Irish characters add color to the silver screen's luster.

Byline: Jim Keogh

COLUMN: FILM CLIPS

I love that when I logged in to a database about Irish movies it included a category specifically about boxing films. How many other ethnicities have an entire sub-genre devoted to beating people up?

Truth be told, I immediately flashed to my late grandfather, who came over in the 1920s. He was a gentle man, an electrician who lived simply, provided for his family and was the funniest guy in the room.

Still, there was a toughness about him. He could flash with anger and impatience in the presence of fools. I watched him battle a bad heart for much of his life, undergoing procedures that today are commonplace but in the 1970s were radical, even life-threatening. He wasn't a boxer, but he was an Irish fighter.

I also remember he wasn't much for St. Patrick's Day, all the green-beer silliness and such. On March 17 you'd be more likely to find him home listening to a Red Sox spring training game on the radio and hoisting nothing stronger than a cup of black coffee. To this day the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee brings me back to my grandfather's kitchen table. I don't drink the stuff, but it's one of my favorite smells.

My grandfather's immigrant experience isn't fodder for a movie. I loved and respected him, but who other than his family would watch a film about his quiet life?

No, the Irish in America are typically memorialized on film as brawlers and boozers, thugs and pols - the kinds of characters that make screenwriters salivate on their keyboards, and whom actors would run over their mothers to play.

Moviewise, these Irish stereotypes make for a fun ride.

Didn't you get a little thrill watching Liam Neeson strap on his iron collar and stride off to war against Daniel Day-Lewis, a.k.a. Bill the Butcher, in "Gangs of New York"? And after years of watching Tom Hanks portray characters who skirted the edges of sainthood, it was compelling to see him walk the dark side as Irish-American hit man Michael Sullivan in "Road to Perdition." Nothing can reinvigorate a career like murdering the future James Bond (Daniel Craig) in a bathtub.

Of course the bad guy's nemesis is just as likely to be an Irishman on the right side of the law, sometimes after the two have grown up in the same neighborhood. Consider the sheer number of movies featuring a square-off between an Irish (or Irish-American) cop and gangster. Think Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn in "Mystic River," Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in "The Devil's Own," Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones in "Blown Away."

The Irish have even found their way into the superhero-super villain ethos. In "Daredevil" Ben Affleck plays the blind son of an Irish-American boxer whose remaining heightened senses allow him to vanquish the deadly Bullseye (Colin Farrell), who we first see in a pub turning paper clips into deadly projectiles.

Boxers? There have been a few. "Gentleman Jim" with Errol Flynn as famed bare-knuckle boxer Jim Corbett, "The Quiet Man" in which John Wayne slugs it out across the Irish countryside, and the criminally underrated "Cinderella Man," with Russell Crowe playing Jim Braddock, the last of the great Irish-born heavyweights who used his fists to stave off starvation during the Depression. In "Million Dollar Baby," Clint Eastwood's grizzled trainer, Frankie Dunn, reads the Irish poets and studies Gaelic when Maggie Fitzgerald (Hillary Swank) walks into his gym looking to lace up the gloves.

"The Last Hurrah" highlights that other Irish mainstay, the politician. The Spencer Tracey vehicle is loosely based on James Michael Curley, who parlayed his man-of-the-people roguishness into a near-lifetime tenure as mayor of Boston, defying the decades of institutional prejudice against the Irish. My affinity for this story is personal at some level. As a native Rhode Islander from the Providence area, I watched that city be transformed by its own Curley-like mayor, Buddy Cianci, who relied on his populist charisma - and fiercely loyal Italian-American voting base - to weather several scandals. After serving time in prison following an FBI corruption sting, Cianci is back with a new pulpit - a TV and radio show. In his day, Curley would have been king of all media.

My favorite Irish immigrant movie is "In America," writer-director Jim Sheridan's account of one newly arrived family's adjustment to life in New York City. Unlike Ron Howard's "Far And Away," which depicted a United States openly hostile to the Irish poor crossing the Atlantic during the potato famine, "In America" shows a country that's almost aggressively indifferent to them by the early '80s. The parents of two daughters (based on Sheridan's own) befriend an African immigrant neighbor dying of AIDS, and brave streets teeming with others who are as bad off, or worse, as they are, scrambling to stay well and whole, and make a life.

When I watch this film, I suspect it's close to what my grandfather experienced when he came here. Life is gritty, money is scarce, pleasures are simple and crises loom.

Irish or otherwise, most immigrants at one time or not stepped into that ring.

ART: PHOTO

CUTLINE: Tom Hanks, right, is Michael Sullivan and Paul Newman is Mr. Rooney in 2002's "Road to Perdition."

PHOTOG: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS