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  • Screening the Stage IrishmanIrish Masculinity in Early American Cinema, 1895–1907
  • Peter Flynn (bio)

Published in the Boston Globe in 1899, a six-panel comic strip titled “The Biograph Up to Date” sheds interesting light on early American cinema and its representation of Irish masculinity.1 Drawing on the popularity of The Corbett–Fitzwilliam Fight—released originally in 1897 and still going strong two years later in various reissues—the strip opens with a kinetoscope operator eager to capture “a genuine ‘hold-up.’” So the resourceful cameraman stages one, hiring a passerby to don a highwayman’s mask and brandish a big stick. Onto the scene arrives Jeffsimmons, “the champion heavyweight, out for his morning jaunt”—every bit the burly, thick-jawed comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage. The faux highwayman confronts the heavyweight while the kinetoscope operator, hidden in a nearby bush, captures the proceedings. “Up with your hands and be quick about it,” he demands, to which Jeffsimmons replies, “W’y cert’ney” and sets about demolishing his assailant. Jeffsimmons marches off, and the ecstatic cameraman reemerges from the bush. “Why, man, that was Jeffsimmons that licked you,” he declares. “Our fortune’s made.” The final panel, captioned, “And sure enough it was,” shifts the scene to an amusement hall, crammed to capacity with well-heeled male patrons. By the entrance is a large poster: “Jeffsimmon’s [sic] Last Battle (with an unknown). Moving Pictures taken on the spot. Admission $1.00.”

“The Biograph Up to Date” makes several important observations about the ways in which early motion pictures were produced and consumed at the turn of the century. First, this was before the so-called nickelodeon boom of 1905–7, and films, while screened in a variety of venues, were most often presented as part of a live vaudeville show. (Moreover, like Jeffsimmon’s Last Battle, they were often hastily made with little concern for art or posterity—constituting what later historians would term the “primitive” cinema.) Second, the lion’s share of audiences for the earliest motion pictures hailed predominantly from the new urban middle or white-collar classes, those most frequently found attending vaudeville, where prices typically ranged from twenty-five cents to one dollar. Finally, the content of these films (mostly a mix of actualities and comic skits) drew heavily from other popular amusements such as boxing, vaudeville, and comic strips.

But “The Biograph Up to Date” reminds us of another important aspect of the moving picture industry in its early primitive phase—the centrality of the stage Irishman and the fascination he held for middle-class male patrons. A popular figure in vaudeville in the late nineteenth century, the stage Irishman was a caricature of the immigrant Irish—shabby, dim-witted, incapable of reason, and prone to verbal and physical outbursts, often under the influence of alcohol. Less civilized than his Anglo-American counterparts—and known variously as Paddy, Casey, Murphy, or Brannigan—the [End Page 122]


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“The Biograph Up to Date,” published in the Boston Globe, October 15, 1899.

stage Irishman occupied the role of ethnic Other, a comic inversion of genteel Anglo-American masculinity reinforcing the popular opinion that the Irish were incapable of assimilation into modern American civilization. Yet despite his simple (even crude) construction, the stage Irishman bore the layered traces of a complex and uneasy intersection of many separate social, economic, and political developments—not all of which were inherently or exclusively anti-Irish. Primary among these were popular (and changing) conceptions of class, ethnicity, and, of course, masculinity as well as the emergent patterns of industrial capitalism and labor. As such, the encounter between the burly Fitzsimmons and the refined male patrons who flock to see his last battle was by no means a simple one. The exhibition of brute male Irish physicality offered many pleasures to its middle-class spectators, not least because of the protagonist’s double role as both victim and victimizer—simultaneously the unwitting dupe of the new medium’s commercial exploitation and the uncontested winner of an ad hoc prizefight. An [End Page 123] object of ridicule, Fitzsimmons was also an exhilarating spectacle of...

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