Worthwhile Movie #23 - The Quiet Man (1952)

BBC period dramas and classic black-and-white films are my entertainment of choice, but it has taken me a few years to learn to appreciate John Wayne. I thought he was good in The Searchers and okay in 3 Godfathers. The first hint that I had of his charisma and charm was in Stagecoach, but the other Wayne movies I’ve watched seemed like run-of-the-mill westerns.

When Anthony Esolen featured The Quiet Man as his film-of-the-week (Substack newsletter), I decided to give Wayne another try. I had seen the movie many years ago and thought it a pleasant bit of romantic fluff, but Esolen gave me eyes to look at it in a new way. He said that the movie is actually about quietness. 

He writes, Prizefighter 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. So Sean will never fight again, but instead moves back to the old family homestead in a village in Ireland, to farm and pick up the rest of his life, as a peaceful 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.

In addition to the excellent acting by both Wayne (playing Sean Thornton), Maureen O’Hara (playing Mary Kate Danaher) and the rest of the cast, the scenery is gorgeous and John Ford’s filming is stunning. Mary Kate and Sean fall in love, but his refusal to fight for something that she believes to be her right, gets their relationship off to a rocky start.

Esolen concludes his essay, 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. 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 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? 

The only free version of the film is a video tape transfer at Internet Archive. If you watch the movie, you will greatly appreciate reading this article about the film AFTER you view it. I loved it, but I'm glad I didn't read it first because of all the spoilers.

Blessings,