New Movies: Eire-Borne Visions

mastersinger's verbalmusic still works its magick in the broadest way immarginable, from the clearheaded images to the twoddle of a fuddled brain. In the beginning was the whirred, whorled prose of James Joyce; now a group of unknowns have transformed Finnegans Wake into a movie. Surprisingly, many of the book's Eire-borne visions work as screedwriter becomes screenwriter and his prose gains the breadth of life. A tavernkeeper, H. C. Earwicker (Martin J. Kelley) sleeps drunkenly dreaming of his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, his daughter and his two sons Shem and Shaun. In the back ground runs the ballad about Finnegan's Wake, the saga of a laborer who falls off a scaffold, then returns to life when the word whisky is mentioned.

To the symbol-minded Joyce, the fabric of the story is not as it seams; with his unique portmanteauhold on language, he gives every line a sinister dexterity and gleanings of meanings. Finnegan, for example, is a Franco-English pun: fin-again—literally, resurrection. In a word, it sums up Joyce's epic of eternal recurrence in which Finnegan-Earwicker goes through mankind's plunge and rise as he "falls" asleep only in the end to "wake" to life. H. C. Earwicker's initials, as he himself explains, also stand for Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere; his dreamscape is like a palimpsest in which myth overlays legend overlaying lore. Anna Livia Plurabelle (Jane Reilly) is also Dublin's river Liffey (life). His sons Shem and Shaun are, among others, Lucifer and the Archangel Michael. The film's multipersonaed hero himself combines such disparate characters as Adam, Tristram and Jonathan Swift. Joyce believed that the pun is mightier than the word. His double-entendres are so arcane and gusty that the movie must print explanations below the image, making Finnegan one of the few films to employ English subtitles below English dialogue.

The filming of Finnegans Wake required a Joycean energy from Producer-Director-Scenarist Mary Ellen Bute, 60, an American whose previous movie experience has been confined to short ; subjects. Almost inevitably, her brave effort suffers by comparison with Joseph Strick's recent version of Ulysses (TIME, March 31). Part of the problem is in the size of the task undertaken. For all its mythic dimensions, the huge superstructure of Ulysses is based largely on a single classic theme. But Finnegan cosmically takes on all history—Critic Frank O'Connor shrewdly accused Joyce the agnostic of egoistically revising "God's point of view about the universe." Moreover, the Wake deals entirely with the subconscious mind, the kingdom of dreams.