Irish director Norman Cohen with Dermot Breen

Irish director Norman Cohen with Dermot Breen

Cork Film Festival, Norman Cohen, Dermot Breen, Greg Smith, Lynda Bellingham, Linda Hayden, Pamela Stephenson, James Mason, Brendan Behan, Carolyn Swift

This is a black and white photo of the Dublin-born film director and producer Norman Cohen shaking hands with the festival director Dermot Breen. A bearded Cohen, wearing a light-coloured utility jacket, is smiling as he chats with Breen. While there are few images of Norman Cohen in the archive, his fingerprints stretch into the archive via the producer Greg Smith, the actors James Mason, Lynda Bellingham, Linda Hayden, and Pamela Stephenson – all of whom were in Cork during the early 1970s.

Norman Cohen’s legacy is tied up with a series of risqué X-certificate rated comedies that he worked on such as Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975) and Confessions from a Holiday Camp (1977) starring Bellingham and Hayden both of whom are in the archive. He also produced and directed The London Nobody Knows (1967) with James Mason, Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1973) and Stand up, Virgin Soldiers (1977), based on the book by Leslie Thomas, and starring Bellingham and Stephenson. Around the time of this picture he had directed Dad’s Army in 1971 based on the popular BBC sitcom of the same name.

Cohen's production of Brendan Behan’s Dublin (1966), sometimes misattributed to the BBC, was made by his production company Norcon with the producer Greg Smith – who produced many of his pictures. Written by the Irish director, actor and writer Carolyn Swift, the twenty-nine minute film was narrated by Ray McAnally as Behan, and the soundtrack was supplied by The Dubliners. It was first shown at the Cork Film Festival in September 1966 supporting the MGM film Woman Without a Face (also known as Mister Buddwing) (Delbert Mann, 1966), starring Jean Simmons and James Garner. Cohen died of a heart attack, in 1983, in Van Nuys, California. (Irish Times letter: Carolyn Swift, Brendan Behan’s Dublin, irishtimes.com, 15.05.1999.)

University College Cork, Cork Film Festival, Bateman Photography

Cork Film Festival Collection

University College Cork

1970

Bateman Photography

Photo
TIFF
JPEG

English, eng

1970
Cork, Ireland

Photo

238 x 190mm