The Quiet Man

With today being St. Patrick's Day, it's unsurprising that TCM is running a bunch of Irish-themed movies. Among them is The Quiet Man at 8:00 PM. Not having blogged about it before, I recently watched it. Interestingly, the recording was from TCM, last St. Patrick's Day at 8:00 PM.

John Wayne plays Sean Thornton, who shows up on the train in the small Irish town of Castletown. He asks the people at the train station the way to Inisfree, but they all have the gift of gab and can't be bothered to give him accurate directions to Inisfree. Thornton, it turns out, is American, and his family came from Inisfree before emigrating to the US, specifically Pittsburgh and the steel mills there. Dad died young and Sean heard all the doe-eyed memories from Mom about Ireland, so Sean wanted to come back and find the old family farm.

The place is still there, more or less, although it's not exactly in the best condition, since it hasn't been used in a while. It's now owned by the widow Tillane (Mildred Natwick), who, as with Tonight's the Night that I mentioned a few weeks back, seems to own a lot around Inisfree. She may be willing to sell that bit of land, but there's a catch. Local "squire" Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen) also wants to buy it.

A bidding war ensues, with Thornton winning. Having met Will, he also meets Will's spinster sister Mary Kate (Maureen O'Hara). These characters being played by John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, you know that they're going to fall in love. But again, there's a problem. In the traditional Irish society of the 1920s when the movie is set, her family has to approve of the marriage and pay the dowry. Her parents having died, Will is the patriarch of the family, and being pissed off at Sean, refuses.

So local schemer Michaeleen Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald, playing the same sort of irritating schemer he played in Tonight's the Night) decides to start intimating that the widow Tillane might be interested in marrying Will if there's no Mary Kate around to interfere with their happiness. With that, Will approves of Mary Kate's marriage to Sean. But he finds out about the deception at the reception, since nobody bothered to inform Tillane about it. Will refuses to pay the dowry, and Mary Kate refuses to perform her wifely duties because an undowried wife would apparently be a scandalous thing.

To win back the dowry, Sean is going to have to fight Will, literally. Sean, however, is reluctant to do this because of his past in Pittsburgh. He was a boxer, but as with Killer McCoy, he accidentally killed a man in the ring. He retired from boxing, and understandably doesn't want to fight again. But since this is the only way to win the dowry and happiness with Mary Kate, he eventually does it....

There's actually a good story in The Quiet Man, and there's gorgeous cinematography. But all of the parts that portray director John Ford's doe-eyed view of Ireland makes the movie a bit of a slog at times. Barry Fitzgerald's character is as annoying as ever, while the music, which may appeal to some people, didn't appeal to me. John Wayne is John Wayne here, but O'Hara and Natwick both give good performances.

A lot of people will like The Quiet Man more than I did, so I'd say it's definitely worth a watch. It's also available on DVD.