The Commitments

I watched half an hour of The Commitments recently. It is certainly one of that handful of films that I've happily rewatched or dipped into, and will never tire of.

I watched the film near the start of the 90s, read the book near the start of the 2000s, and watched the musical near the start of the 2010s. The film is best.

First, the book, though. Roddy Doyle's debut novel, written in 1987. It would be the first of a trilogy. I bought the trilogy in, I think, early 2002, when I was working at Blackwell's. It was on 3 for 2 "Irish Literature" deal and I got my 30% staff discount so, by my reckoning, The Commitments cost me about a pound. The other books I bought as part of that deal were Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan and Tony Cascarino's autobiography Full Time (the big reveal of Cascarino's fine book being, ironically, that the grandmother he, and everyone else, thought qualified him for Ireland was not actually Irish, so he gained 88 international caps on a false premise).

This was part of a period of general engagement with my "Irishness". I remember reading an article about The Commitments which tied it together with Van Morrison and Dexys and the idea of Celtic Soul, and I think I was disappointed a little, when I read the book, that Doyle doesn't actually go very deep on that, nor on the idea of the Irish as "the blacks of Europe" (in-famously, in the book but not, wisely, the film, he uses a stronger, less acceptable term).

It's a short, sweet, funny novel, but didn't really give me that much that the film (co-written by Doyle) hadn't already.

As for the stage show, that was very enjoyable too, but smoothed out plenty of the edges, of course. I remember that the focus was more on the lead singer Deco than the manager Jimmy, particularly because the guy playing Deco had a spectacularly good voice.

Which brings me to a thing that has long interested/perplexed me about the film. The lead character is the band's manager Jimmy Rabbitte. played by Robert Arkins. Arkins really carries the film, is on screen most of the time, has most of the memorable lines, does most of the acting that the film requires.

He'd never acted before. In fact, he was a singer who was lined up to play Deco, before the director Alan Parker heard Andrew Strong's spectacular voice, and cast him as Deco. So Arkins switched to Jimmy, who doesn't sing in the film, though he does over the opening and closing credits.

What perplexes me somewhat is that Arkins has never really acted again. I mean, he wasn't perfect -  watching it back, you can see there's plenty of happy amateurism from many of the young musicians - but he was good, charming, pulled off some memorable lines.

Many of the cast members of the film have gone on to great careers, but not the lead. I've always wondered why.

Anyway, what else about the Commitments? It did more than almost anything I can think of to defang swearing. It paved the way for a billion terrible versions of Mustang Sally. It has one of the two great "pretending to be interviewed while sitting in the bath" scenes of the late 80s/early 90s, along with Emilio Estevez in Young Guns, and what greater legacy is there than that?