The Story
The Guildford Four were framed; there seems to be no
doubt about that. A feckless young Irishman named Gerry
Conlon and three others were charged by the British police
with being the IRA terrorists who bombed a pub in Guildford,
England, in 1974, and a year later they were convicted and
sentenced to life.
But great doubts grew up about their guilt, it was proven
that evidence in their favor had been withheld, and in 1989
their convictions were overturned.
"In the Name of the Father" tells this story in angry
dramatic detail, showing that the British police were so
obsessed with the need to produce the IRA bombers that they
seized on flimsy hearsay evidence and then tortured their
prisoners to extract confessions. The film is based on
Conlon's autobiography, Proved Innocent, and in its general
thrust is factual - although the director,
Jim Sheridan, cheerfully explained to the London Daily
Telegraph last month how he changed facts, characters and
dates to suit his fictional purposes.
As he tells it, the story becomes a tragedy of errors. The
film's rambling opening scenes are important in setting up
what follows: Conlon, a young man from Belfast, finds himself in
England with some friends, half-heartedly looking for work,
sleeping in a shared squatter's pad, drinking and doing
drugs.
Conlon is not a model citizen. One night he robs a
prostitute of her earnings, and returns to Ireland, flashing
the money and buying drinks for family and friends. A former
friend fingers him to the police, and he's snatched from his
bed in a predawn raid - along with his astonished father,
who had nothing to do with anything, and also eventually
finds himself serving a life sentence.
It is Conlon's bad luck that his visit to the Guildford area
coincided with the bombing, and that his newfound wealth
looks suspicious. The IRA is a tightly disciplined
organization whose members are not accustomed to getting
rich off their work, or throwing money around, but never
mind: Conlon is a splendid suspect, and when a sadistic
British policeman gets finished with him, he's a confessed
murderer.
The movie does a harrowing job of showing how, and why, a
man might be made to confess to a bombing he didn't commit.
The early sequences of the movie are a Kafkaesque nightmare
for Conlon, who finds himself snatched from his bed and
locked up for the rest of his life. It's a nightmare for us,
too, because Conlon behaves so stupidly, avoiding the
obvious things he could say and do to defend himself.
The greater part of the movie takes place in prison, where
Conlon and his father are housed in the same cell. His
father, a hard-working, honest man, is filled with
indignation. Conlon is more filled with self-pity and
despair, but gradually, inspired by his father, he begins
trying to prove his innocence, and is lucky to convince a
stubborn lawyer to take his case. She works for years, and
even so might not have made much progress if a police
evidence technician hadn't mistakenly given her a report she
was never meant to see.
Convinced by the film's documentary detail, we assume all
these facts are based on truth, and it is a little
surprising to discover that the sadistic British policeman
is a composite of several officers, that Conlon and his
father were never in the same cell - and that the crucial
character of Joe McAndrew (Don Baker), an IRA man who
confesses to the Guildford bombings, is a fictional
invention. All the same, the main thrust of the story is
truthful: British courts found that Conlon and the others
were jailed unjustly.
The film's dramatic thrust doesn't simply go from wrong to
right, however. It's more the story of how Gerry Conlon
changes and grows during those years in prison. He is shown
in the early scenes to be an aimless drifter - in prison, he
educates himself and the law educates him; by the time of
his release, he is sober, intelligent, radicalized. Seeing
this process happen is absorbing, especially since so much
of it is inspired by the love of the father for his son.
-Roger
Ebert
January 14, 1994
