Certainly, I\u2019ll grant that The Quiet Man <\/em>renders the Emerald Isle gorgeously in Technicolor, with all the expected iconography: glowingly verdant fields ringed by stone walls; lime-washed cottages roofed in thatch; quaint pubs filled with Guinness and folk songs; even a stone castle. A Hibernophile born to Irish parents, Ford insisted upon filming on-location in western Ireland, mostly in the idyllic village of Cong, County Mayo. He would accept no less for his passion project, which was finally green<\/em>-lighted for production by Republic Pictures almost two decades after Ford bought the rights to Maurice Walsh\u2019s 1933 short story of the same title\u2014a story about an Irish-born, Pittsburgh-raised native son returning \u201chome\u201d to Ireland to buy a little farm, seeking peace and quiet but, instead, falling in love with a fiery \u201cred-haired woman\u201d and then into a protracted battle with her bullying brother over her dowry. From this source material, Frank S. Nugent elaborated a screenplay which begins with a friendly little jab at Ford, with whom he collaborated on ten other scripts: \u201cBEHIND the TITLE and the CREDITS there will be a series of shots in and around Galway, which the director knows like the back of his hand \u2013 the same back of the hand which this writer would get if he risked suggesting the shots.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n And certainly, as Nugent\u2019s jab suggests, The Quiet Man <\/em>is pure Ford as auteur, bearing his authorial stamp despite being a romantic comedy rather than a Western. (Actually, it\u2019s worth remembering that Ford won four Best Director Oscars, none of them for Westerns and the last of them for The Quiet Man<\/em>). Most obviously, The Quiet Man<\/em> is populated with Ford\u2019s preferred players. Firstly, there are its top-billed stars: John Wayne (who starred in a dozen Ford films) as the protagonist, Sean Thornton; and the Irish-born Maureen O\u2019Hara (who starred in four Ford films) as the Irish hothead he falls for, Mary Kate Danaher. (With her brilliant red hair and giant green eyes, no actress has been better served by Technicolor, nor by veteran Republic costume designer Adele Palmer.) And secondly, there are its Ford-loyalist character actors: Victor McLaughlin (as Mary Kate\u2019s brother Will Danaher); Ward Bond (as the village priest, Father Lonergan, who also serves as the film\u2019s narrator), and Barry Fitzgerald (as the village\u2019s drunken matchmaker Michaeleen Flynn), each of them trafficking heavily in Irish stereotypes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore, though not shot in Monument Valley, The Quiet Man <\/em>is shot through with Ford\u2019s signature visual style\u2014with the help of another loyal collaborator, cinematographer Winton C. Hoch (who filmed three Ford Westerns, i.e., Godfathers <\/em>[1948], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon <\/em>[1949], and The Searchers <\/em>[1956]). There are sweeping pans of rugged and timeless landscapes, still spaces on which to juxtapose the action of men moving through them. The most gorgeous of these in The Quiet Man<\/em> is a thrilling horse race on Lettergesh Beach, with a thundering cavalry of men vying for the chance to snatch a woman\u2019s bonnet rather than scalp a Native American. In Ford\u2019s hands, western Ireland looks not unlike the American Frontier West, where Nature and Civilization clash; where the lone hero stands outside the community and its values, even while ultimately defending them; and where the Past is romanticized, even as its passing is rendered inevitable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is this sentimentalism about the past that provokes my (corned) beef with The Quiet Man, <\/em>or perhaps, more fairly, my beef with nostalgic celebrations of it today. What version of the past is Ford\u2014and the 21st<\/sup> century fan of The Quiet Man\u2014<\/em>pining after? To put it another way, as did Frances Mulraney here<\/a>, Ford\u2019s portrayal of early 20th<\/sup> century Ireland as some sort of prelapsarian \u201cHeaven\u201d (per its protagonists\u2019 proclamation) has analogy to the \u201cbackward[ness]\u201d of \u201cMake America Great Again,\u201d pining regressively for a mythical past in which [white] \u2018men were men,\u2019 and their authority was uncontested. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Quiet Man\u2019s <\/em>sexism comes through loud and clear, unavoidable in even the briefest of synopses. The film opens with the arrival of a strapping Irish-born \u201cYank,\u201d Sean Thornton (Wayne), who has \u201ccome home from America\u201d to the fictional village of Innisfree, circa 1920s. There, he intends to reclaim the cottage of his early childhood, about which his mother waxed poetic throughout his youth in America (Here we get her voiceover about the \u201clovely little house. And the roses!\u201d in Sean\u2019s memory.) Shortly after spotting the cottage, Sean spies Mary Kate (O\u2019Hara), herding sheep in an idyllic pasture. Just like the cottage, he determines that he will have her. Her status as object for consumption is, of course, reiterated by the male gaze of classical Hollywood cinema, not least of all in this first scene, in which Michaeleen Flynn compares Sean\u2019s immediate lust for her to \u201ca terrible thirst.\u201d The film thereafter unfolds as Sean\u2019s quest to quench that thirst: securing Mary Kate as his bride, away from her possessive brother, and then consummating their marriage, belatedly.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, Mary Kate is an object for consumption and, relatedly, an object of exchange between men. Per Irish custom, Sean learns that he must win Mary Kate\u2019s brother Will\u2019s permission for her hand, and that she comes complete with a \u00a3350 dowry. On one level, The Quiet Man<\/em> gently critiques this Irish patriarchal system as a relic of the past; as a modern American, Thornton thinks the matters of Will\u2019s permission and the dowry are absurd. But on another level, the film redeems it; after all, it is Mary Kate who insists <\/em>that Will pay her dowry, as a measure of her value. In fact, until Sean proves himself \u2018man enough\u2019 to fight for it, she withholds sex, denying Sean his rightful physical satisfaction and the procreation of heirs, causing him to be as \u201cill-tempered\u201d as the black steed he rides. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, the film moves towards a critique of what we call \u201ctoxic masculinity\u201d today, but ultimately reiterates the same, with gusto. The film\u2019s title refers to Sean\u2019s \u201cquiet and peace-loving nature,\u201d his pacifism born of a boxing match in which he accidentally killed his opponent. (Ford renders this accident in flashback, in a sequence so modern in its sensibilities that it belies the rest of the film as old-fashioned even in 1952.) Thornton refuses to fight Will, and won\u2019t be chided into it by accusations of cowardice, by his wife or anyone else. That is, until the film\u2019s end, when Thornton finally cracks, and confronts Will in a bare-fisted brawl, much to the delight of Mary Kate and the entire village, assembled to spectate and bet on the results. For much of its running time, The Quiet Man <\/em>suggests the righteousness of Thornton\u2019s \u201cturn-the-other-cheek\u201d philosophy, but this climactic fight sequence of a full ten minutes undoes all of that, with its gleeful energy, jiggy score, and slapstick comedy. Clearly, Ford\u2019s heart is in the fighting\u2014just as Nugent\u2019s quote hints at above. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, toxic masculinity seems to act as a sort of \u2018kink\u2019 for the lovers in this \u2018greatest\u2019 of \u2018love stories.\u2019 In a famous scene, Wayne yanks O\u2019Hara into his new cottage, as rough as the gale force winds outside, causing her to swoon first, slap second. (Flynn later reprimands Mary Kate for her \u201cfearful temper\u201d with Sean: \u201cHave the good manners not to hit the man until he\u2019s your husband and entitled to hit you back.\u201d) Mary Kate\u2019s tempestuousness–dialed up to an eleven in O\u2019Hara\u2019s over-the-top performance–is an expression of a certain independent-mindedness, sure, but refracted entirely through the male fantasy of the \u201cwildcat,\u201d implying male sexual satisfaction far more than female self-actualization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On their wedding night, peeved about her denied dowry, Mary Kate exiles Sean to a sleeping bag outside their bedroom. Enraged, Sean breaks down the locked door, and throws her violently on their new bed, breaking it. He stops just short of the marital rape the film suggests would be justified. Indeed, Mary Kate\u2019s priest, Father Lonergan tells her as much when she seeks his counsel: \u201cWoman! Ireland may be a poor country, God help us, but here a married man sleeps in a bed, and not in a bag!\u201d Again, as Frances Mulraney argues in \u201cIs The Quiet Man <\/em>Misogynistic and Outdated?,\u201d Ford\u2019s romanticizing of an era in which the Catholic Church controlled women\u2019s sexuality with shame and ostracization is troubling, to say the least. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sean and Mary Kate\u2019s lusty battle of wills ends with Sean\u2019s Battle with Will, which is precipitated by Mary Kate\u2019s attempt to leave him. Fed up, Sean drags Mary Kate off the train and then drags her five miles back to the village to confront her intransigent brother. And when I say \u201cdrag,\u201d I mean drag<\/em>. Sean violently pulls Mary Kate, stumbling to keep up and then falling, after which he drags her on the ground, all of which Ford treats as uproariously funny. A growing crowd follows and cheers, and Sean accepts a branch proffered by a village woman, who says, \u201cHere\u2019s a good stick to beat the lovely lady.\u201d Haha. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All of this is to say that, like pouring green dye into the Chicago River<\/a> and \u201cKiss Me I\u2019m Irish\u201d<\/a> t-shirts, The Quiet Man <\/em>is a St. Paddy\u2019s Day tradition that begs critical re-examination through a 21st<\/sup> century lens. Erin Go Bragh!<\/em> “The Quiet Man” is streaming on Hulu<\/a> and Paramount+<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/quiet-man-1024x576.jpg\")
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