The Road Less Traveled

Jemaine Clement oddity "Gentlemen Broncos" failed in theaters. Will it get a second chance on DVD?

Time sometimes works wonders, as it has for Peter Lennon’s 1967 documentary about Ireland, “Rocky Road to Dublin,” a barbed portrait of the filmmaker’s homeland that had its premiere at Cannes immediately before Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut shut down the festival in sympathy with the general strike that May. It’s been recently restored and nurtured and rereleased after decades in the vault, and as a piece of history, the film is unique — it’s one of only a few films made in Ireland in the ’60s, and the only cinema vérité documentary about the society in the moment. Lennon had an agenda — he saw post-civil war Ireland as a sterile, retarded, constipated culture, deranged with a limiting sense of nationhood (the government went so far as to outlaw soccer and cricket because they were British) and crippled by the censorious control exercised by the Catholic clergy.

Grainly photographed between Godard’s “Weekend” and Truffaut’s “The Bride Wore Black” by Raoul Coutard — simply because Lennon had worked in Paris as a journalist, and had asked him — the film may well be unique in its concept as well. I cannot think of another feature doc made anywhere for the express purpose of identifying and decrying an entire nation’s ethical and cultural failures.

Along the way, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Sean O’Faolain, John Huston (a naturalized citizen), and others are interviewed, and everybody’s in agreement: there was something rotten under the turf, a narrow-minded inadequacy and social decay that may be mitigated, if everyone’s lucky, by the liberations of the ’60s, which were just taking hold at the time. Coutard, interviewed today, says the film is “very Irish in conception” — that is, a testy attack.

Of course, the film was derided in Ireland, played a few weeks to college audiences and then vanished, never to even show up on Irish TV. The new DVD edition includes a new half-hour doc contextualizing Lennon’s movie historically, and features footage from the infamous 1967 impromptu press conference at Cannes, in which Godard called for the fest’s cessation and Lennon tries his Irish darnedest to talk him out of it.

“Gentlemen Broncos” (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray; “Rocky Road to Dublin” (Icarus Films) is now available on DVD.

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