Background
John Ireland was born on 30 January 1914 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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John Ireland was born on 30 January 1914 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
He spent his childhood years in New York, and then he was a carnival swimmer and a theatre actor before doing movies.
He got a supporting actor nomination for All the King’s Men (49, Robert Hossen), and he played the lead in B pictures. But he was employable as a threat or a hood, and it’s as if he took that opinion to heart and turned away from being the flawed hero that was within his reach.
Later on still, he went to Europe and did shlock, combing his hair forward. And it feels the self-destructiveness as well as the glory in the fact that after Red River, it was not Howard Hawks or Montgomery Clift who went off with Joanne Dru, but John Ireland: another young woman who noticed the way he watched her.
It's a very long list, for a guv who seemed to have swallowed his cynic’s pills very early in life: A Walk in the Sun (46, Lewis Milestone); Billy Clanton in Mij Darling Clementine (46, John Ford); a vicious gangster in Railroaded (47, Anthony Mann); The Gangster (47, Gordon Wiles); Raw Deal (48, Mann); Joan of Arc (48, Victor Fleming); A Southern Yankee (48, Edward Sedgyvick); as Bob Ford in / Shot Jesse James (49, Samuel Fuller); Roughshod (49, Mark Robson); Anna Lueasta (49, Ining Rapper); The Doolins of Oklahoma (49, Gordon Douglas); Cargo to Capetown (50, Earl McEvov); Vengeance Valley (51, Richard Thorpe); trying to prove his innocence, with Mercedes McCambridge, in The Scaif (51, E. A. Dupont); Little Big Horn (51, Charles Marquis Warren); The Bushwhackers (52, Rod Amateau); as Quantrill in Red Mountain (51, William Dieterle); Hurricane Smith (52, ferry Hopper); after A-bomb spies in The 49th Man (53, Fred F. Sears).
He then coproduced, codirected (with Lee Garmes), and acted with Joanne Dru in Outlaw Territory (53), and carried on as if nothing had happened: in Korea in Combat Squad (53, Cy Roth); Security Risk (54, Harold Schuster); with Dru again in Southwest Passage (54, Ray Nazarro); The Fast and the Furious (54, Edwards Sampson, with Ireland), a film written and produced by Roger Corman; The Steel Cage (54, Walter Doniger); Queen Bee (55, Ranald Mac- Dougall); Hell’s Horizon (55, Tom Gries); Gunslinger (56, Corman); and Ike Clanton in Gunfight at the O K. Corral (57, John Sturges).
He was forty-three, and it was 1957 in Hollywood. All the lights were going out. The marriage to Joanne Dru had broken down. Ireland’s B pictures were close to dead. One longs for a book that tells us what he felt then. Party Girl (58, Nicholas Ray); Spartacus (60, Stanley Kubrick); with Elvis and Tuesday Weld in Wild in the Country (61, Philip Dunne); 55 Days at Peking (63, Ray); The Ceremony (63, Laurence Harvey); The Fall of the Roman Empire (64, Mann); I Saw What You Did (65, William Castle).
He did at least another thirty films, including Guyana: Cult of the Damned (SO, Rene Cardona) and Messenger of Death (88, ). Lee Thompson), with a final bow called Waxwork IT Lost in Time (92, Anthony Hickox). But he never got to play Old Man Clanton.
By the standards of 1947 he looked like a villain, what with that leer and the grating voice. But look at Ireland then with modern eyes and you’ve got a knockout—there are some whose looks are forty or fifty years ahead of public taste. Ireland nearly made it.
From 1949 till 1957.
