THE RECKONING  (1969)

I saw The Reckoning a very long time ago, and I'm pretty sure it's never been on TV in the last 25 years or so, and you can't get it on DVD.  I bought it from stojo.com recently, and it was as powerful as I remembered it.  To be honest, all I could remember about it was that it starred Nicol Williamson (who I've never really seen in anything else) and that he was a Irishman from Liverpool who worked in some flash job in London, and had to go back to Liverpool for revenge.

This turns out to be pretty much spot on - but read like that it really sounds like Get Carter, and in fact it is very similar to that film, only made a couple of years earlier.

Now the similarities to Get Carter start to become more evident; Williamson vaguely resembles Caine, and he seems like a fish out of water as he returns to his poor, working-class, Catholic Liverpool roots.  Neither the priest nor the doctor (played by Godfrey Quigely, who is also in Get Carter as Frank's friend Eddie, although I remember him well as the prison priest in A Clockwork Orange) seem interested.

Like Carter, he starts making enquiries, and gets the full story from Cocky Burke (a typically authentic performance from J.G. Devlin), that his father suffered his injuries as a result of a kicking by some yobboes, but Cocky is very unwilling to get involved with the "English po-leece", saying "if anything's going to be done, Mick, it won't be the English po-leece that'll be doing it" (this scene reminds me somewhat of Wilfred Brambell in A Hard Day's Night, railing against the brutality of the police when with Ringo in the police station - indeed, just to go off message for a moment, they were of course together in the Steptoe and Son episode 'The Desperate Hours')

Again, like Carter, he meets up with a sexually agressive woman, one Joyce Eglington (Rachel Roberts), the doctor's receptionist, before bedding her almost instantly (mind you, her introduction is "I'm Mrs Eglington, but don't let that bother you").

He now has revenge on his mind, but has to return to London first to oversee the boardroom battles at his company. Perhaps inpsired by Cocky Burke's republican sentiments, he gatecrashes his own party back in Virginia Water, where his background clashes violently with the social circles he now moves in, as can be seen in this scene:

This song is 'Kevin Barry', an IRA member who was hanged by the British in 1920 (I must admit to not knowing this, just done a bit of research).  Here are the lyrics c/o wikipedia (there are different versions)

In Mountjoy jail one Monday morning
High upon the gallows tree,
Kevin Barry gave his young life
For the cause of liberty.
Just a lad of eighteen summers,
Still there's no one can deny,
As he walked to death that morning,
He proudly held his head on high.

Chorus

Shoot me like an Irish soldier.
Do not hang me like a dog,
For I fought to free old Ireland
On that still September morn.
All around the little bakery
Where we fought them hand to hand,
Shoot me like an Irish soldier,
For I fought to free Ireland

Just before he faced the hangman,
In his dreary prison cell,
British soldiers tortured Barry,
Just because he would not tell.
The names of his brave comrades,
And other things they wished to know.
Turn informer or we'll kill you
Kevin Barry answered "No".

Proudly standing to attention
While he bade his last farewell
To his broken hearted mother
Whose grief no one can tell.
For the cause he proudly cherished
This sad parting had to be
Then to death walked softly smiling
That old Ireland might be free.

Another martyr for old Ireland,
Another murder for the crown,
Whose brutal laws may kill the Irish,
But can't keep their spirit down.
Lads like Barry are no cowards.
From the foe they will not fly.
Lads like Barry will free Ireland,
For her sake they'll live and die.