Craig J. Clark
“You know, men. Start out angels, end up brutes.”
In the four-and-a-half decades he’s been making movies, Neil Jordan has shown an affinity for a variety of supernatural creatures, both malevolent and benign. From The Company of Wolves and High Spirits to Interview with the Vampire and Byzantium, he’s given werewolves, ghosts, and vampires their due. His 2009 film Ondine even plays off the legend of the selkie, although that one winds up having more of a grounding in realism. Reality, after all, is where the monsters are decidedly human, something Jordan, who turns 75 today, first explored in his directorial debut, 1982’s Angel.
Made under the aegis of executive producer John Boorman, for whom he worked as a creative consultant on Excalibur, Angel was Jordan’s second film to touch on the Troubles after 1981’s Traveller, which he wrote but did not direct. Jordan’s dissatisfaction with how that turned out spurred him to insist on taking the reins of his next script. “I loved the flights of imagination this medium took me to,” he writes in his 2024 memoir Amnesiac, “would have been happy to write for it forever, but couldn’t face the same experience again.” Luckily for him, Channel Four took a chance on the novice director, and with matching funds procured from the Irish Film Board by Boorman, he was off and running.
What he ran with was the story of a saxophonist named Danny (Stephen Rea, in his first of many films for Jordan) who systematically hunts down the men responsible for killing his manager and a deaf-mute girl he met at a dance hall where his band played. At the outset, it appears Danny’s world has little overlap with the sectarian violence that flared up in Ireland in the late ’60s and was still raging when Jordan penned his screenplay. Hence the band’s drummer’s pointed question about whether the hall is “paying danger money,” which Ray, their manager, dismisses. “None of that, boys,” he says. “We’re musicians.” Besides, he knows he’s already paid for protection, which ironically paints a target on his back. When four thugs in stocking masks and balaclavas show up brandishing machine guns, it doesn’t matter which side Ray paid. There’s still the other one to worry about.
For Danny, his primary motivation for seeking revenge is the deaf-mute girl, with whom he made a tentative connection in spite of her tender age. “You’re too young,” he says when she comes on to him, but he doesn’t exactly run away. That she’s shot right in front of him is perhaps more of a shock than the dance hall blowing up moments later. He’s so dazed by the experience that the next morning when he’s being questioned by the police, he can only remember one detail – one of the men wore an orthopedic shoe – and doesn’t share it. Instead, Danny alternates rehearsing with his reformed band (dubbed The New Pretenders) and chasing down clues that lead him to the killers, each of whom gives him another part of the explanation for what went down that night.
While Jordan doesn’t comment directly on the Troubles, they are an ever-present part of the film’s milieu, between the armed soldiers on the scene of the bombing, and the one stationed on the street outside the run-down building where Danny’s aunt lives. There’s also “IRA” graffiti spray-painted on the house where he confronts the club-footed perp identified by his scuffle walk. Shortly after, one of the coppers on the case makes the first overt reference to Catholics and Protestants, but professes his neutrality by saying he’s Jewish. “Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?” Danny asks, showing he hasn’t lost his ironic sense of humor, even if he has killed one man and is primed to kill his second.
Throughout, Jordan punctuates the violence with stylized musical numbers as the New Pretenders ply their trade under new management. One of the gigs secured for them, though, is in a mental hospital, leading to a scene straight out of Amnesiac where Danny’s solo saxophone playing attracts the patients. It’s an unnerving sequence, matched by Danny’s encounter with a shell-shocked widow at a farmhouse where he seeks shelter after carrying out his latest hit. The closer he gets to his goal, however, the less human he becomes – and the less he understands why he’s still pursuing it.
In the years following Angel, the Troubles returned to the forefront of Jordan’s imagination in The Crying Game (which netted him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) and Breakfast on Pluto. His loyalty to the Irish film industry remained strong as well, using his clout from the success of The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire to mount the big-budget historical drama Michael Collins, the project he’d originally hoped to follow Angel with. He also continues to make films there, most recently the New York-set Greta and the Los Angeles-set Marlowe. Considering how many Hollywood films set in the Emerald Isle were filmed on studio backlots, it’s only right for Jordan to return the favor.
“Angel” isn’t on any streaming service, but the Twilight Time Blu-ray is available from Screen Archives Entertainment.
