When it opens tomorrow, Cork Film Festival will be celebrating its 50th birthday. The city seemed an unlikely venue for such a glamorous event, but a canny approach worked wonders, writes Michael Dwyer
When the first Cork Film Festival was held, in May 1956, The Irish Times reported with mild disappointment that the event "brought forth no mink Bikinis". The second edition of the festival brought forth Dawn Addams, however. An English starlet with 20 film appearances to her credit at the time, Addams was no stranger to publicity when she came to Cork. In 1952 she had fainted outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, in Hollywood, "due to diet and a tight dress", but was revived in time to attend the premiere of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Two years later, to much fanfare, she married her second husband, Vittorio Emanuele Massimo, prince of Roccasecca de' Volsci. They made the papers again after their honeymoon, when Diana Dors invited them to dinner. They turned up three hours late, reportedly drunk, and the butler refused to let them in.
None of this could have prepared the people of Cork for the demand she made on her arrival at the festival - for a milk bath "and a black bathtub to show up the purity of the milk". This caused consternation in Cork. It also attracted international media attention, a point not lost on the festival's savvy founder, Dermot Breen. He had managed the Palace cinema in Cork for eight years - staging plays (featuring, among others, Micheál MacLiammóir and Cyril Cusack) and ballets there, as well as showing films - and he later became Cork's first public-relations consultant. He was a visionary whose charm and style helped enormously when he came up with the idea of holding a film festival in the city where he grew up.
These days several film festivals are running on any one day of the year around the world, but back in 1956 there were few of them. In those grey, conservative days, Ireland seemed an unlikely place for a festival that traded on glamour and art, but Breen bit the bullet. "This country was in a state of the depression in the early 1950s," he recalled in an interview with The Irish Times in 1970, "and no one seemed to realise the value of tourism. This was a challenge." An enterprising man with no shortage of energy and ambition, Breen rose to the task, persuading the bureaucratic International Federation of Film Producers' Associations to ratify his plan, ensuring access to films from around the world.
Bord Fáilte, as the tourist board was then known, was the festival's main sponsor through its first few decades. International film critics were flown in and wined and dined, ensuring serious coverage of the festival programme in the British media, in particular, and the event generated plenty of copy for reporters seeking colour stories. Breen organised a train, dubbed the Star Express, to transport a slew of movie stars and starlets to the first festival, which was opened by Liam Cosgrave, the minister for external affairs and future taoiseach (and closed by the president, Séan T O'Ceallaigh). Aboard the train were Peter Finch, June Thorburn, Maureen Swanson, Tony Wright, John Gregson and the Irish actor Noel Purcell. Finch, who won a posthumous Oscar for Network, declared: "Cannes was, Venice is and Cork will be the fairest of the three."
Soon after the milk-bath story was relayed around the world, there was another well-publicised incident in a Cork hotel bathroom. Jean Seberg, who had cropped her hair to play Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan, was wearing a wig when she arrived at the festival. When her wig fell into the bath, she cancelled her Cork press conference and went out to buy a headscarf - which became the story for the media covering the festival. And several photo opportunities were devised in which European actresses posed with farmers and tractors or cooked drisheen for the cameras.
To up the glamour quotient, the festival took a leaf from the Cannes book and made formal dress de rigueur for the prime evening screenings at the grand old Savoy cinema, on Patrick Street. This became irresistible to the city's merchant princes, as they were quaintly known, but inevitably deterred less well-off cinema-goers.
"Yet Cork is a city which prefers not to be impressed by anything except the glory that was Cannes," the Irish Times critic Mary Leland observed in an article in 1970. "A film festival is not something that comes naturally to the proletariat, who now accepts it as a week-long series of publicity glimpses of eye-catching, breath- stopping women who turn out to be absolutely no one they ever heard of."
The formal dress code was still in force in the 1970s, when I made the first of many visits to the festival. Still in my teens and with a gluttonous appetite to devour movies day and night for the week, I bought a season ticket that assured me of the same seat in the Savoy for the duration of the festival.
On my first night there, I knew nobody but got chatting with some people from Montenotte in the late-night festival club, then held in City Hall. They looked at me as if I had two heads when I told them I intended to see every film on the programme. They attended the festival on only the opening and closing nights, they said, and it was clear they were there to preen and be seen.
Within days, however, I found kindred spirits sitting in the same seats, near me, at every show, and despite the glamour tag still attached to the festival - for a few years in the 1970s it organised a Miss Movie Girl contest - there was a great deal to see on the screen and to discuss passionately afterwards, in the often riotous festival club. There were tribute programmes to directors of the stature of François Truffaut and Richard Lester, both of whom came to Cork for the festival, along with one of the first international showcases of the exciting Australian cinema that emerged in the late 1970s, and opportunities to see such arresting films as Taxi Driver and Midnight Express within a month of their world premieres, at Cannes.
From the festival's inception, Dermot Breen chose to celebrate achievements in the short-film form - a daring move given the mediocrity of the shorts regularly shown in Irish cinemas at the time. Part of his celebration involved prizes awarded by juries of respected film-makers and critics. This tradition has been carried on by Breen's successors as festival director; tomorrow's opening has been preceded by a three-day international short-films symposium.
One element from the old days that has not survived is the annual Mass of St Fin Barre, commissioned by the festival, although this did not save the organisers from a few belts of the crozier. In 1969 the festival was denounced from the pulpit by Dr Cornelius Lucey, who was then bishop of Cork, for screening I Can't . . . I Can't (also known as Wedding Night), an Irish-set drama scripted by Lee Dunne and dealing with the sexual problems of a young couple, played by Tessa Wyatt and a pre-Minder Dennis Waterman.
In 1972 the city's lord mayor led the chorus of disapproval for Peter Bogdanovich's outstanding The Last Picture Show, describing it as "sex of the lowest order". And in 1989, long after the black-tie nights had passed into history and Mick Hannigan, the festival's present director, was sharing the helm with Theo Dorgan, there was uproar when Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ was screened, attracting protests and bizarre counterprotests.
Film festivals have always been magnets for controversy, and down the years Cork has been castigated for the quality of the films it has shown - at the closing-night ceremony in 1975 the jury chairman declared from the stage of the Savoy that the standard of feature films in competition was "absolute crap" - and the films it chose not to show, the documentaries Rocky Road to Dublin and Shellshock Rock, before caving in to media pressure.
As the last-minute preparations are made for tomorrow's opening-night gala, the festival is in sturdy health, with a great deal to offer audiences over the eight hectic days and nights ahead. Breaking with the tradition of showing a new feature film on opening night, the festival will mark its anniversary with a celebratory event titled Memories and Dreams; in a nod to the festival's early history, a formal dress code will return for one night only.
Unfortunately, the guests will not include Vida Breen, the founder's widow and his rock of support through all those turbulent early years as the festival fought to made its mark on the international calendar. She has commitments abroad, but she will be home in time to attend the closing night, a week from tomorrow.
Dermot Breen, who later became the Irish film censor, died suddenly in October 1978, at the age of 54. As the film historian Liam O'Leary observed a few days later: "The establishment of the Cork International Film Festival was a milestone in the history of film in Ireland. It was largely due to the imagination and hard work of this talented man that it came into existence." Long may it thrive.
Cork Film Festival, which this year includes drive-in movies at Munster Showgrounds, runs from tomorrow until Sunday, October 16th. More details from www.corkfilmfest.org. The box-office number is 021-4272263