Brendan Behan

Series: Omnibus

Duration: 52

Year Published: 1974

Creator: Time-Life

Format: 16mm

Color: Color & B&W

Sound: sound

Description: On March 20, 1964, crowds of Dubliners came out to bid farewell to their popular hero, the Irish playwright/nationalist, Brendan Behan. This biographical portrait meshes dramatizations of Behan's autobiographical plays with reminiscences by his wife and other family members to chronicle his rebellious life and tragic death from alcohol-related ailments. Borstal Boy recalls Behan's adolescent membership in the IRA, his arrest in Liverpool for planning to bomb a British battleship, excommunication from the Catholic Church, and happy sojourn at Borstal, a English reform school for boys. Confessions of an Irish Rebel concerns the author's run-in with Irish police. Sentenced to prison for the attempted murder of a police officer, Behan befriended an IRA member who taught him Gaelic, the Language in which he wrote his subsequent works, The Quare Fellow and An Giall (The Hostage). Public acclaim for Behan's masterful plays was subverted by the author's increasingly dissolute behavior, graphically apparent in interview footage. Brendan Behan, the consummate Dubliner who took the world at a spree, died at age 41.