Wednesday, April 30, 2025

The Quiet Man


THE QUIET MAN   **

John Ford
1952
























IDEA:  Upon returning to his birthplace in Ireland to purchase his old family home, an Irish-American former boxer gets involved with a local woman and her tyrannical brother, who had his eyes on the property.



BLURB:  The Quiet Man is a romance and a comedy in which the romance, as it were, is based on a caveman’s idea of courtship, and the comedy is mostly comprised of a checklist of stereotypes about Irish people. Some would argue that Ford is lampooning the hidebound sociocultural mores of Old Ireland, and this feels at least half-true, but it is difficult to deny how he is also reinscribing a sexist gender politics that squares awfully well with the era in which the film was made. The Quiet Man would be satirical, perhaps, if we weren’t supposed to swoon when John Wayne forces himself on a perfectly acquiescent Maureen O’Hara in a golden-hued cabin during a windstorm, or if the sight of him literally dragging her across a field by her collar was intended to elicit the appropriate horror rather than laughter. Instead, the film wants us to root for this dreadful pairing and charm to its pseudo-screwball connubial violence, to identify with John Wayne as a white knight, because, hey, anything beats being shackled to your oafish alcoholic brother for a lifetime, right? Meanwhile, Ford’s affection for his ancestral homeland is obvious behind the Oirish caricatures, but it doesn’t make them less lazy, nor the film’s transformation into a slap-happy slapstick farce in the last act any less jarring. The Quiet Man is very well-made, because the man behind the camera was an exceptionally skilled filmmaker, but it’s hard to take any claims of its greatness without serious skepticism.