The Quiet Man

Dir: John Ford

1952

**

You can't deny that Winton Hoch's beautifully epic cinematography doesn't make you wish you were in the lush Irish countryside when watching but as far from classic romantic-comedy drama goes, I really don't see the appeal. John Ford was a great director, he made some of cinema's finest films but I don't personally count The Quiet Man as one of them. It is far from romantic, not very dramatic and calling it a comedy because of the few jokes it tells is a bit of an exaggeration. Made in the 50s and depicting the 20s, the story does indeed match the way life was back then. Some of the cultural differences from today seem quite horrific but at the time they were the excepted norm, however, I can't laugh at something dislikeable. Sean Thornton (played by John Wayne), is an Irish-born American from Pittsburgh who, after giving up a boxing career after he accidentally killed a man in the ring, travels back to Ireland to reclaim his family's farm and his birthplace in Inisfree. He meets and falls in love with the fiery Mary Kate Danaher (played by Maureen O'Hara), who is the sister of the bullying, loud-mouthed landowner Squire "Red" Will Danaher (played by Victor McLaglen) who actually wanted to buy the Thornton family farm for himself. When Thornton asks Danaher for his sister's hand in marriage, there is an argument over consent and then her dowry and in the end the two men end up having a very lengthy punch up that lasts hours and has a few intervals including several pints of stout. However, for most of the film John Wayne throws Maureen O'Hara around, is rude to her and the chemistry between them is anything but romantic. If life was really like that in real life then this should be a serious drama, rather than a comedy romance unless of course it was a satire or spoof. The Quiet Man was something of a departure for Wayne and Ford, who were both known mostly for Westerns and other action-oriented films but I still feel that their work ethic that worked in the Wild West was used poorly in the Irish countryside. It's one of those films that everyone likes but I do not. I thought the flash-back boxing sequence was very good and it reminded me of Raging Bull made many decades later. The final punch up was mildly amusing too but the thing I find most interesting about the film is the last scene. At the film's conclusion, after the credits have rolled, we see Kate and Sean standing in their garden waving good-bye. Maureen O'Hara turns to John Wayne and whispers something in his ear, evoking a priceless reaction from Wayne. What was said was known only to O'Hara, Wayne and John Ford. In exchange for saying this unscripted bit of text, O'Hara insisted that the exact line never be disclosed by any involved parties. In her memoirs she says that she refused to say the line at first as she "couldn't possibly say that to Duke", but Ford insisted, claiming he needed a genuine shock reaction from Wayne. The line remains a mystery to this day and I'd love to know what it was. Once you know the story you can never see that scene the same way again.