Cork film that almost scooped an Oscar

IN 1955, a film crew from America’s famous Paramount Studios arrived in Cork to shoot a short film about hurling.

The fictional tale featured players from the iconic Cork team of that decade and their legendary coach, Jim ‘Tough’ Barry.

The nine-minute short, called Three Kisses, is a light-hearted drama about gifted young hurler Colm Gallagher from the fictional Cork village of Ballykilly, which has never produced a player of renown. He courts a camogie player and they share three kisses in the film, hence its title - although the camera chastely pans down to their feet for the embraces!

Colm catches the eye of Cork’s selectors and visits Barry at his tailoring business. In the film, we follow him as he walks the rain-soaked streets of 1950s Cork, from the top of Patrick’s Hill down through Pana, on to Barry’s shop on Washington Street.

Colm is picked for the Cork senior hurling team, who travel to Thurles and win the day against Clare. These players were part of the famous three-in-a-row team and included the likes of Christy Ring.

Three Kisses was written and directed by American Justin Herman, who had been nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Film in 1950, about the roller skating contact sport called roller derby.

Its young male and female stars were the Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal of their day - Mescal famously shot a GAA scene for the hit drama Normal People.

However, the names of those 1950s stars have been lost in the mists of time, despite The Independent praising the lead actor’s performance as “completely natural before the camera”. If anyone knows their identity - drop the Holly Bough an email!

Three Kisses, an early example of Bord Fáilte facilitating a film crew to market Ireland to the world, was a little sprinkling of Hollywood stardust in the often drab and colourless world of 1950s Cork, where the biggest treat was a trip to the cinema.

However, the Cork Examiner showed no fear or favour when it reviewed the film made on its own patch. Its critic called it “a farce” offering its American market an outdated view of Ireland.

That did not trouble the Irish-American audience though, who, by all accounts, lapped up Three Kisses and its portrayal of Cork, romance, and hurling. It was promoted in the U.S by Paramount with the tagline ‘15 wild men on a side, racing around a cow pasture!’ and shown as a short before the main movie - or a ‘topper’ as such short films were known.

The film then got the Hollywood seal of approval when it was nominated for Best Short in the 1956 Academy Awards, although it lost out to a U.S documentary, Survival City, about a mock town constructed in Nevada to test the effects of an atomic bomb explosion... shades of Oppenheimer there!

The big Oscar winners in 1956 included Ernest Borgnine and Jack Lemmon, with Frank Sinatra, Katharine Hepburn, and James Dean among the nominees.

Remarkably, given the hullabaloo surrounding the modern Oscars, the Cork hurlers who featured in Three Kisses didn’t even know it had been nominated!

In 2009, Jimmy Brohan, one of the stars alongside the likes of Vincent Twomey, Paddy Barry, Mick Cashman, and Joe Hartnett, admitted it was only years later that he heard of the Oscar nomination.

At the time, there was little commentary on short films generally, and newspapers and radio in Ireland reported only on the stars of the day. “I have only a vague recollection of the film, I was only 20,” said Brohan, who died in September this year. “I enjoyed it. It was something out of the ordinary, to be taking part in a film.”

Three Kisses disappeared into memory until 2002, when the only known copy resurfaced and was donated to the Irish Film Institute by Los Angeles-based collector Paul Balbirnie.

“We were delighted to get the film as it’s extremely rare. We know of no other copy and there’s practically no information about it available,” said Kassandra O’Connell, Head of the Irish Film Archive.

You can see it here: https://ifiarchiveplayer.ie/three-kisses/