... which is set to open March 16, also shows British soldiers interacting with rural Irish people but is less sparing of the brutishness. A narrative of the war of independence, it begins with a platoon of Black and Tans, the mostly English recruits who augmented the Royal Irish Constabulary, beating a young farm worker to death while training their rifles on his mother, grandmother and sister. Damien (Cillian Murphy), a student doctor who has joined an Irish Republican Army flying column and been arrested, listens to the screams from an adjoining cell as his brother Teddy’s fingernails are torn off during interrogation.
In a recent telephone interview Mr. Loach said that the barbarities perpetrated in Ireland by the Tans and the Auxiliaries, Churchill’s elite “gendarmerie,” are well documented. “We could have made it far more brutal,” he added. “We could have shown teeth being pulled out, but that would have filled the screen with blood. There is correspondence from that time about the brutality the British were importing into Ireland.”
In condemning the British cabinet’s sanctioning of ferocious tactics in Ireland in 1920, two years after Sinn Fein won a democratic mandate to form a republican parliament, Mr. Loach and the screenwriter Paul Laverty adopt a clear ideological position. Some British critics have been outraged that the filmmakers would besmirch the name of the empire with the torture scenes and have suggested that they romanticize the Irish guerrillas.
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