killarney’s
d o o w y Holl BRUSH WITH
The parish priest of Beaufort castigated the ‘tramp photographers’ for invading the village. He called on the strong men of the Gap of Dunloe to
“chase them across the stone bridge spanning the River Laune with sticks and stones” As the first US filmmakers to work on location in Europe, Kalem had opted to blaze a trail eastwards at a time when all the movie traffic was heading west from New York – then the heart of the US film industry – to California. Until then, Hollywood was a Los Angeles suburb known mostly for its orange groves and lemon ranches.
The parish priest of Beaufort castigated the ‘tramp photographers’ for invading the village. He called on the strong men of the Gap of Dunloe to chase them across the stone bridge spanning the River Laune with sticks and stones. The year was 1911 and the subject of the cleric’s ire was the pioneering Kalem Film Company, which had sailed three thousand miles from New York to base itself for a summer in the tiny village located six miles from Killarney at the foot of the Gap of Dunloe.
Director Sidney Olcott suspended the filming of The Colleen Bawn in the ancient Churchtown Graveyard in Beaufort after the parish priest accused Kalem of exploiting his parishioners and ‘desecrating the bones of their ancestors’. But an intervention by the American Consul with the Bishop of Kerry on behalf of the ‘O’Kalems’, as the American film company became known, resulted in filming continuing throughout the summer and for three more successive summers. Sidney Olcott had first travelled to County Cork in 1910 to make the emigration drama The Lad from Old Ireland. The silent movie was the first ever fiction film to be made in Ireland, and the first one to be made by a US company on this side of the Atlantic. Some scenes were shot in Kerry, and the cast stayed in the former Glebe Hotel in Killarney that first summer. Coincidentally, The Glebe was later owned by the late Thomas G. Cooper who, in 1936, filmed The Dawn, the first feature-length ‘talkie’ shot in Ireland. The Kalem films were all based on Irish stories about Irish rebels and the hardships of eviction and emigration. The sensitive portrayal of Irish issues was in sharp contrast of
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I KILLARNEY Magazine
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