Captain Lightfoot, Douglas Sirk

I wrote a post here about how I thought Douglas Sirk's use of real Irish locations in Captain Lightfoot struck me as odd. The really real Irish locations (the village for instance,
or the prison-castle

) seemed very touristy to me, and rather artificial (even though as you can see on those stills they are authentic)-- while the fields, the stone walls, the rivers, in other words, the open air that could have been shot anywhere seemed very Irish, and very real, probably because it fit the mood of playful larks, of anything-goes with those crazy Irish temperaments ("the bad good old Ireland" as the introductory title says). In other words, they seemed real because seeing Rock Hudson playing pranks on British soldiers in a field seemed so logical.

Apparently I'm not the only one to think there's something going on with Sirk's use of the Irish landscape. Jean-Loup Bourget writes in Bright Lights issue #6 of 1977-1978 (Sirk and his critics):
"Sirk's admirers have done him as much disservice as those who forgot him. In the Dictionnaire du Cinema published by Editions Universitaires, 1965, Patrick Bachau, after an interesting passage on the decadent and autumnal quality of the Sirkian universe, stakes everything on his own personal discovery of the high point of Sirk's work, which, in his case, happens to be Captain Lightfoot (1955. Regaling us with an account of his favorite film, Bachau refers to "a happy, humorous adventure story about the Scottish rebellion" with "the little moorland villages, the harps, the scarecrows, the pubs reeking of ale, and the fields of Scotland." In fact, Captain Lightfoot tells of an episode in the Irish struggle against the English, and the entire film is suffused with a totally Irish atmosphere about which Sirk himself has spoken at length (in the interview published in Cahiers du Cinema). Bachau is the only one to be taken in by the harp; perhaps he was simply thinking of Brigadoon."

While the confusion is pretty funny indeed, I can see where Bachau went wrong. Again, in the film, Ireland is more in the link between action and background, than in the background buildings themselves, though they are still supposed to indicate time and place. We are far from Brigadoon indeed, but there's some ambiguity worth investigating here...