John Ford's Ireland
MURRAY, BRIAN
John Ford's Ireland Why The Quiet Man is always good. BY BRIAN MURRAY Later in his life, long after he became a cinematic legend, Orson Welles was often asked to name filmmakers who had...
...and, as a young film critic in the 1950s, had openly mocked the patriotism and sentimentality frankly displayed in much of Ford's work...
...Patrick's Day staple...
...But he didn't want politics to dampen the buoyant mood of The Quiet Man, which took him fifteen years to put on the screen...
...But what Ford "brought to the movies" was "a sense of the turning of the earth" and the "rhythm of life as experienced by people who have a bond with the land...
...He's gained a beautiful wife, a pretty little cottage, and the enviable prospect of a peaceful life lived close to the land...
...I had to become a director and turn on the TV to find The Quiet Man," Truffaut wrote, "before I could measure my blindness...
...Ireland retains ample charms...
...Inisfree," Thornton tells the locals, "is a second word for heaven to me...
...It's no wonder, then, that such a diverse group of directors were struck by the lavishness of Ford's gifts...
...The Quiet Man features other improbabilities...
...He doesn't understand all this "fuss and grief over furniture and stuff...
...One of them even offers Thornton a stick "to beat the lovely lady...
...In one particularly contested scene, Thornton drags his recalcitrant wife through a rough field and is cheered by neighbors who, it appears, find inexhaustible delight in violent scenes...
...Other prominent directors—from Ingmar Bergman to Federico Fellini to Satyajit Ray— had praised Ford's mastery of his medium, his pure and often poetic craft...
...Scott Eyman hailed not only Ford's craftsmanship but the completeness of his vision in Print the Legend, an Brian Murray teaches writing at Loyola College in Maryland...
...Paddy, moreover, takes part in Ireland's civil war, joining the IRA to "fight against the terrible thing that England stood for in Ireland—the subjugation of the soul...
...Mary Kate's obsession with her dowry was not only woefully anachronistic, but furthered the notion that money inevitably prompts the Irish into comic displays of stinginess or greed...
...Set in the 1920s, it stars John Wayne as Sean Thornton, a popular American prizefighter who returns to Inisfree, a fictional and picturesque town on Ireland's stunning west coast...
...Indeed, in many ways, Ireland is the real star of The Quiet Man...
...Hollywood's major studios had balked at the project, convinced that moviegoers would never buy the idea of Wayne sauntering about in the land of shamrocks and leprechauns...
...He "was a wonderfully fluid painter...
...I studied the masters," Welles liked to reply, "by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford...
...The Quiet Man is one of the best-selling videos of all time, and its sales are steady in Ireland and Britain as well as the United States...
...Other critics objected to the brutish manner with which Thornton sometimes assumed his husbandly role...
...Its title character, Paddy Bawn Enright, is "slightly under middle height" and a far cry from the heavyweight Wayne...
...But such quirks don't bother the film's growing number of fans...
...Inisfree, after all, is a one-saloon cow town much enlivened by the arrival of Thornton, a strapping stranger with a mysterious past...
...Danaher refuses to endorse the match, and spitefully withholds his sister's dowry...
...BY BRIAN MURRAY Later in his life, long after he became a cinematic legend, Orson Welles was often asked to name filmmakers who had influenced him the most...
...What accounts for the film's continuing allure...
...Ford finally sold the idea to Republic, a "B" movie factory...
...In Ford's film politics are rarely mentioned, most notably when Michaleen Oge Flynn— a supporting character played by Barry Fitzgerald—observes in passing that "It's a nice soft night, so I think I'll join me comrades and talk a little treason...
...And yet, in Ireland, The Quiet Man stirred controversy...
...It's lyrical in the best sense of the word: inspired and passionate at every turn...
...Growing up in America, he'd often heard his mother describe the lush splendor of Ireland's rural west...
...Born Sean Aloysius O'Feeney in 1895, Ford—the thirteenth child of Irish immigrants—was keenly interested in Irish politics, and supported its fight for independence...
...But it's also fast becoming another secularized, high-tech Euro state filled with Ikea stores and sushi bars...
...Finally, the two men slug it out in an epic brawl that, in true Hollywood fashion, leaves them fast friends...
...Thornton wants to buy the pretty cottage that was home to "seven generations" of his family...
...But a local man, Red Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen) also craves the property—and when he loses the cottage to Thornton, Danaher vows revenge...
...By the mid-1980s, however, the Ford renaissance had begun...
...Ford, as Eyman showed, was an unusually complex and often "terrible-tempered" man who was more respected than liked...
...Thornton smokes like a chimney throughout the movie and flicks lit butts about with the swaggering abandon of a man who has forgotten that his own house is covered with thatch...
...But Mary Kate, seething, repeatedly insists that her Yank husband confront her rough brother and, if necessary, forcibly seize the money and property that are rightfully hers...
...Ford, as the actor Rod Taylor once observed, "could look at a thing and compose it as well as Cézanne...
...With the help of his cinematographer, Winton Hoch, Ford movingly amplifies the impossible beauty of its landscape...
...Fueling this was his fascination with people...
...they can book rooms at Ash-ford Castle, where Ford and Wayne stayed, and where The Quiet Man is still shown daily...
...As late as 1980, David Thomson asserted in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that only "sheer longevity made Ford a major director...
...And so, as The Quiet Man ends, all's right with Thornton's world...
...The much anticipated brawl with Danaher provides The Quiet Man with its dramatic finale—just as so many westerns build up to the big gun fight at high noon...
...Patrick's Day...
...Some reviewers complained that the film relied too heavily on stereotypical characters and also trivialized the country's customs and traditions...
...Thornton had delivered a fatal knockout in his final pro fight and now longs to leave the past behind...
...But even Truf-faut succumbed to the old master's power and the appeal of the movie that so many of us watch, yet again, around St...
...At one point Thornton barks at Flynn, his comical sidekick: "Saddle up my horse...
...The feud deepens when Thornton marries Danaher's sister, Mary Kate, a strong and rivetingly beautiful redhead memorably played by Maureen O'Hara...
...The Quiet Man is based loosely on "The Green Rushes," a 1932 short story by Maurice Walsh, a shamefully unsung writer from Kerry...
...And Ford, by the late 1960s, was often dismissed by film critics and scholars as a cinematic dinosaur who made far too many movies for far too long...
...There is, for starters, the inspired combination of O'Hara and Wayne, whose characters are wholly comfortable with themselves, their social roles, and their attraction for each other, which is displayed in several elegantly and memorably sensuous scenes...
...Though reared in Pittsburgh, Thornton is so skilled on horseback that he gallops to first place in the grand Inisfree Race...
...Indeed, Danaher, a celebrated bruiser, is itching for a fight...
...Cong's residents have encouraged such pilgrims by preserving their village in much the same state as the film's cast and crew found it some fifty years ago...
...For years, fans of the film have come to Cong, the quaint village in County Mayo where most of The Quiet Man was filmed...
...Ford certainly took liberties with Walsh's story, which offers no overdrawn characters and scant comic relief...
...In return, Ford had to promise Republic one of his trademark westerns, Rio Grande, a 1951 vehicle for Wayne and O'Hara that, despite solid virtues, is largely forgotten today...
...The French director François Truffaut, for example, shared few of Ford's values...
...Thornton doesn't care: He doesn't need the money and he's sick of fighting...
...Such characters aren't common in contemporary movies, and the world they inhabit is harder than ever to find...
...Moreover, the best of Ford's over one hundred films—including The Grapes of Wrath (1941), The Searchers (1957), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1963)—were widely available on video, prompting fresh scholarly assessments of his remarkably prolific career...
...The Quiet Man is, quite simply, one of the most perfectly composed movies ever made...
...In one scene, Thornton asks Mary Kate whether she can ride a bike, even though he had watched her ride only minutes before...
...In fact, he'd treated the subject before, far more somberly, in The Informer, a 1935 film based on Liam O'Flaherty's novel...
...It is especially true of The Quiet Man (1952), one of Ford's most popular films and a St...
...In some ways The Quiet Man is a western...
...excellent 1999 biography...
...The Quiet Man, however, proved the most profitable film in Republic's history and won Oscars for both direction and cinematography...
...Ford—who died in 1973 at the age of seventy-eight—was, among other tedious things, "grandiloquent and maudlin...
...Welles liked to shock and no doubt relished the astonishment that followed...
...Thus tourists can still see many of the shops and homes that are featured in The Quiet Man...
...After all, in such films as Citizen Kane (1942) and A Touch of Evil (1959), Welles had defined himself as an often showy experimentalist with an intellectual's jaded view of American life and the human condition...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 27
