The Quiet Man (1952)

Directed by John Ford

Our Film of the Week was one of my father’s favorites, and I remember that he told me when I was a boy that the heart of the movie was just about that quietness — and in a movie with the longest two-man boxing scene in Hollywood history! But here’s the moral and human issue. A former prizefighter named Sean Thornton, an Irish-American living in Pittsburgh, has killed his opponent in the ring. It’s an accident, but Sean can’t accept that, because as he says later on, to the only man who is in on his secret, he wasn’t thinking about anything else in the fight but murdering the fellow. “He was a good egg, too,” says Sean. So Sean will never fight again, but instead he moves back to the old family homestead in a village in Ireland, there to farm and pick up the rest of his life, as a peaceful man — as a quiet man. He’s made a vow never to throw a punch again. That’s what he intends, but sometimes a man has to fight, regardless of what he’d like, especially if he is fighting for something — or someone — he loves.

Well, you knew we’d be in Ireland this week, with Saint Patrick's feast day leading us off! And that’s where John Ford shot the film, in all the bold green of the village of Cong, in County Mayo — that’s Cunga Fheichin, Saint Feichin’s Narrows, in northwestern Ireland, on Galway Bay, and if you want to hear the old Irish tongue spoken, and even to find schools where all instruction is conducted in Gaelic, the shores of County Mayo are a likely choice, far likelier than Dublin. And there was a real Irish fighting spirit in County Mayo, too — I don’t know where the Irishmen in my town came from, but the potato famine hit Mayo very hard, and a hundred thousand people came from there to the United States, so it’s entirely likely. And there’s an undercurrent of Irish separatism in The Quiet Man, too, which the director, John Ford — John Martin Feeney, born in Portland, Maine — sympathized with. But enough geography and politics! Let’s get back to the film, one of the greatest ever made, featuring two very close friends, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, each of whom was a titan in Hollywood, and that’s actually an understatement.

Maureen O’Hara was a tomboy growing up, and she was known to do most of her own stunts in her films — a great match for the rawboned Duke, whom she loved dearly, as I said, and in all their films together, you can feel a downright electric arc when their faces are near one another. Of course, Sean Thornton is going to fall in love with the spirited redhead she plays, Mary Kate Danaher, and all should be well, except that her older brother, a gruff, tight-fisted, comedic blusterer and rich farmer, Will Danaher (played to comic perfection by Victor MacLaglen), has it in for Sean and won’t approve of the marriage. That brings into action the village’s official marriage-broker, little Michaleen Oge Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald), the parish priest, Father Lonergan (Ward Bond), and other saner and slyer heads. See, Danaher has long been courting the widow Tillane (Mildred Natwick), and — and I don’t want to reveal more of the plot. I’ll leave it here: when Danaher finds he has been the butt of a ruse, he accuses Thornton and his sister of being in on it (they weren’t), and he refuses to give her what’s owing to her as a dowry, and even the furniture that is hers outright. Thornton doesn’t care about that one way or another, but Mary Kate does, and she thinks he’s a coward because he doesn’t want to fight for it.

In many ways, The Quiet Man is a film for those who believe in marriage and who know that what men and women do is that staggering and monumental thing, so closely related to tending the soil with love and care: they make children. The dialogue is priceless, yet it all seems perfectly natural, not stylized, as is the wonderful dialogue in that equally quotable film, Casablanca. We like everybody in The Quiet Man, even granite-jawed old Will Danaher, and there are gestures in the film that are unforgettable for a kind of down-to-earth nobility that I can’t find so well expressed in any other film except for John Ford’s own How Green Was My Valley. Ford was a poet of scene and dialogue and music, and — if you will look closely in The Quiet Man — of silences that are more filled with meaning than any words can be. But above all, when you watch this film, have fun! And thank God for the two great sexes that animate the world, because if it weren’t for them, where would we be?

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Today’s film is available on Internet Archive, but only in a VHS transfer version.

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