On a layover in Dublin, a filmmaker pays homage to Quackser Fortune

Frank Durant wasn’t wasting his Monday morning layover in Dublin.

He and his six-year-old son Bryce stood outside of The Gravediggers pub with the filmmaker Meghan Mickela, waiting for the doors to open at half eleven.

The father and son had flown in from Boston to Dublin, landing just after 11am, and were on their way to Rome later that same day. “We’re leaving here in three hours,” Durant said.

There came a dull clunk from behind the Glasnevin pub’s front door, and as it opened, the barman peeked out.

They weren’t doing food, the barman said. “Are you here for a drink?”

Everyone nodded.

The trio entered, passing a framed black and white photograph on the wall just inside the entrance. It showed a picture of the late actor Gene Wilder pushing a wooden wheelbarrow filled with horse manure.

The picture was a still from the 1970 romantic comedy Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, which had used this very premises as one of its pivotal locations.

Durant had come because of this fact. He was in town to link up briefly with Mickela, as they made plans to shoot a short documentary about the film, he said.

“I’ve done documentaries, feature films, and I just thought, I’m gonna be down here. We’ll get a team together, make something beautiful,” Durant said.

City at a crossroads

Set in and around Mount Street and Pearse Street, in the late 1960s, Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx trails its titular character (played by Wilder) as he happily makes a modest income by collecting horse manure, which he sells to neighbours as fertiliser for their gardens and houseplants.

He lives with his parents and sisters on Island Villas, a row of terraced houses just below the Dart line, between Pearse Street and Grand Canal Street.

As the title suggests, he has a cousin living in the Bronx, one of New York’s five boroughs. Although the family hasn’t heard from the cousin for a long time.

While Fortune’s father wants him to come work in the local foundry, the young Fortune would rather stick to collecting droppings out on the streets.

Fortune likes the job because he’s done by lunchtime, Durant says. “And he wants to basically feed the ducks and hang out over at St Patrick’s Cathedral.”

It seems a rather cliched Hollywood portrait of an Irishman at work. Even in the city, the hero is going about whistling a carefree tune, shovelling horse excrement.

The horses keep Fortune in business, because they are still being used by the city’s major milk supplier, Premier Dairies, to run daily deliveries.

Except, the Department of Transport and Power has only announced that the city would be speeding up these services by switching over to motorised vehicles.

Without the horses, the streets aren’t covered in manure, and without the manure, his only option is to either join his father in the foundry, or migrate to the States.

As this unfolds, Fortune, something of a local lothario, strikes up a relationship with Zazel Pierce – played by Margot Kidder – a young American, who is studying in Trinity College.

She is from Connecticut, or “Connect-icut”, as he puts it, and is enthralled by local history.

Her dorm room is decorated in maps of Ireland, and her college friends are all wealthy, fashionable, and living in a very separate society, singing trad songs at parties, but disgusted at her “bogmen” friends.

It isn’t that she loves him, more she loves the idea of him, Durant says. “She’s the one always searching him out.”

Their relationship is fleeting. They spend time together chatting about local history in St Patrick’s Cathedral, exploring Greystones, and visiting The Gravediggers.

But, like Fortune’s job, she isn’t long for the city, as she is due to return home imminently.

Fortune hasn’t been searching for any greater meaning in his life until he meets Pierce, Durant says. “Then, he’s like, huh, there’s more to life than working until one.”

As Pierce departs, Fortune finds himself in a pit of despair, and neither willing to join his cousin in the Bronx, or his father in the foundry, he tries to figure out how he can modernise his role in the city as a working-class flaneur.

Echoes of the past

On Monday, in The Gravediggers, Durant ordered three Guinnesses and a ginger beer at the spot where Kidder sat, while being scrutinised by the local punters.

He, his son and Mickela had gone to see Brendan Behan’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery earlier, he said. “But I didn’t really feel anything. Here, I feel, y’know “Where is Gene?” It depends on what you believe in. But I feel like he’s going to check in.”

A filmmaker himself, Durant discovered Quackser Fortune online during the pandemic in 2021, he says. “With the isolation, I wanted to get something going, and I was searching ‘Gene Wilder’, and this came up. A wacky, original title.”

Written by Gabriel Walsh and directed by Waris Hussein, Quackser Fortune wasn’t a box office hit at the time of its release in the summer of 1970. But over the ensuing decades it’s gained a cult following.

It was Wilder’s fourth film, coming three years after he starred in Mel Brooks’ debut The Producers, and right before his breakthrough role as Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

It was also one of Kidder’s earliest roles, coming out eight years before she played Lois Lane in Superman.

For film buffs, it’s a curiosity in the early stages of two major Hollywood careers. But for those more drawn to local history, it is a visual representation of the inner-city as it was on the cusp of modernisation.

It offers a glimpse of the Grand Canal Street area before the local foundry was felled for apartments, and the skyline was dominated by the seven-storey Stripe building.

As the film continues, the viewer is shown more and more forgotten sights throughout the city.

The Ambassador Theatre was still a thriving cinema. People rode horses for recreationally down by the Grand Canal’s walkway, and The Gravediggers had a “ladies lounge”, while the men drank at the front bar.

Mickela, who lives in the Liberties, says it brings the viewer into a more familiar city, in comparison to something like John Ford’s 1952 romance film, The Quiet Man.

“There are so many of these places that are very recognisable, whereas The Quiet Man is more romanticised,” she says.

Ireland is usually depicted as a more idyllic fantasy land, she says. “It’s a sprawling green place. But this is more realistic.”

There isn’t yet a small green outside the Gravediggers, and besides Wilder and Kidder’s brief date out in Greystones, the only traces of green are the trees that go down the middle of O’Connell Street.

Footnotes

While a lot of the city is familiar, but different, The Gravediggers seems like a place that hasn’t aged all that much in the nearly 55 years since Wilder and Kidder were here.

The toilets are now tiled and clean, rather than a stony, doorless hole in the wall. But the rest feels well-preserved, Durant says, as walks around the back lounge where, towards the end of the second act, a drunken, unemployed Fortune staggered about, hallucinating as he bought the whole pub round after round of drinks.

That the pub keeps a photo of Wilder up was probably done because it is good for business, but it’s also because the film clearly has a story to tell, half a century later, Durant says. “He’s gonna be known for Willy Wonka. He’s done The Producers. He’s done 10 other films better than this.”

But, still it meant something, Durant says, recalling an interview Wilder did with actor Alec Baldwin in 2008. “He says he got the script, and cried, and he used his talents to tell it.”

After an hour in the pub, the Durants were paid a visit by Kieran Crehan, the fiddler and owner of the now closed Crehan’s Musical Instruments in Drumcondra.

Crehan presented Durant’s son with two tin whistles, wrapped in brown paper.

“Why am I here?” Durant asked. “You know, I’m here taking Bryce, he’s got some Irish blood in him. Show him Dublin. I got to have my first Guinness with my son. But at the same time, god forbid I open some doors and get some people to watch this movie.”

Producing a short, which Mickela will shoot, is about creating a footnote, Durant says, and he likes footnotes. “I had nothing to do with this movie. But, in my circles, I’d like to show people this film, with its Irish connections, it’s worth a watch.”

With two hours to go before their flight to Rome, Durant and his son departed with Mickela to grab a taxi, passing by the photo and leaving behind the pub, which was now alive with chatter.