The Luck of Ginger Coffey

The way upward and the way downward are the same.
- Heraclitus


Shot on a small budget, with two of the most in demand British actors of the day, and a story about what used to be called a working class family, it is easy to mistake The Luck of Ginger Coffey for one of the British New Wave, "kitchen sink" films, like Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961) and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963). But, aside from Robert Shaw and Mary Ure, and the American director Irvin Kershner, Ginger Coffey was a Canadian production from the beginning.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey started out as a novel written by the undervalued Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore, published in 1960. The novel's hero, James Francis (Ginger) Coffey, is an Irishman who brings his wife Vera and young daughter Paulie with him to Montreal, Canada hoping to have a better go at success in life, success at whatever job he can land. When we meet him on a bright and cold morning, he is going out to look for a job with the rent money in his pocket.

Fifteen dollars and three cents. He counted it and put it in his trouser-pocket. Then picked his Tyrolean hat off the dresser, wondering if the two Alpine buttons and the little brush dingus in the hatband weren't a shade jaunty for the place he was going. Still, they might be lucky to him. And it was a lovely morning, clear and crisp and clean. Maybe that was a good augury. Maybe today his ship would come in.

The only ship that his wife, Vera, looks forward to is the one that will take her home to Ireland. Ginger hasn't much time left to find the job that will change his fortunes, and the novel tells us about his successes and - mostly - failures in the search. The third-person narration is limited to Ginger, who is such a habitual loser that, as we follow him around wintry Montreal, his missteps become a kind of litany in his life and make one realize that whenever the word "luck" appears in a story's title, it infers good luck and bad, a rise and an eventual, inevitable fall.

It was Moore's fourth novel, and its success attracted the interest of pioneering Canadian producer F. R. Crawley. Crawley got Moore to write a script, which unfortunately had to dispense with most of what you've just read and everything else in between - the whole of Ginger's inner life that film isn't very good at showing. But Crawley was lucky in his casting of the two lead roles. He got Robert Shaw, an excellent and charismatic actor, and Mary Ure, stage and screen actress who had already won an Oscar nomination for her performance in Sons and Lovers, and who also happened to be Mrs. Shaw at the time. Between them, and the raw location photography of Montreal, a beautiful city with which filmgoers weren't familiar, they made Moore's fine novel into a fine film.

Ginger is offered jobs - a proofreader and a diaper delivery driver - but his ambitions are bigger and he gets himself fired and almost gets in a fight. Meanwhile, Vera has left him for Joe McGlade, taking Paulie and most of Ginger's belongings with her. Having to stay at the YMCA, Ginger goes to same bar frequented by his ex-co-workers, is caught urinating in an alley outside a posh hotel, and lands in jail for public indecency. Vera shows up at his hearing the following morning at which the judge makes jokes at Irishman Ginger's expense. To Vera's surprise, Ginger swallows his pride and shows sufficient contrition to the judge that his case is dismissed. Over their coffee at a nearby diner, Ginger confesses to Vera what a loser he has been, having arrived at the discovery that his ship had come in years ago, and it's right under his nose - it's his wife, who loves him. He walks with her through the snow to her apartment and, when she goes inside, she leaves her door ajar so that Ginger can follow. The film backs away discreetly and closes on a shot of a high rise apartment block silhouetted against a feeble winter sky.

Brian Moore's ending, inside Ginger's head, is more explicit:

He pushed the bedroom door, let it drift shut. He unbuttoned his overcoat. In the dresser mirror, the man began to cry. Detached, he watched the tears run down that sad impostor's face, gather on the edges of that large mustache. Why was that man boohooing? Because he no longer lusted for his wife? Because he wasn't able to leave her? Ah, you idjit, you. Don't you know that love isn't just going to bed? Love isn't an act, it's a whole life. It's staying with her now because she needs you; it's knowing you and she will still care about each other when sex and day-dreams, fights and futures when all that's on the shelf and done with. Love why, I'll tell you what love is: it's you at seventy-five and her at seventy-one, each of you listening for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden silence, a sudden cry, could mean a life-time's talk is over.

The last moment in the film, in which Ginger is standing in the cold outside the door to Vera's apartment, reminded me of the ending of Satyajit Ray's film Charulata. Charu's husband, having discovered her illicit feelings for his younger brother, and after learning that he has been cheated by a longtime business partner, has returned to their home - but he can't bring himself to come in. He stands there, unable to move, until Charu holds out her hand to him. As he reaches across the divide between them, Ray freezes the moment in an almost supernatural effect, viewed from several angles, and leaves them there, their reconciliation suspended.

This little film wouldn't have got as much attention as it did without the two actors playing Ginger and Vera Coffey. As I mentioned, Robert Shaw and Mary Ure were husband and wife when they appeared in The Luck of Ginger Coffey. And it's impossible for me to see them onscreen together without thinking about their tragic fates. They were both heavy drinkers. Because of his growing number of children (eventually numbering 10) Shaw had given up writing award-winning novels for the more lucrative profession of acting. He met Mary when she was married to John Osborne and she appeared with Shaw in one of Osborne's plays. They continued to pivot from stage to screen roles, and in 1974, after Mary's appearance in the disastrous premier of the play The Exorcism, Shaw found her dead of an alcohol/barbiturate overdose. She was just 42. Only four years later, at the age of 51, by then world famous but still having to scramble to make ends meet, Shaw collapsed and died on a roadside in Ireland of a massive heart attack. Knowing how sadly both of their lives would end, how poignant The Luck of Ginger Coffey's ending seems, in the cold light of a Montreal morning, as they face each other, the snow falling on them (beautifully, you can see a snowflake alight on Ure's lip and quickly melting).