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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."
