Young Cassidy is a well-intentioned but ultimately too middlebrow biopic to capture the fiery life of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey.
Rod Taylor, fresh off from his success in Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds, plays the titular role without much distinction or commitment.
Director Jack Cardiff has surrounded Taylor with a stellar cast of women, including the young Julie Christie, Maggie Smith, as his real love interest, and Flora Robson as his mother.
Set in 1911 and the growing protest against British rule of Ireland, young John Cassidy is a laborer by day and a pamphleteer by night. When the pamphlets he has written incite riots, Cassidy realizes he can do more for his people with the pen than with the sword.
He writes a new play, The Plough and the Stars, which he submits to the famed Abbey Theatre (which had already rejected another of his plays), and is surprised when Yeats, the founder of the Abbey, accepts and produces his play.
The opening of the play causes the audience to riot, and he loses many friends. However, he is undeterred, and is soon acclaimed as Ireland’s outstanding young playwright at the price of having a more conventional domestic life.
