Binging on John Ford: Part 3: St. Patrick's Day Irish Movies

Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne in
The Quiet Man.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, here's a continuation of my consideration of John Ford's cinematic oeuvre, focusing on his Gaelic efforts. The director had an affinity for his ancestral home and two of his Oscars were for pix set in the Emerald Isle. The Quiet Man (1952) is lushly beautiful, gorgeously capturing the colorful scenery. Winton Hoch rightfully also won an Oscar for his cinematography. However, it lost Best Picture to Cecil B. DeMille's extravagant and schmaltzy The Greatest Show on Earth, probably for CB's model train wreck (Steven Speilberg pays tribute to this sequence in his autobiographical pic The Fabelmans). But Ford was no slouch when it came to schmaltz. The New Yorker's critic Philip Hamburger sneered,  "If am to believe what I saw in John Ford's sentimental new film, The Quiet Man, practically everybody in Ireland is just as cute as a button....Mr. Ford's scenes of the Irish countryside are often breathtaking ... but the master who made The Informer appears to have fallen into a vat of treacle."

Wooden-faced John Wayne stars as an American former boxer returning to the land of his forebears to reclaim his inheritance. He falls in love with a high-spirited lassie (Maureen O'Hara) eager to get out from under the thumb of her bullying brother (Victor McLaglen). Wayne, like Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity, is reluctant to take up the boxing gloves because he killed an opponent in the ring. After much leprechaun charm from the likes of Barry Fitzgerald, Jack MacGowran, and Ward Bond (who was in almost every John Ford picture) and some quiet dignity from Mildred Natwick, the film culminates in an epic brawl between Wayne and McLaglen over O'Hara's dowry. The marathon punch-arama is accompanied by spritely Irish music as if the combatants were dancing a jig. Even the Irish term for an epic brawl--donnybrook--sounds more like a picnic than a celebration of violence. (The flop Broadway musical version of the film was called Donnybrook.) Once again, Ford defines masculinity as fisticuffs. The money doesn't really matter since Wayne throws it in the fire once he acquires it from McLaglen.

Victor McLaglen in
The Informer.

As always, Wayne shows little emotion and his passion for O'Hara is less important than his honor. I didn't believe he had any feelings for O'Hara. McLaglen on the other hand is a much better actor and displays his stubbornness and pride to greater effect. In Ford's other Irish Oscar winner, The Informer, McLaglen plays Gypo Nolan, a brutish drifter in 1922 Dublin who sells out his best friend to the occupying British for 20 pounds. The Informer (1935) is the dark night compared to the bright, beautiful day of The Quiet Man. It's a darker, more honest portrait than the sweet valentine to the quirky country folk of Quite Man. Shot in black and white and set in the gloomy urban streets far from the bucolic paradise of Man, Informer follows McLaglen as he drunkenly spends the reward money in bars and sporting houses before he is ultimately found out and executed by his comrades in the Irish Republican Army. Ford's shots and camera angles created a claustrophobic world as the noose of guilt tightens around Gypo--similar to the dark nightmare of the later Fugitive (1947). McLaglen won Best Actor for his fierce child-like Gypo, much more complex than any of Wayne's stiff-upper-lip heroes. Donald Meek, who would later stand out in Ford's Stagecoach, is amazingly detailed and real as a timid tailor wrongfully accused of Gypo's crime. The two Hollywood-ish young lovers (the dead man's sister and the local leader of the IRA) are even stiffer than Wayne.

Ford's did not finish his final Irish film, Young Cassidy (1965), a biography of playwright Sean O'Casey, played by hairy-chested, two-fisted brawler Rod Taylor. The legendary director took sick two weeks into production and was replaced by Jack Cardiff. In addition to Taylor's magnificent chest, we get a glimpse of Julie Christie, Flora Robson, Maggie Smith, Dame Edith Evans, Sir Michael Redgrave, Sian Philips, Jack MacGowran (again) and Donal Donnelly.