1 Reading Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father (1994) against its source, Gerry Conlon’s prison memoir Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father (1993) tells the story of Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four. The source text, Proved Innocent, is Conlon’s 1991 memoir of the ordeal, so the work of literary adaptation here involved interpreting the sequence of real - life facts as remembered by Conlo n coupled with translating his character to screen performance based on his way of telling and his own self - presentation. Concerning the former, the basic sketch remains loyal to the real story, a story which the world at the time was familiar with: Gerry Conlon grew up in Belfast, coming of age at the peak of IRA activity, and was seeking his fortune in London as a young man, his visit coinciding disastrously with the 1974 Guildford bombings, landing him, three of his hapless friends (the Guildford Four) and numerous members of his extended family in jail wrongfully. One of them was his father Giuseppe (played by Pete Postlethwaite), who died there before the Four finally had their conviction quashed. One of the biggest disgraces in the history of British criminal justice, his story shone a powerful light on the depth of English prejudice and the belligerence and corruption of police detectives when the country was, as his finally successful lawyer Gareth Pierce (Emma Thompson) puts, “baying for blood.” F ocusing on its historical relevance that way, Sheridan trims a large amount of the book’s prelude and aftermath of the events to focus on his time of prosecution and incarceration, making it a parable of the wrongly accused. We therefore miss plenty of enl ightening written details about Conlon’s young life in an area becoming an English/Irish turf war, where anti - Irish prejudice among the English police a fact perceptible to Gerry even as a child, noting the lenient treatment toward street card games on Pro testant streets compared to their harsh discipline towards Catholics, arresting youths for ‘loitering’ - Gerry himself was arrested for breaking curfew. As Gerry became older the situation worsened and the riots spread, bringing more serious state policing , including 2 ‘The Specials’, “exclusively Protestant and very brutal,” who burnt his aunt Annie’s house to the ground when she was alone with her three young children. Riot fatalities among neighbours were par for the course. Regardless, Gerry and his fami ly were not nationalists. The rivalry was most relevant to Gerry on the pitch, in which Catholic and Protestant teams would play off in neutral zones between their areas. Conlon was, in those times, something of a rogue, a shoplifter, and even robbed a cou ple of houses, though never in “the areas where I lived [...] I wouldn’t steal from my own people.” He likes a drink, he is a creature of fierce loyalty and affection for the lads he grew up with, and more than anything loves the crack, with a cheeky accep tance - almost obliviousness - toward the seriousness of the situation, altogether evaluating that despite everything life was good; “my parents loved me and the community in which I grew up was an affectionate one.” In missing the bulk of this context, w e do lose the full appreciation of how deeply Conlon’s entire life - not just his incarceration - was dominated by police presence of some sort. With that said, Sheridan does a good job of capturing Conlon’s position in his society within the political con text in his invented opening scene, where Gerry steals lead from roofs and, playing air guitar with a long strip, is mistaken for a sniper, kicking off a terrifically directed IRA - army skirmish and capturing the extent of Conlon’s blithe, uncalculated, ant i - English sentiments in his rioting: “the RUC was such a hated symbol that it felt good to retaliate, throwing stones, bricks and bottles.” Daniel Day - Lewis’s devil - may - care Gerry seems loyal here to Conlon’s words on himself, admitting he was widely perce ived as a reckless idiot who wouldn’t have been let into the IRA if he’d wanted to, while the misperception and overreaction of the English police lays the groundwork for the hysteria and stupidity which will damn him later on. This irony seems a source of consoling humour for the real Conlon, and Sheridan keeps him funny. After robbing a prostitute of what will later be evidenced as bomber money and crawling back home to Belfast in a Afghan coat, his fecklessness is at least evidence of his innocence to hi s nearest and 3 dearest: “when came through that door looking like a bloody circus clown,” says his mother, “did you think he had murder in his eyes?” The film’s interpretation seems to differ in this respect mostly, in that Sheridan’s Conlon has an emotion al arc where maturity, and with it a newfound respect for his father, leads to his ultimate return from despondency to collaborate with Gareth Pierce to win his case. While the autobiographical Gerry describes being shy in comparison to his father of menti oning his innocence to other prisoners towards the beginning of his ordeal and then becoming more vocal, he still noticed and hoarded with righteous anger all the little instances of ignorance, deliberate deceit, and systemic prejudice of the law and order process which landed him in his terrible situation, growing only in his persistence and knowledge of the most effective channels, but nonetheless remaining before, during and after the case a victim of the utmost naivety and cluelessness in the face of an impossible rival. In short, Conlon was scarcely a child and even in his young - adulthood hardened by prison life remains very candid about his emotional vulnerability and foolishness, whereas Day - Lewis comes across as more swoonworthy, with a trajectory fr om ignorance and despondence to grit rather than the constant victim of an inescapably bleary, confused volume of years. Gone are the bulk of these more childlike moments of vulnerability, full of pathos, such as Conlon’s shouting “Mammy, mammy!” during on e of the nights he was held and abused by police to force a confession, which actually became evidence of mistreatment in the appeal which was to free him having been overheard unbeknown to Conlon by an aunt locked up in a nearby cell. This aspect of Gerry ’s character which makes the book read as if through the lens of a young person is condensed to just a few moments, like when Day - Lewis attacks his father, then collapses in tears on his shoulder. With these gone plus the invention of ‘Joe McAndrew’, the I RA leader who sets fire to a policeman to Conlon’s disgust (a fictional event), Sheridan’s Gerry becomes the hero in a kind of stylized morality play about the right and the wrong ways for Irishmen to respond to distorted portraits of their character. 4 Cir cumstances are adapted in similar ways to bring out other important themes: Gerry’s relationship with his father and the irredeemable injustice of his death are very important in the book, chiefly in that at the time he published the memoir, his father’s n ame had still yet to be posthumously cleared. However, Sheridan moves the Conlons into the same cell until Giuseppe’s death, so that the relationship is foregrounded and developing throughout the film, rather than reflecting reality, where father and son w ould wait in ignorance on the next time they happened to be imprisoned together (which is part of the inhumanity of the true story - in fact most Category A prisoners spent a good part of their time in solitary). Lots of pertinent things, of course, must be edited from a full - length book in the interest of brevity and momentum, but part of the absurdity and difficulty of Conlon’s ordeal was the constant movement from prison to prison and the sheer obliteration of time in each place, sometimes summarising whole years in a sentence or two. Sheridan instead sets most of his action in just one prison, but he does nod to this effect in a scene where Day - Lewis suffers a period of mental instability after his father’s death, looking at a patch on the wall and tel ling us via inner monologue that years can pass this way and feel like seconds. In the book it’s hours, as Gerry timidly reveals to an inmate in search of reassurance, and his mental health struggle is not really like Sheridan’s mad montage in which Day - Le wis wraps his face in video tape: it is much more subtle, persistent and, in my view, touching, described as recurring bouts of depression with one particularly memorable episode of irritability toward his prison friends alleviated by the tender tough - love of one of them, telling Gerry to “get up tomorrow morning and go round and make everyone concerned a cup of tea and apologize for being such an arsehole.” The bulk of Gerry’s little observations about prison life have gone, and Sheridan has retained just a few of the japes, such as the black man who paints himself white in protest for ‘white man’s justice’. Quite a few other things are embellished for emotional impact, like the cinematic moment where the prisoners throw burning pieces of newspaper or bedd ing from their windows 5 in tribute to Giuseppe and protest of his death; or to make Day - Lewis more roguishly sexy than, perhaps, the real Gerry, who was staying at a hostel with a bunch of other weird Irish lads rather than dishing out free love in a hippy commune (“call me Wild One”). The mundane and banal in the real Conlon’s memories are very much a privileged insight into his subjective experience of those years, while of course conveying the strong sense of injustice felt as it was at the time as an arc hetypal example of the falsely accused. This injustice narrative remains strongly felt in Sheridan’s film, and he totally succeeds in conveying the symbolic importance of the event to Britain and to the justice system. With that said, some of the more whim sical material, for its humanity and for its spot - on snapshot of time and place, was sorely missed. Reb e cca Lynes University of Cambridge