…and the seminal film about one man’s love for his land
The Field (1990), directed by Jim Sheridan, was the screen adaptation of John B Keane’s stage play of the same name.
Like his father and his father’s father before him, the Bull McCabe has nurtured a small plot into a field that supports some livestock. ‘God made the world but we made the field,’ the Bull, played by Richard Harris, proclaims, as if his toil on the land supersedes the fact it’s rented.
When the landlord puts the land up for auction – attracting the interest of wealthy American businessman (Tom Berenger) known only as ‘The Yank’ – the Bull’s desire to hold onto the field at all cost leads to his own undoing.
‘No outsider will bid for my field,’ he declares upon learning of the Yank’s interest. The English were gone ‘because I drove them out: me and my kind. Gone, but not forgotten. No outsider will bid for my field’.
Filmed in the picturesque village of Leenane, Co. Galway, amid an atmosphere of fog, rain, storm clouds and mud, The Field encapsulates the centrality of land in the Irish psyche.