John Ford’s Irish holiday is a picture-book fantasy and knows it, and for most of its 129 minutes the fantasy is good company. Maureen O’Hara gives it a spine; Barry Fitzgerald’s whiskey jokes and one ugly late scene take some of it away.
John Ford made The Quiet Man about the Ireland his people came from, and he made it as a holiday from the Westerns he is known for. From a story by Maurice Walsh, it follows an American who comes back to the village of his birth, buys a cottage, and sets about marrying the woman he saw on his first afternoon. Everyone he meets is a type: the matchmaker, the priest, the bully, the widow. Ford does not mind, and for most of 129 minutes neither did we. It is a good film, warm and slow and green, and it has one scene in it that has aged badly.
Winton Hoch shot it in Technicolor, on location, and the colour is the first reason to see it. The fields are the green of a painted sign, the sky comes and goes behind heavy cloud, and the cottage sits at the end of a lane with a mountain behind it. Ford holds his wide shots longer than a comedy usually allows, and lets people walk into them and out again. The first sight of Mary Kate, red hair in a field of sheep with Thornton staring from the cart, is the shot the film is remembered for, and we understood why the instant it happened: it stopped us the way it stops him. Victor Young’s score is fiddles and slow airs, laid on with a shovel, and Hoch’s pictures can take it.
Maureen O’Hara is the second reason. Mary Kate wants Thornton and says so, wants her dowry and says so, and will not keep house in a home she has not furnished herself. O’Hara plays her at full volume, chin up, and Frank S. Nugent’s screenplay gives her the best lines in it. Wayne, for once, is the quiet one. He plays Thornton as a big man who has decided to say as little as possible, and it suits him. There is a courtship scene in a churchyard in the rain, the two of them soaked through and grinning, that is as close as Ford ever got to filming desire, and it is closer than we expected.
Victor McLaglen’s Red Will Danaher is a bully with a great deal of noise, and McLaglen plays him as a man who would be startled to learn anyone was afraid of him. Ward Bond’s Father Lonergan, who tells us the story, would rather be fishing and mostly is. Mildred Natwick’s widow is dry and watchful and given too little to do. Then there is Barry Fitzgerald, whose matchmaker is a small drunk man with a pipe, a pony and a running commentary. We laughed at him the first three times. After that we started counting.
The Ireland here is a picture book. Nobody works, everybody drinks, the train is late by hours and the two clergymen are the best of friends. The village is played as stage Irish and the accents wander. Jack Murray’s editing is loose; the horse race on the beach runs on past the point where we knew who would win, and the film as a whole could lose a quarter of an hour. Adele Palmer’s costumes are the place where the picture book pays its way: Thornton in a flat cap and tweed bought to fit in, and not fitting in, and Mary Kate in colours chosen for Hoch’s camera.
And there is the scene near the end, which we will not describe, in which Thornton handles his wife in a way the whole village turns out to cheer. It is played for laughs and got none from us. We winced, and kept wincing, because Ford plainly thinks it is the best joke he has. The one notice from the film’s own year that took against it complained of treacle. That is the wrong complaint. The sweetness is fine; it is that scene.
Set against Ford’s own work, this is his lightest film and, by most accounts, one of his most personal. It has none of the weight of Stagecoach or The Grapes of Wrath, and it does not want any. Watch it on a wet Sunday afternoon with the heating on, and be ready to look away once. The U certificate is accurate about the language and the blood. It is silent about that one scene.
