Portrait of a National Canadian Film Day Icon: Mary Walsh talks Gordon Pinsent
By Jim Slotek
Though she would repeatedly work with him and get to know him, Mary Walsh’s first exposure to the late fellow Newfoundlander Gordon Pinsent was the same as many. He was RCMP Sgt. Scott in a youth-targeted CBC ‘60s show The Forest Rangers.
“I so badly wanted to be a Forest Ranger,” the This Hour Has 22 Minutes alumnus recalls. “Of course, I also wanted to be on Chez Helene.”
Gordon Pinsent in John and the Missus
She later adored him on Quentin Durgens, M.P. I suggest how weird it is that there was a series where a parliamentarian was the crusading hero, considering the low esteem politicians hold today.
“It does seem that way today, doesn’t it?” she says. “But in our lifetime of course, it was politicians who got rid of the death penalty, politicians who introduced socialized medicine. At one point, they WERE heroes. We seemed to, at one point, elect people who had a vision. Maybe it’s us who changed.”
And Pinsent was the man to communicate that integrity. It would be more than a decade before their paths would cross again. Pinsent wrote the pilot, and played a priest in the East Coast series Up at Ours, where the then twentysomething Walsh played a 50-year-old boarding house mistress.
In later years in his six-plus decade career, she would direct a play he wrote, and appear with him in the film The Grand Seduction with Brendan Gleeson.
Pinsent reads Bieber on This Hour Has 22 Minutes
In short, she has cred to pay tribute to the man on National Canadian Film Day Wednesday (read our roundup of the nation-wide event HERE). She and fellow friend-of-Gordon Colm Feore will host Q&As for live screenings in Toronto and Ottawa (also streaming) of Pinsent’s directorial feature debut John and the Missus, about a stubborn Newfoundlander struggling to stay.
“I really got on very well with Gordon. As did everyone. You always say, ‘Oh Gordon and I really get along so well.’ That enthusiasm made everyone feel like ‘Oh, I guess I’m special, ‘cause Gordon really likes me.’ And he was so beloved here,” she says, via zoom from St. John’s.
Told that the Scotia theatre in Toronto is doing all-day Pinsent movies, we rattled some off. She remembers first seeing The Rowdyman. “He was so good, I was very bitter about it. Why couldn’t I be his sister, even though I was a youngster?”
She even named, “The one where all these stars (like Dame Judi Dench and Kevin Spacey) did bad Newfoundland accents and Gordon was brill.” (The Shipping News).
But she and Feore will be there tomorrow for John and the Missus, which behooved her to give the 1987 movie a rewatch.
“I was watching it the other day. And I thought, about all the bullshit about Newfoundland - not to say anything bad about the National Film Board - but all the horny-handed fishermen, the hail-fellow-well-metness of Newfoundland.
“Gordon played that darker temerity, that stubborn cranky guy, the way that you had to be as a Newfoundlander to just stay here.
“It was kind of a visionary movie because it looked back to us losing our independence and committing to Confederation. But it also looked forward to 1992 when we lost our whole raison d’etre, losing the cod fishery in ’92.
The movie was in ‘87, there was no indication of what was coming before the moratorium, except from fishermen around the island saying, ‘Oh Jaysus there’s no cod left!’ We’d heard that story so often, and no one took it seriously. And Gordon’s story of leaving and coming to the end of a natural resource and leaving a way of life et cetera was spot on.”
“It’s interesting about John and the Missus, because Gordon left in 1948, before we were even part of Canada. He moved to another country, Canada, and moved from Canada to L.A., and then came back to do The Rowdyman.
“The part that made me cry in John and the Missus was when his son is going off to the mainland. And he won’t look at him. And, so the son looks at him, Gordon looks away and when the son looks away, Gordon looks at him and there’s tears in his eyes, just a little. I just started to cry right away.”
Pinsent could play it all, and loved his occasional appearances on This Hour Has 22 Minutes – reading with gravitas the lyrics of a Justin Bieber song, or playing in a sketch called The Codfather with his son-in-law Peter Keleghan and Mark Critch.
Pinsent could even throw shade with class, Walsh recalls. She was brought in to direct a play of his at a festival in Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula.
“We were down there, and I was shortening the play. I said to Gordon, ‘A play is like the train. You gotta get on and you gotta get off. You just can’t ramble around forever.’ And the next day, because one of the things I don’t lack is gall, I shortened his play from about 200 pages to 45.
“And Gordon came in the next day and, in the nicest way that anyone could ever say this, he went, ‘Oh yeah! I’m on the train. But I can’t find anything to eat!’
Speaking of eating, she recalls, “Every day, women in Burin would bring a pie for Gordon. A meat pie, a lemon meringue pie, an apple pie. Just every single day there was a pie.
“Everybody just loved him so much.”