General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Informer (1935 film)

The Informer is a 1935 American black-and-white drama directed by John Ford, adapted by Dudley Nichols from Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel of the same name, in which a dim-witted Dubliner betrays a rebel friend to the authorities for a twenty-pound reward during the Irish Civil War period. Produced by RKO Radio Pictures, it won four Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor, and was named best picture of 1935 by the New York Film Critics Circle in that body's inaugural awards.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	John Ford; screenplay by Dudley Nichols from Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel¹
Source novel	O'Flaherty's The Informer (1925), awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1925³
Production	RKO Radio Pictures; produced 11 February to 14 March 1935; 10 reels, black and white, RCA Victor sound¹
Release	New York opening 9 May 1935; general release 24 May 1935¹
Principal cast	Victor McLaglen (Gypo Nolan), Heather Angel (Mary McPhillip), Preston Foster (Dan Gallagher), Margot Grahame (Katie Madden), Wallace Ford (Frankie McPhillip)⁴
Academy Awards	Four wins from six nominations: Direction, Actor, Screenplay, Music (Scoring); nominated for Outstanding Production and Film Editing⁵
Other honors	New York Film Critics best picture and best director (1935); National Board of Review best picture; Prix du Roi, Brussels International Film Festival; Best Screenplay, Venice²^•⁶
Preservation	Inducted into the National Film Registry in 2018⁶

Spoilers

Plot and source

The story is set in Dublin in 1922, during the turmoil that followed the Irish War of Independence. Gypo Nolan, an unemployed former member of a revolutionary organization, sees a "wanted for murder" poster offering a twenty-pound reward for his best friend, the rebel Frankie McPhillip. Hungry and desperate to buy passage to America for himself and his girlfriend Katie, Gypo informs to the police. Frankie is killed when the police raid his mother's home, and Gypo collects the reward money, then spends a single night wandering the fog-bound city as guilt closes in and his former comrades hunt the informer.¹^•⁷^•⁸

The film adapts O'Flaherty's novel The Informer, which the Irish writer had planned, by his own account, as "a sort of high-brow detective story" built on the technique of the cinema, designed to make readers end by pitying a character they began by considering a monster.³ In the novel the subversive group is called only the "Revolutionary organisation," not the IRA, and scholars note that O'Flaherty did not intend it as a historically accurate portrait of the republican movement.⁹ Ford and Nichols transformed the novel's story of squalor into what one scholar describes as a romanticized tale of dignity and redemption.¹⁰

The Informer was the second screen version of the novel. The first, a 1929 British silent film directed by Arthur Robison for British International Pictures, downplayed the Irish setting; a 1968 version by Jules Dassin transferred the story to Belfast, and a further adaptation followed in 1992.¹¹^•¹²

Production

RKO had doubts about the project's commercial prospects. Ford, a close friend of O'Flaherty, persuaded the studio, which bought the novel for $5,000; when executives questioned whether the story suffered from "dramatic anemia," producer Cliff Reid argued that the studio had the best director in Hollywood working on it.¹^•⁷

A six-day script. Ford and Nichols wrote the screenplay in six days during a cruise on Ford's schooner, the Araner, off the coast of Mexico, and Nichols called it the only draft. Ford then shot the film in less than three weeks, on the 11 February to 14 March 1935 production schedule, completing it on time and on budget.⁷^•⁸^•¹

The budget was reported by The New York Times at $218,000, with modern sources listing $215,000, $243,000, or $340,000. Heather Angel was borrowed from Universal for the role of Mary McPhillip.¹

Style

The film is built on expressionist visual methods: dense fog, chiaroscuro lighting, and shadows that turn studio-built Dublin into a murky maze. Ford, Nichols, and cinematographer Joseph H. August set out to use the camera as a narrator, and the whole film plays at night.¹³^•¹⁴ Nichols described the intended symbolism as deliberately unobtrusive: after collecting his twenty pounds, Gypo waves his hand before the eyes of a blind man, as if confronting his own conscience, though Nichols noted that no one at the time interpreted the scene that way.¹⁴

Max Steiner's score was an acknowledged part of the film's effect, and the finale plays under a looming crucifix in a cathedral, underlining themes of forgiveness and redemption.⁴^•¹⁵ A scholarly study of the film's treatment of urban space argues that its visualization of Dublin produced unease in audiences and allowed the filmmakers to construct what it calls dangerous histories in the context of right-wing Europe of the 1930s.¹⁶

Reception and awards

Critics responded far more strongly than the first audiences. The film was hailed at release as one of the most important contributions to the film arts since the talkies began, but it was initially a box-office failure, barely recovering its cost.¹⁴^•¹ After revivals in late 1935 and 1936, it became, according to the New York Times, the most substantial money maker on the RKO schedule.¹

At the Academy Awards for 1935 the film received six nominations and four wins: John Ford for Best Director, Victor McLaglen for Best Actor, Dudley Nichols for Best Screenplay, and Max Steiner for Best Scoring. It lost the Outstanding Production award to MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty.⁵^•¹⁷ Nichols at first refused his Oscar because of the feud between the Screen Writers' Guild and the Academy over union matters, the first time an Academy Award was declined; he finally collected it at the 1938 ceremony.²^•⁶

The newly founded New York Film Critics Circle, created in 1935 as an antidote to the Academy's awards, named The Informer best picture in its inaugural balloting, agreeing with the Academy on best director.¹⁸ The film also took the National Board of Review best picture award for 1935, the Prix du Roi as the highest prize of the 1935 Brussels International Film Festival, and Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival.²^•⁶

Censorship in Ireland. The film was never screened in Ireland in the 1930s; it was banned outright, even as audiences elsewhere came in droves to see it.¹⁶

Legacy

The film fixed Ford's critical reputation. His biographer Scott Eyman wrote that The Informer gave Ford a critical reputation he would never entirely lose and a leader's role within the industry, and it brought him the first of his Academy Awards for direction.⁷^•⁸ Ford himself was cooler on the result, telling critic Lindsay Anderson in 1950 that it came a long way down the list of his own favorites and remarking that it lacked the humor he considered his forte.¹⁵

Its standing has varied with later critics. Time Out's retrospective review calls it heavy-handed and patronizing while conceding that Ford received the best reviews of his career for it; the Observer has called it an expressionist masterpiece.¹⁹^•²⁰ Martin Scorsese referenced the film in his statement on Irish guilt and betrayal in The Departed (2006), and the story's treatment of the informer in republican culture has remained a touchstone in Irish writing on betrayal.⁷^•⁹ In 2018 the Library of Congress's National Film Registry added the film.⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026