Robert Shaw was another of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August. This gave the chance to record a few movies I hadn't seen before, along with one I had never even heard of. That latter movie is The Luck of Ginger Coffey.
Robert Shaw plays Coffey, nicknmed Ginger for his red hair, although the movie is in black and white. Ginger was born in Ireland, but seeing no economic opportunity for himself there, has decided to emigrate to Canada with his wife Vera (Mary Ure) and adolescent daughter Paulie. As the movie opens the family has already been in Canada for some time, long enough for Ginger to be at the unemployment office in a Montreal where you could still get by as a monolingual anglophone: the movie was released in 1964, several years before the Parti québecois gained power and began to transform Quebec.
Ginger thinks he's well-suited to a bunch of better white-collar type jobs. Perhaps he is, although he comes across as the sort of chancer who will come up with all sorts of get-rich-quick schemes that to any sane person are never going to pan out. The bigger problem, however, is that Ginger went into the military back in Ireland, meaning that he wasn't able to get the sort of academic or professional qualifications that are necessary for the sort of job he wants.
So Ginger winds up getting two jobs to try to show Vera he can still make it in Canada. One is as a proofreader for the local English-language newspaper. Ginger has this belief that this job is eventually going to lead to work as a reporter, which is something he just knows he can be good at. The editor, however, is likely just trying to fob him off in saying maybe a reporter's job will open up in a few weeks' time. Ginger's other job is working for a diaper delivery service. This job is getting a bit more precarious in that it's early in the era when disposable diapers were coming into being. Here, Ginger has something that might actually be a good idea: why not rent out things like cribs that parents are only going to need for a year or two at most? Since the company would be able to reuse the stuff and obtain it at a volume discount, this might be a good new revenue stream for the company. And the boss actually likes it and wants to promote Ginger. But he's insistent on becoming a reporter.
All of this indecision is putting Vera off, and when she finds out that Ginger has spent the money the couple had saved for the possibility that they might have to go home to Ireland not having succeeded in Canada, that's enough for her. And she's already met another guy. It's all enough to sent Ginger's life spiraling out of control....
The idea of The Luck of Ginger Coffey is a good one, but the movie was hard for me to get into for a couple of reasons. One is that the print TCM ran didn't seem very good, looking more like a TV movie. The bigger issue is that the Ginger Coffey character isn't all that sympathetic. He seems to have unrealistic expectations, and is also the sort of smooth operator character that has never really appeared to me. So even though Shaw and Ure both give good performances -- and, from what I've read from Canadians, the movie is a nice time capsule of early 1960s Montreal -- it still wasn't the most appealing movie to me.
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