Reading the stories that Herminie Templeton (later Kavanagh) published in 1903 as Darby O’Gill and the Good People, it’s easy to understand why Walt Disney wouldn’t give up on the idea of bringing them to the screen — but it’s also easy to see why it took Lawrence Edward Watkin eleven years to fashion them into a screenplay. With titles like “The Convarsion of Father Cassidy”, “How the Fairies Came to Ireland” and “The Banshee’s Comb”, the stories are short on incident — more anecdotes that stories, really. Also, as the word “Convarsion” suggests, they are written in a (literally) pronounced Irish dialect — it takes a while to realize that “craychur” means “creature”, “sthrame” is “stream”, “imaget” is “immediate”, and so on.

But once you adjust to these idiosyncracies (especially if you can assume the accent and read the stories aloud), there’s an unassuming poetry to the tales that can sometimes take your breath away. Describing one fine morning, the narrator (it’s hinted that he’s a Kilkenny cabbie and the son of a cousin of Darby’s) says, “‘Twas one of those warm-hearted, laughing autumn days which steals for a while the bonnet and shawl of the May.” What more do we need to hear to know exactly the sort of day it was?

Another time, Darby O’Gill’s wife Bridget boasts to other wives of the village that her husband is so brave that he doesn’t fear to leave the house on Halloween Night, when “all the worruld” knows that ghosts are afoot. To prove her point (and save face), even as a fierce storm rages that very night, Bridget resolves to cajole Darby into taking “a bit of tay” to poor young Eileen McCarthy, who lies near death. At first Darby resists — “We have two separate ways of being good. Your way is to scurry round an’ do good acts. My way is to keep from doing bad ones. An who knows which way is the betther one. It isn’t for us to judge.” But when he finally agrees to go out, a relieved Bridget encourages him in this lovely passage: 

 

There’s nothing puts so much high courage and clear steadfast purpose in a man’s heart, if it be properly given, as a kiss from the woman he loves. So, with the warmth of that kiss to cheer him, Darby set his face against the storm.

There are countless rough-jeweled passages like that in Mrs. Kavanagh’s prose — I laughed out loud at “One could have scraped with a knife the surprise off Darby’s face” — but you get the idea. How to preserve the delicate humor of the stories, the palpable sense of a happy home and hearth, the simple yet ardent faith, the merry yet mischievous friendship between Darby and King Brian, was what Lawrence Edward Watkin wrestled with between assignments from the day Disney hired him.

Because Darby O’Gill is rarely considered one of Disney’s major pictures, there is scant published documentation of its development and production. Two major biographies, Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination and Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, have only two cursory mentions between them. Peter Ellenshaw’s coffee-table memoir Ellenshaw Under Glass goes into detail about his visual effects work (which I covered in Part 2), and he says that both Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi (who later shared an Oscar nomination for their Mary Poppins screenplay) worked on the script. (In the finished picture DaGradi is credited only for “Special Art Styling”, Walsh not at all. It may be that Walsh — like DaGradi, one of Disney’s most trusted lieutenants — worked uncredited on the script; it’s also possible that Ellenshaw, writing in 2003, conflated Darby O’Gill with his later work with Walsh and DaGradi on Mary Poppins.)

We do, at least, have testimony from Walt Disney himself, in the form of his introduction to the Darby O’Gill novelization. (The intro was ghost-written, no doubt, but it’s a cinch it wouldn’t have gone to the printer until Walt approved it.) He says that it was “in 1945, I believe” that Herminie Kavanagh’s stories first came to his attention, prompting a trip to Ireland to get a feel for the land.

Disney did indeed visit Ireland and Great Britain in November 1946, and again for a longer stay from June to August ’49. His leprechaun movie might have been on his mind both those times. In ’46 he had spoken to Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper about plans for Alice in Wonderland (to be done with a live-action Alice played by little Luana Patten of Song of the South, and set in an animated Wonderland) as well as for The Little People, to be set in Ireland.

But it’s unlikely that Herminie Kavanagh’s Darby O’Gill stories were foremost in his mind even then. The Disney Studio was drifting after the end of World War II — strapped for money, still recovering from the bitter trauma of a strike in the early ’40s (which Disney took very personally), and uncertain how to move forward. Of more immediate concern, no doubt, was how the cash-poor studio could make use of the millions of pounds sterling that had piled up from features and shorts playing in the U.K. during the war; money that Disney sorely needed but which, due to currency restrictions imposed by Parliament, couldn’t be taken out of the country.

DR. JAMES HAMILTON DELARGY

 

Watkin also provided something Herminie Kavanagh’s stories lacked: a couple of villains. Maybe “villains” is too strong a term; these two aren’t really wicked. But both of them are up to no good. First comes old Sheelah Sugrue, the village gossip and busybody (Estelle Winwood). Watkin’s novelization says, “She was the sort of old woman who in olden days made witch-burning flourish. One look at her and you would want the custom revived.” English-born Estelle Winwood was 75 when she made Darby; she had been a professional actress since 1903 and had made her Broadway debut in 1916. This was her sixth feature film since 1933 (she preferred the stage but did a lot of TV in the ’40s and ’50s), and she would go on to become the oldest working actress — or actor, for that matter — in the world. She made her last appearance in an episode of Quincy M.E. when she was 97 and died in 1984 at the age of 101. In Darby, her meddlesome Sheelah Sugrue is the proud mother of…

 

 

Pony Sugrue (Kieron Moore), Rathcullen’s roisterer, bully-boy, and all-around ne’er-do-well. (The character would resurface a generation later, little changed, in the form of Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.) Pony’s mother regards him as the natural heir to Darby’s job (a job she doesn’t know Michael McBride already has), while Pony himself regards Katie O’Gill as his personal property, any other man who looks at her doing so at his own peril. Kieron Moore was another one of the authentic Irishmen in Darby‘s cast. He began his acting career as a teenager with Dublin’s Abbey Players; he was soon placed under contract by British producer Alexander Korda, who predicted great stardom for him. The stardom never quite materialized despite solid work in over 50 movies and TV series, and he retired from acting in 1974 to devote himself to social activism on behalf of the Third World. He died in 2007, age 82.