Angela’s Ashes
Director: Alan Parker
1999
16 June 2025
See
Frank (played young by Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens in the middle and older by Michael Legge) is the eldest son of Angela (Emily Watson) and Malachy (Robert Carlyle). Irish immigrants in America whose poverty and tragedy of his siblings infant death has them return from America to Limerick in Ireland where they continue to struggle.
Think
Adapted from Frank McCourt’s autobiographical book, which won the Pulitzer prize. I first heard about it when my year 5 teacher Mr Flannery hung the poster in our classroom ad said the story was so sad. And it is, with told with humour too, between each set back. The first baby daughter to die in Brooklyn. Prejudice against Malachy’s Northern Irish Protestantism in the Catholic south. His inability to find work in 1930s depression Ireland, his alcoholism and propensity to not hold down work when he finally has it. The harshness of the catholic church and subsistence charity leads the family to beg, which Angela isn’t above to try and save the children that remain. Malachy is. He has a romanticism about him and fanciful storytelling which passes on to Frank who makes practical use of it with his own Protestant work ethic, not from his father, as well as a good deal of Catholic guilt.
Feel
What’s it gonna be that pulls you out of poverty? There’s the time when Frank is hospitalise and learns to love Shakespeare, which prevents him from repeating a grade. Gaining employment as a post boy, who meets the beautiful but blighted Theresa (Kerry Condon), sick with consumption and doomed to die. But not before her craving physical affection prompts Frank to lose his virginity with her.Then there’s the job he gets writing demand letters for the local loan shark lady. It’s all grist for the mill and Frank finally gets lucky and finds a way out of the poor house and books passage back to the United States, the land of opportunity. There he became a school teacher and eventually wrote this book, and those that followed ‘Tis and Teacher Man.
