'The Woman Who Married Clark Gable' (1985) is a pivotal, BAFTA nominated film in the career of Thaddeus O'Sullivan. Andrew Pattman's screenplay was adapted from Sean O'Faolain's short sorty and the film was O'Sullivan's first venture into directing drama for the screen. Starring Bob Hoskins and Brenda Friker, and set in late-1930s Dublin, it tells the story of an uninterrupted, domestic routine, and a stale marriage without children that is temporarily transformed by a cinematic obsession.
Echoing the Hollywood screen of that era, O'Sullivan's film was shot on location in luminescent black-and-white. Lit, designed and costumed with beautiful detail, it captures the mood and pace of suburban Dublin life in the interwar period. Its central drama, coupling and English working-class lapsed Methodist with a devout Irish Catholic woman, teases out an emotional level the close, long-standing relations between Ireland and England that also spoke to its mid-1980s contexts.
This special edition combines O'Faolain's original short story, the text of the screenplay, an introduction by the director, and is offered in dual-language translation, generously illustrated with images. It is framed for the reader by critical essays by Lance Pettitt, Roy Foster and Anelise Corseuil, notes and filmography. This book accompanies a digitally re-mastered, two-disk DVD of Thaddeus O'Sullivan's films, 1975, published by the Irish Film Institute, Dublin / St Mary's University College, London.
