VI

THE QUIET MAN AND THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

Previous page: Barry Fitzgerald as Shaughraun; Maureen O’Hara as Mary Kate Danaher, in The Quiet Man, 1952. (Lilly Library)

 

 

On Saturday morning, 23 March 1935, Aideen O’Connor was in rare good form. She wrote her father from Hotel Sir Francis Drake in San Francisco, the next stop on the Abbey tour after five days in Hollywood.

We played Juno last night and the critics have just gone crazy in this morning’s papers … By the way, they seem to consider me good-looking in this city, all the critics have mentioned me as being ‘pretty’, or ‘lovely’. One even said, ‘Aideen O’Connor looks as though she might have come out of a painting,’ etc. It will be funny to go home and settle down as the least good looking of the family.1

Since it was her father she was addressing, the Shipping Master of Dublin Port, Aideen played down the adoration of actors as just craziness. To her sisters Eileen and Maeve, however, she showed a different side of herself. She could not hide her delight, or fail to tell all about her giddy whirl through the house of fame, with a purse full of cash, changing as the days went by from her afternoon frock to her dinner frock and finally getting into her evening frock.

One shopping spree on Wilshire Boulevard was worth a whole paragraph: One day in Hollywood, Frolie, Maureen O’Sullivan, and I went shopping in Bullock’s, Wilshire, the rendezvous of all the stars. I bought some lovely beach things, a pair of white shorts with a blue strip down the sides. The ‘top’ consists of a blue handkerchief with white anchors on it, which goes around the neck and ties at the back … cool, that! I also got a beret in white rubber, and white rubber shoes. Then I got a glorious wool bathing suit in royal blue and beige for myself, a lighter blue one for you and a reddish mixture for Maeve. That left me financially embarrassed for the rest of the week! But you’ve yours … You simply say, ‘swim suits’ – it’s the thing in Hollywood! I also bought the loveliest stockings in Hollywood! We had lunch with Maureen [O’Sullivan] and of course were photographed …

She was chuffed by all her encounters with the Hollywood Irish and other screen personalities:

Una O’Connor has a movie camera and she took at least ten rolls of me doing different things. She’s a pet, and I got awfully fond of her. Wait till you see the lovely jade bracelet and dress clip she gave me …

Dudley and Mrs Digges are a pair of dotes too. Everyone likes Una, Dudley, and Mary [Digges].

Joe Kerrigan is a scream. You just can’t stop laughing at him …

Maureen [O’Sullivan] was rather shy at first, but she and Frolie and I have become great friends. She is not a bit spoiled and doesn’t like Hollywood much. Her fiancée, John Farrow, is a darling. He reminds me of John Coughlan … talks just like him, and behaves in the same crazy way. He and Maureen are crazy about each other. I think they will be able to get a dispensation all right [Farrow was divorced]. Maureen has a glorious engagement ring.

Victor McLaglen is quiet and refined. He loved our plays and was there every night. He asked Frolie and me out to play tennis with his children, but we weren’t able to go.

Pat O’Brien and his wife are as jolly as possible. They have a nine month old baby and are daft about it.

Ralph Bellamy is so good-looking that when I was introduced to him, I just gaped in a half-witted way. He has bright golden hair that waves adorably, huge blue eyes, a marvellous smile, perfect teeth, and a fascinating voice. He’s the best looking thing in men I’ve ever seen.

He and Dudley [Digges] and Joe [Kerrigan] and Maureen [O’Sullivan] all played in the crowd scenes in Playboy with us. Such fun! The stars got more of a kick out of it than out of anything since they had come to Hollywood.

Elissa Landi is very charming and quiet. She is not nearly so pretty off screen as on.

Edward G. Robinson and I had a long discussion on James Stephens’s poetry, and whether The Crock of Gold could be dramatised. Anything less like a gangster I never saw. His wife talked to me about her baby boy, likewise did Mrs Pat O’Brien about her baby daughter, Mavourneen.

Impulsively girlish, uninhibited, intelligent and scatty, the letter goes on for several more pages, offering younger sister Maeve advice about premenstrual cramps (Aideen was given drugs for them in Los Angeles but they made her sleepy), chatting about a Chicago photographer who while snapping her portrait fell in love with her, and providing more details about her romance with Bob, a divorced man – he was planning to come to the Dublin Horse Show in August (this was before the start of Aideen’s affair with Arthur Shields).

From Molly Allgood’s Pegeen Mike to Sara Allgood’s Juno, and from Ria Mooney’s Rosie to Maureen O’Hara’s Mary Kate Danaher, arguments continued about the nature of the Irish woman. What was she really like? To the minds of patriots, she had to be represented as modest, chaste, noble and obedient, a lovely embodiment of family, home and nation. Irish women of the period, although not culturally silent, did not prominently step forward in such debates to say that they were nothing of the kind. Indeed, before the publication of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (2003), it was hard to locate instances from 1900 to 1960 in which the free-spirited, uncensored and unpremeditated words of Irish women could be read, although James Joyce invented some plausible and provocative reveries for Molly Bloom.

But Aideen O’Connor’s letter to her family of 23 March 1935 has another value too. It conveys the excitement not just of Aideen for Hollywood, but of Hollywood for the Abbey Theatre players. Stars of Irish birth like Dudley Digges, Joe Kerrigan (Abbey veterans themselves) and Maureen O’Sullivan, those of Irish descent like John Farrow, Pat O’Brien and Ralph Bellamy, and those of no Irish descent at all, but with an interest in Irish literature, like Joan Crawford, Heather Angel, Victor McLaglen and Edward G. Robinson, were all swept up in enthusiasm for the revivals of the classics of the Irish stage, especially The Playboy of the Western World, performed on 9 March 1935.2 The happy hilarity of the film actors going on stage in the crowd scenes of that play is easy to picture. What a lark for them to be able to join in with seasoned performers like Arthur Shields as Christy Mahon, Barry Fitzgerald as Michael James and Eileen Crowe as Pegeen Mike, professionals who had all done this play many times already, and were free and at ease in Synge’s fantastical language and knew how to get the most of the plot’s breathtaking turnabouts. It was like a group of international concert artists joining in a rollicking ‘session’ with famous traditional musicians in a country pub – a great night’s fun!

2

That same week in Hollywood was also the week when John Ford gave his banquet for the Abbey players on the set of The Informer, and conceived his plan for a series of Irish films starring the Abbey actors: first The Plough and the Stars, then Juno and the Paycock and The Quiet Man.3

This last piece was a short story by Maurice Walsh that first appeared in the 11 February 1933 issue of The Saturday Evening Post and was expanded for publication in a volume of interrelated tales, Green Rushes, published in 1935. On 25 February 1936, while The Plough and the Stars was still in development, Ford bought the film rights to the story.4 But because The Plough turned out to be a financial failure for RKO, there was no chance of that company taking up an option on The Quiet Man. In 1937 Ford told the young Irish journalist Michael Morris (Lord Killanin of Spiddal) that he still meant to make a film of ‘The Quiet Man’ from Green Rushes.5 By 1939 Ford evidently had a producer in mind, because in March of that year, after a spree in New York with Ford, Liam O’Flaherty remarked on the plan to make The Quiet Man in Ireland.6 O’Flaherty hinted that a movie about the IRA would not at the time be popular in England, ‘owing to the recent activities of “the boys”’ – a reference to the current IRA bombing campaign on English soil, a renewed protest against the 1920 partition of the country into the twenty-six-county Free State and the six-county Northern Ireland.

But was The Quiet Man necessarily going to be a film about the IRA? In Walsh’s story the ‘quiet man’ is Paddy Bawn Enright, a smallish fellow (obviously not the shape of John Wayne, who plays the character in the movie). He had returned around 1920 to Kerry from America where for fifteen years he had been working in steel mills and, under the name Tiger Enright, boxing professionally in the welterweight class. He just wanted to settle down quietly in the Enright family’s hillside cottage, but it had been grabbed by a land-hungry farmer, Red Will O’Danaher, a huge figure of a man, and famously short-tempered (‘O’Danaher’ became ‘Danaher’ in the film). Rather than fight for his rights, Paddy Bawn Enright quietly accepted the situation, and paid to regain the cottage from O’Danaher. In consequence, he was held in contempt by his neighbours.

Prior to the beginning of the tale, and in episodes dramatized by the earlier stories from Green Rushes, Enright had been drawn secretly into service with a flying column of the IRA in its war against the Black and Tans. One of its members was a former student for the priesthood, a ‘lean, grave man’ named Mickeen Oge Flynn (obviously nothing like Barry Fitzgerald, who plays that part in the movie). Another Volunteer, Hugh Forbes, proved himself a military commander of genius.

The story proper begins once the war is over and the land is at peace. Paddy falls in love with a red-haired woman he sees at church, Ellen Rose O’Danaher, sister of Red Will. However, Red Will does not allow suitors near his sister; she is useful as a house servant. Once a wealthy neighbour woman becomes a widow, the land-hungry O’Danaher proposes, but she will not make a match so long as Ellen Rose remains in the O’Danaher house. Red Will decides to dispose of his sister by marriage to Paddy Bawn Enright, and he puts up a £100-dowry, provided there’s a good harvest and he has spare cash at the time of the wedding.

Paddy knows that Ellen Rose does not love him, but he hopes when they are married she will come to do so. After the wedding he buys her a horse and trap, hires a serving-maid to help with the housework, and chats to her long hours by their fireside about his life in America. Gradually, she does get to like him, and even love him, but it needles her that Red Will has never paid the hundred pounds, her ‘fortune’. So though he himself sets no store on the money and simply wants peace and quiet, Paddy Bawn Enright asks Red Will for the dowry, and, refused, asks again. The wealthy widow had by then married another, and Red Will was not happy with his bargain. Forced to ask a third time, ‘Go to hell out o’ that!’ and a hard shove in the public market is all the answer Paddy Bawn Enright gets. To the dismay of onlookers eager for a showdown, once again he does not fight back. He and his wife quarrel, with him saying that maybe with all her care about money, she’s just a Danaher after all, and she saying, placing her hand under her breast, ‘I am a Danaher. It is a great pity that the father of this, my son, is an Enright coward.’7 That was the first Paddy Bawn Enright knew he was going to be a father, and this news arrived with the information that his wife had lost all love and respect for him.

Husband and wife go home together to a sad house. During a sleepless night Paddy realizes that he was going to have ‘to do a thing so final and decisive that never again could it be questioned’. The next morning he asks Ellen Rose if she will come with him to see Red Will, and they walk together to the field where O’Danaher is threshing corn with his men. Once the brother flatly refuses to hand over the promised dowry, Paddy springs his surprise:

‘Right. That breaks all bargains.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you keep your hundred pounds, you keep your sister.’8

But the public return of his sister without her virginity, and pregnant, puts Red Will in a spot. Watched by forty men, he decides to pretend that he was only joking with the little Yank, and now will hand over the dirty money, and give him a beating to boot. In two minutes O’Danaher is back with the banknotes, and he thrusts them into Paddy’s hand with a curse and a threat. Paddy turns, and walks toward the threshing machine. Ellen Rose, anticipating him, throws open the firebox door, and he pitches the crumpled bills into the blazes.

With a cry of ‘My money, my good money!’ Red Will comes running to batter Paddy Enright. At last there is the long-awaited fight in the field, followed blow by blow by forty onlookers, with Mickeen Oge Flynn taking bets on the outcome. His own money is on Paddy Bawn Enright, because he knows about his past in the ring as Tiger Enright. In the clinch Enright proves unhittable, while O’Danaher is defenceless against the array of quick punches from the smaller man. For five minutes he gives it to O’Danaher. Eight times, Red Will is knocked down, and eight times he comes back for more, until a combination of a left below the breastbone and a right uppercut to the jaw lifts O’Danaher up off his feet, and he falls flat, out cold. Ellen Rose, satisfied at last, declares of her husband, ‘Mother o’ God! The trouble I had to make a man of him!’ Mickeen Oge corrects her: ‘God Almighty did that for him before you were born!’9

3

It seems that at one time John Ford fancied making much of the involvement of the man from America in an IRA flying column. Ford himself had been to Ireland in early December 1921, at the very end of the Anglo-Irish war, and he had seen the cottage of his kinfolk in Spiddal left in ashes by the Black and Tans. He liked to fantasize that he had had been involved in the struggle. It was probably in 1929 that he got to know Ernie O’Malley, a head organizer of IRA flying columns; in that year O’Malley was in Hollywood raising money for the Fianna Fáil party. Ford later hired O’Malley as advisor on the set of The Quiet Man, and at one time considered having him make an appearance on screen.10 Liam O’Flaherty had done service with the IRA too, and that won him great favour with Ford.

But fundamentally, ‘The Quiet Man’ as a short story does not feature either the War of Independence or the Civil War. It begins after war has ended, and concerns Irishmen fighting not with Englishmen but with each other over land and a woman. The essential elements of its plot are the return of a man from America seeking a peaceful life, a love story with a proud red-haired woman, a point of honour connected with the dowry system, and a fist fight at the end. Leave out any one of those elements, and you do not have The Quiet Man; put in action about the flying columns, and you strain the unity of the tale.

But John Ford would have a lot of time to consider what the real story of The Quiet Man ought to be. Six months after Liam O’Flaherty asked him if he was coming to Ireland to film it on location, World War II broke out.

4

If there is anything at all to the auteur theory of film – that great movies are the self-expression of great directors – then The Quiet Man ought to register the effect of World War II upon John Ford. The war was the most significant experience in his life. Already in the Naval Reserve, he enlisted for active duty on 11 September 1941, well before the December attack on Pearl Harbor. Serving in Washington DC as a commander in the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), Ford recruited many from his usual crew of photographers, soundmen, editors and special-effects experts to work under him in the Field Photographic Unit. Their brief was to develop the potential of film for training, propaganda, documentation of combat, and reconnaissance.11

Ford’s military service record is unusual. He shot with a camera and not with a rifle, but there cannot have been many servicemen who were wounded in action at the Battle of Midway (4 June 1942),12 accompanied the tank invasion of North Africa (16 November 1942),13 set up operations in Argentina and Brazil (April–May 1943), covered the fields of operation in Southeast Asia, travelled secretly behind Japanese lines into China ([?] November 1943 to 14 January 1944),14 and went ashore in the D-Day invasion (29 July–4 August 1944 at Grandcamp Les Bains).15 He was first wounded in the Battle of Midway while shooting film of the dive-bomb attack of Japanese zeros from the ‘top of the power house, a hot place to be during an air raid’, as his commanding officer noted.16 Again and again Ford put his life at risk when he could have remained behind the lines. For having done so, he wanted the medals and ribbons, and when he got them he wore them unblushingly.

Ford had friends, and the sons of friends, who were killed among the three hundred men under his command. Twelve are memorialized at the Field Photo Farm he set up for veterans after the war. He saw men and women of all backgrounds thrown together in a common war effort, to sink or swim by their unity.

As a top man in the intelligence service, Ford was briefed not just about the enemy, but about America too. Upon Ford’s request, Elmo Roper (of ‘Roper Polls’) provided a summary of studies on possible chinks in ‘America’s moral armour’. A main problem, Roper reported, was the ‘northern negro’: ‘he feels discriminated against’, as indeed he was.17 Another problem was anti-Semitism. ‘Too many people’ thought Hitler had to be ‘licked’ but that he was not all wrong about the Jews. In the Midwest, people had little sympathy for Britain, and thought the British ought to carry more of the burden of war than they already did, though their country had been bombed to bits. Finally, a majority did not believe that the Soviet Union could be trusted as an ally, especially once war had ended. Ford himself had had many of these attitudes that Roper counted as chinks in America’s moral armour, but he probably had not before thought of them in that light. A strong nation, it was implied, was a multi-ethnic nation with tolerance and equality at home, and respect for other nations who were not openly at war with the United States.

These profound experiences mattered to Ford’s sense of himself as both an American and an Irishman. A Quiet Man after the war was not likely to be the same as a Quiet Man made before it.

5

In October 1944, upon leaving active military service, Ford visited the set of The Spanish Main, a swashbuckler directed by Frank Borzage and starring Maureen O’Hara. Ford called Borzage over to witness a conversation: ‘Maureen, I am going to make a movie in Ireland called The Quiet Man, and I would like you to play the female lead.’ Ever since they had worked together on How Green Was My Valley (1941), Ford had kept O’Hara in mind for this project.18

But Ford would make a lot of other movies before he made The Quiet Man with Maureen O’Hara in the female lead:

1945 They Were Expendable

1946 My Darling Clementine

1947 The Fugitive

1948 Fort Apache

1948 Three Godfathers

1949 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

1950 When Willie Comes Marching Home

1950 Wagon Master

1950 Rio Grande

1951 This is Korea!

1952 The Quiet Man 

Some of the continuing delay in making The Quiet Man had to do with the difficulty encountered by Merian Cooper, Ford’s partner in Argosy Pictures, in finding money for a production in Ireland. It would have been easier, no doubt, had The Fugitive, made in Mexico, not been such a failure. That gave a bad name to Ford’s pet notions and to filming on location with native actors.

Ford was not wasting his talent in directing the other movies. My Darling Clementine, made with Twentieth Century Fox under Darryl Zanuck, and the cavalry trilogy – Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande – made with Argosy Pictures, are some of the best Westerns of all time.

Fundamentally, the films of the Cavalry trilogy are war movies, but in a form acceptable to a movie-going public tired of propaganda films about World War II servicemen.19 Because of this displacement, they are more philosophically broad in their representation of life and also take a longer view historically than movies about the wars against the Germans and the Japanese. While patriotic, they are not first and foremost American propaganda. They take it upon themselves to examine critically the formation of the nation. Fundamental to all of them is that the Indian wars are a backdraft of the Civil War. Some of the soldiers in the cavalry fought for the South, others were Yankees, and now they must unite to advance the interests of a single nation. Yet the ‘enemy’ are the original inhabitants of the land. It is a fraught situation and now and then is recognized to be so.

If one sees the movies allegorically, a cavalry outpost in the west does duty for service abroad in World War II, and the Indians in a complicated way stand in for the foreign enemy, while also being sometimes acknowledged as natives in their own land – people of another language, and with their own customs, wishing to defend their buffalo-hunting way of life against invaders. The comparable desires of Japanese people to defend their rice-growing, samurai-honouring way of life, or the Germans their steel-smelting, music-making way of life, are not explicitly evoked, but a degree of cultural doubt and a momentary question over ethnocentrism are indicated by the representation of native Americans in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache. Fundamental to the ‘cavalry trilogy’ is the case of General Custer, personification of bloody-minded  aggression and idealistic nationalism.

The questions that underlie the plots (one could hardly say the questions are ‘raised’) are anything but simple or easy, nor are the implied answers. What is civilization and what savagery? How can one weigh up the stakes, when common security (‘freedom’) is bought at the cost of individual liberty? How do people cope with their part in the tribal and global murder of others, and go on to propagate their individual futures? How do women manage to get along with men who have done such things in war, and have thrilled in the doing of them? The allusions to Custer in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache do not directly evoke Hitler, but nonetheless they force one to consider a basic problem of leadership, whether elected or military: what if the leader is wholly in the wrong, so that doing one’s duty makes one an evildoer?

Overall Ford gave a picture of the military that was not a nightmare of moral contradictions. His picture is instead sentimental, full of affection for the military as a way of life and an ethical way of life. The deep, sorrowful, mutually reliant friendships between officers, the almost wifely loyalty of aides to their commanding officers among the career veterans, the fatherly care of the officers for the boys who enlisted, and the pride among the rank-and-file in being led – all this is depicted as the best life has for the giving. It may be that the military offers ‘a life of suffering and hardship, an uncompromising devotion to your oath and your duty’ (as Lt. Col. Yorke tells his son in Rio Grande), but it is still the best life. Duty stands unquestioned at the top of the scale of human virtues.

Curiously, Ford mixes family life and military life in each of the films, although the anomaly of women and children on an imperilled outpost has to be explained away again and again. In Fort Apache, widower Lt. Col. Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) brings his daughter (Shirley Temple) with him when assigned to command of the outpost, and she falls in love with Sgt. O’Rourke’s son – unworthy on two counts in Thursday’s view: Irish and the child of a mere enlisted man. A plot about free choice in marriage then runs side-by-side with the story of a Custer-like general who leads his men into a massacre. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon also has a romantic plot involving the younger generation within the frame tale of an Indian rebellion and senior officers at Fort Stark, who this time do not make Custer’s mistake.

6

Rio Grande is a particularly interesting case, because it was envisioned as a sort of diptych with The Quiet Man and a down-payment on it. John Wayne at the time was under a seven-year contract at Republic Pictures, mostly a producer of B-movies. He tempted its owner, Herb Yates (frightened by the new competition from television), with the opportunity of making an A-list movie directed by Duke’s pal John Ford. All ‘old man’ Yates had to do was give Ford money for The Quiet Man. The producer, a Scots Presbyterian and basic businessman, suspected that Ford’s pet project was, like The Informer or, worse, The Fugitive, another ‘phoney art-house movie’.20 So he insisted Ford first make a successful cowboy movie with the ‘same director, same producer, same cast and crew, same everybody.’21 Thus, Yates could cut overheads, and pay for The Quiet Man.

While Ford and Merian Cooper directed and produced both movies, the cast and crew for Rio Grande and The Quiet Man are not in fact identical. James K. McGuinness (a right-wing Irish-American and old friend of Ford’s) wrote the Western; Frank Nugent did the script for the Irish film. Bert Glennon photographed Rio Grande in black and white; Winton Hoch was the Oscar-winning cinematographer for the Technicolour Quiet Man.

But the principals for both movies were John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, and they were supported in each by Victor McLaglen. The two stars play characters older than their real age in the first film, and younger in the second. In the first, they have been married for over sixteen years, have a son, and are long since separated; in the second, they are a courting couple who marry and then work out their differences. In the first, the embers of the couple’s old passion, though clearly still alive, are buried under ash, and never burst visibly again into flame; in the second, their desires are licking flames from their first sight of one another. So ‘same cast, same crew, same everybody’ superficially seems to have produced nothing except proof that two talented actors can represent a wide variety of individualities.

A basic motif of Rio Grande is children. In the opening scene of the movie, a detail of cavalry is returning to base after a police expedition among hostile Apaches. Children within the fort race for the gates to see their fathers arrive, as if they are simply coming home after a day’s work or an out-of-town business trip. It is not in their minds that their dads might come back wounded, or dead. The situation is different for the row of wives who wordlessly watch the men file into the fort. The delight of those catching first sight of their fathers and husbands on horseback, tired and dusty (all but those four troopers lost in action) tells a tale. Some Apache prisoners have been taken, and they are put with others in a detention centre. The end of the movie will repeat the scene of the soldiers’ return to the fort, but this time Maureen O’Hara will have joined the waiting wives, as she searches the file of tired troops for the faces of her son and her husband.

There is a great deal of ‘back story’ in the plot of Rio Grande. The past emerges bit by bit in the present, as the central characters try to heal old wounds from the time of the Civil War. Kirby Yorke (John Wayne) is a lieutenant colonel in the 7th Cavalry, serving under Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan (1831–88), and based near the Mexican border. The area has been harassed by raids of Apaches, who escape to sanctuaries across the Rio Grande. Colonel Yorke has requisitioned 180 additional troopers to handle the problem. Instead, he gets eighteen, and one of them is his teenage son, Jeff, who, lying about his age, has enlisted after being expelled from West Point for failing mathematics. York has not seen his son since 1864, fifteen years earlier. In that year General Sheridan introduced tactics of ‘total war’ in the Shenandoah valley campaign, burning out the crops and destroying the farms of the confederacy. A Yankee platoon under Kirby Yorke’s command carried out an order to burn down the plantation home of his wife Kathleen’s family, and she has not lived with him since.

Jeff is called to a short meeting in his father’s tent, and gruffly told that he will be treated with the same rough discipline as the other recruits. However, Kirby Yorke has a hard time hiding his fatherly concern, as the boy risks his neck learning horse-back stunts, and has to stand up for himself in fistfights with older troopers. Just as Jeff has proudly gotten his first black eye, Mrs Kathleen Yorke (Maureen O’Hara) arrives at the fort to buy out his commission and bring him home to school and safety. Kirby Yorke sees that his wife is still beautiful, and longs for her love, but he refuses to sign the release. Jeff does the same (he has to keep his word and prove himself), so Kathleen stays on in the fort to try to get her way. At dinner parties in Kirby’s tent, and listening to serenades of Irish songs by the regimental singers (‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’), the couple try to come to terms. At one point, Yorke admits he is tempted to agree that if she would sleep with him, he would let their son go, but decides he could not even then release Jeff; the boy has to grow up.

One night the Apaches raid the fort, shoot up the place, and free the captives from the stockade. Colonel Yorke decides it is time to send his wife along with the other troopers’ families out of harm’s way, and assigns Jeff to guard the caravan, supposedly safe duty.

General Sheridan finally gives Yorke secret permission to engage in the sort of total war that had brought victory in the Shenandoah valley. He is to lead the 7th Cavalry across the Rio Grande in pursuit of the Apaches, and wipe them out. If the mission fails, Sheridan will deny he gave the order and Yorke will be court-martialled, but Sheridan promises that the officers who try him will be picked from those who participated in the raid on the Shenandoah valley, men with experience of justifiable atrocity.

The caravan carrying Mrs Yorke and the other wives and children is raided by Apaches. She survives, but many of the children are taken captive across the Rio Grande, and one of the soldiers’ wives is raped and murdered. Trooper Tyree (Ben Johnson) followed the Apaches into Mexican territory, and learned that the children are being held in a village church. According to his reconnaissance, the Apaches have been drinking all day in a tribal festival, and are not prepared to defend themselves. Tyree volunteers to lead a commando party to break into the church and protect the children while Yorke attacks the village with the main force. Tyree selects Jeff to go with him, and Kirby Yorke, though his face shows worry, has to swallow that decision.

The manoeuvre is a success, the children are rescued, and the Apaches slaughtered, but Yorke takes an arrow in the chest. Returning to consciousness, he asks his son to pull it out. ‘Get it done, Johnny Reb,’ Tyree says to the hesitant youngster, and, in a weird piece of symbolism, Jeff dis-impales his father. In that moment, he becomes a man, his father becomes old, and the Civil War becomes history. When the cavalry return to the fort with the children, Kirby Yorke drawn along in a litter, Kathleen runs up, and, her heart evidently open to renewed love, takes his hand and paces along by his side. Father, mother and son are united once again.

Although both Colonel Yorke and General Sheridan are depicted as grave, dignified and honourable gentleman, they justify past war crimes and plan and execute new ones. These atrocities, it is acknowledged, have divided Yorke from Mrs Yorke, the North from the South in the Civil War, settlers from Indians, and Americans from Mexicans, but they are necessary to bring an end to conflict and save American lives. This is the same argument that was used to justify dropping the atom bomb on Japan, twice, just five years earlier.

It is sometimes said that the movie allegorically addresses an issue in the Korean War. Should not the United Nations’ forces pursue the Chinese armies – fighting in support of the North Koreans – across the Yalu River and into Red China, even at the risk of a wider war? In fact, the North Korean army did not invade the South until 25 June 1950, while Rio Grande was in its tenth day of filming in Utah. Chinese communist forces did not enter the fighting until 14 October, by which time the movie was completed. So the Korean War may have been on the minds of the movie-goers who first watched Rio Grande in late November 1950, but it cannot have been on Ford’s mind when making the movie, much less on that of James Warner Bellah, who published the story on which the movie is closely based in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947. The Cold War was hardly underway at that point; the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia occurred in February 1948. The movie is not therefore in any specific way a ‘Cold War Western’, but it is racist in its depiction of raping, murdering, child-abducting and tequila-drinking Apache and righteously nationalistic in its justification of total war.22 Indeed, the dehumanization of the Apache is a necessary preliminary to the justification of a strategy to extirpate them.23

Strangely enough, Rio Grande is more accurately conceived not as a Cold War movie but as a post-World War II, coming-home movie like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), only from a patriarchal and pro-war point of view.24 In the earlier movie war-wounded veterans return home to find their kids grown up and wives estranged by the passage of years; the soldiers have trouble reintegrating into civil society. In Rio Grande the wife and child of Colonel Yorke come to the military fort that is his home. There they have to be cured of their illusions and reintegrate with him and his soldiering way of life. Reality is his world – war on the heels of war, until the end of time to police the earth. His view, not theirs, is realism. Father knows best. They just have to learn to accept that fact. Although kind enough, Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke is too powerful and too damn sure he is right. An arrow in the breast makes him lovable again.

In addition to the humanizing wound, another element in the film draws the couple toward reconciliation, the element of music. After their first candlelit dinner together in the Colonel’s tent, Kirby and Kathleen Yorke are serenaded by the regimental singers. She is still stiff with fury at Kirby and his ‘arsonist’ aide, Quincannon (Victor McLaglen), whose hand it was that, under orders, set fire to her family home. The eight-man chorus sings ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’ with aching slowness:

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,

Across the ocean wild and wide,

To where your heart has ever been,

Since first you were my blushing bride.

The roses all have left your cheek,

I’ve watched them fade away and die;

Your voice is sad when e’er you speak,

And tears bedim your loving eyes.

Oh! I will take you back, Kathleen,

To where your heart will feel no pain,

And when the fields are fresh and green,

I’ll take you to your home again.

Kathleen Yorke melts and leans in toward her husband. Kirby stupidly apologizes that the song was not sung at his request, perceptibly disappointing Kathleen, and confirming the belief that ‘real’ males are clueless.25 A few bars later, she turns again toward him, he moves to return her look, she turns aside in embarrassment before their eyes can meet, and at last they both face the music once again, the possibility of an early reconciliation lost.

The importance of the song is not just that Mrs Yorke’s name is Kathleen, or that she might wish that Kirby would take her back to where her heart would feel no pain, or even that she would be relieved if he could at least acknowledge that she does feel pain. It is also that the song is always taken to be about Irish-American longing for the old country.26 Along with the song after their second dinner, ‘The Bold Fenian Men’ –

Some died on the glenside, some died near a stranger,

And wise men have told us that their cause was a failure.

They fought for old Ireland, and they never feared danger.

Glory O, Glory O, to the bold Fenian men

– it evokes the fact that Kirby and Kathleen are both Irish, as is Quincannon. General Sheridan is a Fenian good old boy too. All of them are Irish-Americans working in the new land to make America great, but not forgetting the roots that bind. The recognition of common ethnicity is a step toward overcoming personal differences.

In the final scene of the movie, music again does all the talking. With Colonel Kirby Yorke back on his feet, and himself, Kathleen and General Sheridan on the review stand for awards to the troops (Jeff Yorke gets one), the regimental singers give a rendition of ‘Dixie’, by order of General Sheridan. Kathleen twirls her parasol in pleasure, both at the tune and at the long-awaited acknowledgment of herself. That she was well worth it – a fact about which movie-goers can have had no doubt – was all left to Maureen O’Hara to embody. She had few lines and little to do to show it. In a movie that requires a woman to execute one long ‘climb down’, and to give up everything to a man and a man’s values, she never loses her pride, and it is hard to see exactly how she carries it off.

7

The making of A Quiet Man at long last in June and July 1951 was a family reunion and family vacation for Irish and Irish-American actors. John Wayne arrived at Shannon Airport with his wife Pilar and kids. Melinda, Michael, Patrick and Toni Wayne all show up in the scenes at the pony races on the strand. John Ford brought his son Patrick, who directed some second-unit photography, while his daughter Barbara stayed in Hollywood to edit the rushes. Her future husband Ken Curtis joined the cast in an uncredited part. Ford’s brother Eddie O’Fearna was a second assistant director; his brother Francis had a cameo role as old Dan Tobin with a long prop-room beard. Tobin’s daughter is played by Ford’s former girlfriend Mimi Doyle.27 Maureen O’Hara’s brothers Charles B. Fitzsimons and James Lilburn had parts as, respectively, IRA man Hugh Forbes and young Father Paul. Victor McLaglen’s son Andrew was ‘second assistant director’; the ‘first assistant director’ was Wingate Smith, Ford’s brother-in-law. Barry Fitzgerald – who got star billing and top pay along with Wayne and O’Hara – was joined in the cast by his brother Arthur Shields. So in the cast and crew of The Quiet Man, there were seven Fords, five Waynes, three Fitzsimons, two McLaglens and two Shields, as well as long-time members of the ‘John Ford Stock Company’ like Ward Bond and Mildred Natwick, who were the next thing to family.

Fitted out from head to toe in brand-new tweeds from O’Máille’s shop in Galway, they were all settled in to the finest hotel in Ireland, Ashford Castle (the hotel was a main reason for the choice of location). One can imagine the pleasure of its manager, Noel Huggard, in February when he received a letter reserving eleven twin-bedded rooms from 1 June 1951 to 1 September 1951, a major booking only to be enlarged by the time summer came.28

Ashford is a thirteenth-century Norman castle, to which a nineteenth-century French chateau was added by the Oranmore and Browne family, and Victorian gothic extensions by the Guinnesses later in the century. It is sited at the mouth of a river connecting Lough Mask to Lough Corrib, with some of the best trout and salmon fishing in Europe. Ward Bond tried his luck as an angler both on set as Father Lonergan, and off-set during his free time. In the local pubs of Cong village nearby, 18-year-old whiskey sold for a shilling a glass – fourteen cents in American money – and John Wayne sometimes took advantage of this.29 The landscaped ‘English garden’ around the castle (where one first sees Maureen O’Hara as Mary Kate herding a flock of sheep) had been converted to a golf course. This amenity was appreciated by Barry Fitzgerald, who relaxed with a round of golf. Arthur Shields wrote Christine, his five-year-old daughter, a message on a postcard depicting Ashford from the air: ‘Isn’t this a lovely-looking house? This is where we stay. It is on a river that flows between two lakes. Lots of big fish in the water and plenty of flowers and trees.’30 Plenty of trees is an anomaly in the west of Ireland. Shields wished Christine were there to enjoy Ashford’s loveliness and the gaiety of cast and crew.

Ashford Castle, Co. Mayo. The castle itself never appears in The Quiet Man, although the crew was lodged there and many scenes were filmed on the grounds.

Frank Nugent, the screenwriter, came along as well. Adjustments to the script continued up to and then into the period of filming. The complete history of the script of The Quiet Man is difficult to trace. A prose treatment was done by Richard Llewellyn (author of How Green Was My Valley). Bits of it that survive show that early scenes would depict ‘The Troubles’, with an IRA Flying Column battling the Black and Tans. An undated version by Nugent that evidently was written after 22 December 1950 and before 22 May 1951 also includes a brief early scene entitled ‘The Terror’. The hero (then named ‘Sean Burke’), having already married Danaher’s sister, but who has not consummated the marriage, goes out at night with an IRA column to defend villagers against Black and Tan terrorism.31 Armistice then occurs, a blacksmith puts away his rifle and takes out his fishing rod, and the rest of the story proceeds in peacetime.

A note in the script suggests that this treatment of ‘The Terror’ is abbreviated from an earlier version, as a result of ‘our lengthy discussion with Sean Nunan of External Affairs’. The writers were informed by this official that it was the wish of the Republic of Ireland that the film should have as little as possible to do with the Anglo-Irish war. Whether this was out of diplomatic sensitivity to Britain, the hope of warmer winds of tourism blowing from America, or some other reason, it is impossible to say.

In any event, not only were no pre-1921 war scenes shot, the film’s action was shifted to a vague time period well after peace had been established. As if this were not sufficient, the IRA characters are hilariously sanitised as apple-cheeked dandies in knee-breeches and tam-o-shanters. When one night Mickeleen O’Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald) says that he thinks he’ll go to a pub and meet up with his comrades to ‘talk a little treason’, it is implied – partly because Barry Fitzgerald, aka ‘Captain Boyle’, says it – that it will be all talk and harmless talk.32 The Quiet Man is not a war movie.

8

But it may be helpful to compare The Quiet Man to post-war, coming-home movies. In that way, if few others, it is like Rio Grande. One of the fundamental changes made in the plot of Walsh’s short story has to do with the motive of ‘the quiet man’ for refusing to fight Red Will Thornton for the dowry, when it means so much to his wife. Walsh simply stipulated with circular logic that the quiet man after his time in America wanted quiet and did not care about money. But if that were the case, why did he join the IRA soon after his return to Ireland? That he uses a machine gun in a surprise attack against British soldiers but has compunctions about fighting for his wife’s dowry does not make sense.

Ford and Nugent invented a new back-story in which Sean Thornton is in flight from a thing he did in America. He killed a man in a prize fight. That fills him with self-disgust, and especially disgust for any fighting done for money. That is why he will not fight Red Will for the £100.

True, he does not have such an aversion to money that he has given his own to charity. Mickeleen O’Flynn says to the IRA boys that Thornton is a millionaire, ‘like all the Yanks’ (a knowing joke by Ford). As a matter of fact, Thornton is indeed rich, at least relative to the villagers of Innisfree. He has a brand-new set of tweeds; he buys back the family cottage, ‘White O’ Morn’, from Widow Tillane for £1000. Having bought it, he comes into the village pub and offers to buy everyone a drink. He hires a crew to thatch his cottage. He gets himself a fine hunter, a big, dark steed. After his marriage, he buys his wife a pony and trap. The Yank throws his money around. Indeed, part of what is so infuriating to his wife is his attitude to her pittance – what’s a hundred pounds? He implies he has so much more as to make that amount nothing. Why bother with the brother? The Yank has so much money he cannot understand its social meaning.

Ford kept World War II out of The Quiet Man nearly as completely as he did the Irish War of Independence, yet there is one direct allusion to military service: Sean Thornton was known in the ring, the Reverend Playfair recollects, as Trooper Thornton. War service was, along with working in a Pittsburgh steel smelter, among those unmentionable ‘other things’ that Thornton says hardened him in the USA. Along with this slight ‘Trooper Thornton’ reference to the military, the fact that Sean Thornton is ‘coming home’ to Ireland traumatized by having killed a man, a decent man who had a wife and kids, makes The Quiet Man comparable to the sub-genre of post-war, coming-home movies.33

The Quiet Man is a diptych with Rio Grande by virtue of being, among ‘coming-home movies’, its opposite: it explores the anti-war position. Against the ethic of the most engaged, militarily aggressive and ethically vociferous nation, Ford is matching the ethic of a small nation with a policy of neutrality. Ireland would not fight even against Hitler, nor did Irish men enlist in World War II to the degree that they volunteered for World War I. The first film explores a politics of engagement; the second, of disengagement. In The Quiet Man, disengagement proves impossible for Sean Thornton, although the slow-paced, dreamy life of a country that forgot the war and was forgotten by Europe seems idyllic.

9

The Quiet Man is often taken to be an idealization of Ireland, even ridiculously so. That it is idealized is certainly true cinematographically. Although 1951 had a good summer, the best the people of Cong had seen in years, it was not good enough for the cinematographer, Winton Hoch. He photographed only when sunshine of Californian brightness broke out, so that the movie is made up of the best minutes of a fair season.

The Quiet Man also packs into its fictive little townland of Innisfree the sightseeing splendours of three counties. The production company was based, as mentioned, at Ashford Castle, but the film crew ranged around to all the beauty spots within a day’s drive: Yeats’s castle, the Tully strand, the Maumturk mountains, Ballyglunin station, the streets of Tuam – they were all magically made part of the immediate vicinity of Innisfree (Cong village). The Quiet Man became the ‘beautiful travelogue’ that Ford intended: turn one way, and you are in Mayo, another and there is Galway; a short stroll, and you are standing on the sea cliffs of Clare.

The movie leaves out Ashford Castle itself, but it frequently features the Castle’s mock-Gothic stone bridge and the artificial landscape of its ‘English garden’. The slopes and valleys and plantings of the parkland had been constructed between 1860 and 1890 by thousands of post-Famine workers, employed by Lord Ardilaun of the Guinesss family.34 Even the picturesque church is actually a decorative Protestant estate chapel that normally had at its door no such papist feature as a stoup of holy water (from which Sean Thornton cups a handful for Mary Kate to bless herself). The interior of the church in the movie, however, comes from the Catholic church of Cong, because Ford wanted to include on film its stained-glass masterpiece by Harry Clarke. The Ireland of The Quiet Man is an assembly, and a magnificent one.35

10

But Ford did not just idealize Ireland, he critiqued it. The critique, like the idealization, comes about through his practice of loading every rift with ore. Ford and Nugent drew into the tale by Maurice Walsh references to many Irish literary classics. ‘Innisfree’, the name of the townland, obviously alludes to Yeats’s most popular poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. Innis means ‘island’ in Irish, and the movie’s village is on the mainland, so the name does not make sense. It is apposite as a literary allusion. Like the speaker of Yeats’s poem, Sean Thornton was heartsick on the roadway and the pavements grey; he dreamed that he would arise and go to a small cabin. Indeed, Thornton not only dreamed of doing it, he bought the cabin.

‘To begin at the beginning,’ as Father Lonergan says, the movie first introduces, though she has no particular plot reason for being there, May Craig at the ‘Castletown’ railway station. May Craig was the Abbey’s most veteran actor, someone present at the beginning of the Irish Dramatic Revival, and on stage in the first production of The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. That is why she is there at the Castletown station.

Stepping off the newly arrived train, Sean Thornton (John Wayne) sparks off a complex little comedy just by asking the guard (Joseph O’Dea), ‘Can you tell me the way to Innisfree?’ Thornton gets an hilarious amount of useless help. O’Dea says, ‘Do you see that road over there?’ Yes. ‘Well, don’t take that one. It will do you no good at all.’ As the train guard quickly falls into a fight with the railway porter about Irish history, May Craig butts in with her offer of assistance. Her sister’s ‘third young one’ lives in Innisfree and will be only too glad to show Thornton the way. That’s great. ‘O, no, if she was here,’ which she is not.

The train driver is played by Eric Gorman (1882–1971), with the Abbey since 1909. He next steps to centre stage in the conversation, but then cannot get it out of his head that the Yank is not in the West of Ireland for the fishing. In his own tales of trout and salmon he has himself caught, ‘as long as my arm’ (he points with his right hand to the full length of his left arm, elbow to ring finger), he forgets all about Innisfree. The train porter joins in the melee, everyone talking at once, while the fireman watches closely. Finally, without a word, Mickeleen Oge Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald), arrives and walks off with Thornton’s cases to his horse and buggy.

This comedy of country confusion is a skilful pastiche of a play by Lady Gregory, with her signature combination of condescension to, and appreciation of, Irish country people. Spreading the News (1904) works in ways similar to the opening episode of The Quiet Man. Eric Gorman, May Craig and Joseph O’Dea were old hands at playing Lady Gregory’s one-acts; their performances in such plays were beloved by Abbey audiences and audiences across America during the Abbey’s tours.

‘Justified complaints about “American cultural imperialism”,’ Fintan O’Toole observes, ‘can sometimes miss the point that American mass culture may well contain buried elements of other cultures.’36 This Lady Gregory moment in The Quiet Man, of course, is hardly buried. It is a conscious tribute by John Ford, blazoned at the movie’s beginning, to her type of comedy and the players who brought it to life again and again over the previous forty years. The Quiet Man is full of ‘cover versions’ of Top Forty Hits of the Irish Revival.

The casting of Barry Fitzgerald as Mickeleen Oge Flynn manages to bring one of O’Casey’s characters into play, and enables the film to offer another ‘cover version’ of an old favourite, or a medley of such. The part of Mickeleen was expanded and diversified into a combination of jarvey, family friend, matchmaker, chaperone, bookie, veteran of the old IRA, secular priest and boxing referee. He even has different costumes for different roles. When going about his business as a shaughraun, he puts on a top hat and greatcoat like a character out of Boucicault.

Fitzgerald evokes Captain Boyle from Juno and the Paycock by means of his vocabulary. In one of the best lines in the movie (ad-libbed by Fitzgerald),37 Mickeleen, having carried the crib into the Thorntons’ bedroom following their wedding night, sees that the bed has been toppled and a corner of the mattress has dropped to the floor. Ford allows Fitzgerald plenty of time to silently take in the scene, and set the stage for his first judgment, which he addresses toward the viewer as if from the apron of a stage: ‘Impetuous!’ On further consideration of what he thinks must have been epic love-making, Mickeleen adds, ‘Homeric!’ The chief identifying feature of Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock is the utterance of the unexpectedly bookish polysyllable, an incongruous exactitude that is irresistibly comic.38

After Sean Thornton outbids Squire Danaher in the Widow Tillane’s parlour for ‘White O’ Morn’, Thornton proposes to Mary Kate Danaher, but the Squire, having lost to Sean Thornton a property he thought some day would be added to his own, will not hear of such a match. And Mary Kate could not, and would not, marry without her brother’s consent. The Yank finds her deference to her brother and rejection of himself outrageous. We see how angry and frustrated he is by the way he rides his hunter. As if he were an eighteenth-century Irish buck, he jumps gates, gallops through farmers’ fields, spurs on the horse, then, dragging hard on the reins, pulls it to a painful stop beside Mary Kate, before digging the spurs again into its wet flanks.

Faced with the spectacle of such public passion, the priest, the vicar, the vicar’s wife and Mickeleen agree that something must be done. They concoct a plot to change Danaher’s mind. The first part of the plot is to perpetrate a lie. They make out that Thornton is now aiming to marry the Widow Tillane, on whom (or on whose acres) Squire Danaher had always set his sights. At the Innisfree races, the custom is for the unmarried women of the parish to tie their bonnets on high stakes, and the riders in the order of their finish can snatch what bonnet they wish, and thus both prove their mettle and claim their prizes. Sean comes first at the finish, and leaves Mary Kate’s bonnet untouched; he takes the Widow’s instead. Mary Kate is distressed and Squire Danaher alarmed. Mickeleen and Father Lonergan then spring the second part of their plot. They tell Danaher that were Mary Kate out of his house, the Widow would be happy to come into it as Mrs Danaher.

11

One of the biggest changes to Maurice Walsh’s plot was the introduction of pony-racing on the strand. Nothing of the kind occurs in the short story; in the movie, it is important both as spectacle and as a key part of the plot within the plot. It is also an obvious allusion to J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, where such a race occurs offstage in Act III. A movie can do something like this so well, especially a movie by John Ford (past master of filming men on horseback), and a play cannot do it at all. So The Quiet Man splendidly supplies a missing scene from a great Irish play, but there may be more of The Playboy in The Quiet Man than a pony race on the strand.

There is a rhyme between the premises of Synge’s play and Ford’s film. In Synge’s plot, Christy Mahon arrives at a Mayo village having (he thinks) killed a man, his own father. Christy falls in love with the publican’s daughter, while a widow also takes a fancy to him. He begins to prove his mettle – that he’s not all talk, and a snivelling coward – by winning the races, but he cannot avoid a fight with the old man at the end of the play, watched by the whole village. Then, surprisingly victorious, he walks off alone, and Pegeen Mike is left to despair: ‘I’ve lost the only playboy of the Western World.’

Now compare the story of Sean Thornton. He arrives at a Mayo village having killed a man, a father. He falls in love with the local spinster, while it is falsely rumoured he is courting the village widow. He begins to prove his mettle by winning the races, but still ultimately has to fight old Squire Danaher. Here, however, there is an important change from The Playboy pattern: the movie does not end with sexual frustration, but with fulfilment.

Some of these similarities between play and movie are also found between The Playboy and Walsh’s story, which is riddled with recycled elements from the Literary Revival. Ford evidently perceived the similarities, and both underlined and extended them by the addition of the race scene. This enforcement of the parallel compels a comparison of Pegeen Mike with Mary Kate Danaher.

12

One of the causes of offence taken by Irish nationalist audiences in 1907 to Synge’s play was its representation of women. Famously, rioting broke out at the verbal evocation by the playboy of himself being served up with ‘a drift of chosen females standing in their shifts’ (that is, in their slips). The alexandrine preciousness of the rhyme between drift and shifts did not mitigate the crime of conceiving of Irish women as willingly coming in a herd, like heifers, to service, or to be serviced by, the playboy. And how could Synge make mention of the undergarments of Catholic Irishwomen?

Synge’s fantasies about countrywomen did not stop there. Not a single passionate kiss (according to the stage directions) is exchanged between the actors, but Christy promises Pegeen that in days to come: ‘You’ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair.’ Pegeen skips over the ticklish question of whether God might or might not regret His sexual solitude, and simply says, ‘That’ll be right fun, Christy Mahon.’39 Pleased with her receptiveness, he next pictures the two ‘making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths … with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the flowers of the earth.’ Pegeen, ‘moved by his tone’, murmurs: ‘I’d be nice so, is it?’ The readiness for love of Pegeen was Synge’s wish and part of the point of his play. The audience got that point, and did not like it, especially coming from a Protestant author about characters who were Catholics. Catholic Irish countrywomen were not like that. Not at all. Not a one of them. Never had been.

The riotous reaction to The Playboy pretty much put an end to stage representations of Irish women as sexual beings. Synge’s play is unarguably a masterpiece, and it quietly took its place in the Abbey repertoire, after some bowdlerizations and the introduction of a demure tradition in the way Pegeen Mike was acted.

13

When Ford finally got around to making The Quiet Man, he decided it was going to be a sexy movie, not a movie about IRA heroics. This was not because Hollywood required it to be so, nor because Ford needed to find a way to turn a profit on the movie, nor because it was Ford’s custom to dwell on the sexual side of things (it was not), nor even because the IRA activities were small beer after Ford’s experiences in the OSS. The Quiet Man is far and away the sexiest movie that Ford ever made. Indeed, he claimed it is ‘the sexiest picture ever … all about a man trying to get a woman into bed’.40 He had a reason for making it such.

Sean Thornton’s first physical encounter with Mary Kate occurs just after he buys ‘White O’ Morn’. He is left home by Mickleen Oge Flynn for his first night in his new property, a quite Gothic, Sheridan Le Fanu, ghostly ruin. Yet as he approaches the abandoned cottage, he sees turf smoke coming from its chimney. Thornton opens the cottage door, and the gale outside rushes in, disturbing a little heap of dust beside an abandoned broom. He tiptoes in and fastens the door. He does not (as we do) see Mary Kate Danaher crouching in the shadows, but he does sense the presence of someone else in the building. He gives an Indian war-cry and pitches a stone through a window-pane. Mary Kate (who has been preparing the place for his arrival) gasps, turns, sees her own image in a dusty mirror, screams, and runs for the door, where she is intercepted by the Yank. He pulls the beautiful woman into his arms for a kiss. She, having taken the kiss, stands back, considers her position, then wallops him with a round-house punch.

Mary Kate Danaher: It’s a bold one you are! Who gave you leave to be kissin’ me?

Thornton: So you can talk!

Mary Kate Danaher: Yes I can, I will and I do! And it’s more than talk you’ll be gettin’ if you step a step closer to me!

Thornton: Don’t worry – you’ve got a wallop!

Mary Kate Danaher: You’ll get over it, I’m thinkin’.

Thornton: Well, some things a man doesn’t get over so easy.

Mary Kate Danaher: Like what, supposin’?

Thornton: Like the sight of a girl coming through the fields with the sun on her hair … kneeling in church with a face like a saint…

Mary Kate Danaher: Saint indeed!

Thornton: … and now coming to a man’s house to clean it for him.

Mary Kate Danaher: But … that was just my way of bein’ a good Christian act.

Thornton: I know it was, Mary Kate Danaher. And it was nice of you.

Mary Kate Danaher: Not at all.

‘Saint, indeed!’ She both rebukes him for the impiety and phoniness of his courtship metaphor, and indignantly denies being a saint. This Irishwoman is no puritan. After she is done talking, Mary Kate turns to leave, then darts her head back inside the door for one last quick kiss on the lips of the Yank before taking her leave.

When the official courting commences, Mary Kate is as eager as Sean Thornton is to escape the eye of their chaperone, Mickeleen. Together they steal a tandem bicycle – the riding of which even more than paddling a canoe together traditionally symbolizes successful marital relations. Having gotten clear of onlookers, they pause, and Sean wishes to point out aspects of the scenery. Not Mary Kate.

John Wayne, Barry Fitzgerald as chaperone, and Maureen O’Hara, at the beginning of the courting in The Quiet Man, 1952. (Lilly Library, courtesy Republic Pictures)

She runs off across a field. At a river’s edge, she kneels to peel off her silk stockings. Sean catches a glance of her thighs, she catches him looking, and returns to her undressing, then bare-footed prances across the stream. He gives his usual John Wayne double-take, throws one shoulder back, then rears forward to stomp, still wearing his shoes, splashingly after her. Up ahead, she does a Daphne-like pastoral striptease – with her stockings in one hand, she takes off her bonnet with the other, casting flirtatious looks back at him. He shows he is as game as she is by hurling his hat into the next field over. Then she leads him by the hand up the hill.

They arrive at a hilltop churchyard with a ruined chapel.

Thornton: If anybody had told me six months ago that today I’d be in a graveyard in Innisfree with a girl like you that I’m just about to kiss, I’d have told ’em …

Mary Kate Danaher: Oh, but the kisses are a long way off yet!

Thornton: Huh?

Mary Kate Danaher: Well, we just started a-courtin’, and next month, we start the walkin’ out, and the month after that there’ll be the threshin’ parties, and the month after that …

Thornton: Nope.

Mary Kate Danaher: Well, maybe we won’t have to wait that month …

Thornton: Yup.

Mary Kate Danaher: … or for the threshin’ parties …

Thornton: Nope.

Mary Kate Danaher: … or for the walkin’ out together …

Thornton: No.

Mary Kate Danaher: … and so much the worse for you, Sean Thornton, for I feel the same way about it myself!

She opens her arms to be embraced, and he gathers her in to himself. Thunder rolls. Frightened by the lightning-bolts, Mary Kate hugs closely to Sean Thornton’s broad chest. He puts his suit coat round her shoulders as the winds rise. Then big raindrops splat one by one on his white nylon shirt, and each makes a little nude pool of transparency, over which Mary Kate spreads and tenses her fingers. Finally, they do kiss. The experience leaves Mary Kate limp. During its shooting, Ford did take after take trying to get the pair to be more passionate.41 Though only involving a kiss and a rain shower, the action is metaphorically pre-coital, coital, and then post-coital. It is as sexual as a Hollywood movie in 1951 could be.

For the rest of the movie, Ford makes the audience interested in one chief question: when will Sean Thornton and Mary Kate Danaher get on with the consummation of their love? They get married in due course, but at the wedding reception Squire Danaher finally realizes that he has been tricked by a community plot against himself; he punches Sean and scatters the coins across the floor. Mary Kate makes it known to Sean that she will not sleep with him until she gets her dowry, and locks herself in the bedroom.

In a new scene that was suggested by John Wayne (unless he got to do it, he feared he would appear to have ‘no balls’),42 Sean Thornton kicks the bedroom door down, lifts his bride up, and says, ‘There’ll be no locks or bolts between us, Mary Kate Danaher, except those in your own mercenary little heart,’ then tosses her, panting with anger and sexual frustration, onto her own marriage bed, breaking it. So when Mickeleen Oge Flynn says their love-making has been impetuous and Homeric, we know it has as yet been nothing of the kind. They both want it, but because of the missing dowry, they cannot have it.

Each goes to talk to a man of the cloth – Thornton to Church of Ireland Reverend Playfair (Arthur Shields) and Mary Kate to Father Lonergan (Ward Bond). Reverend Playfair knows all about Thornton’s history in the ring, and has a scrapbook to illustrate it, but he also knows a lot about local customs of marriage, and, though Protestant, respects them. He gently takes it for granted that now Sean will have to fight for the dowry. By showing a picture of himself on the Trinity College boxing team, he subtly shifts the context from boxing as a fight to the finish to boxing as an athletic competition. That is all the persuasion required. The tact and economy in the script is admirable, as is Shields’s performance. His message is: You must fight for that dowry, and it will be good sport on the day.

Mary Kate happens to catch Father Lonergan just as he is stalking a trophy salmon. She whispers to him in Irish of her plight (as if dirty things become clean when spoken as Gaelige): no dowry, no consummation, husband in sleeping bag. ‘Sleeping bag’ in Irish is unfamiliar to Lonergan (a joke on the language revival?), but when he does get the meaning, he is outraged: ‘Ireland may be a poor country, God help us, but here a married man sleeps in a bed and not a bag.’ His implied message is: Go home and bring your husband to your bed. Which she duly does.

Revd Playfair (Arthur Shields), Mary Kate Danaher Thornton (Maureen O’Hara) and Mickeleen Oge Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald) attend to Sean Thornton (John Wayne) after he has been knocked cold at his own wedding reception, in The Quiet Man, 1952. (Lilly Library, courtesy Republic Pictures)

We do not witness the long-delayed nuptials, but the next morning Sean Thornton appears to be mighty pleased with how the night was passed. He is cock of the walk and calls for his wife, but she is not to be found in the kitchen. Mickleen Oge Flynn, waiting at the cottage door, is ready to explain that she is so ashamed of loving a man of whom she could not be proud, she has run away to Dublin. It all has to do with the dowry, and a woman’s rights.

Thus, the final fist fight is precipitated, more or less as in the story by Maurice Walsh, apart from Ford’s innovation of having Sean Thornton drag his wife brutally from the train station across half the parish to Squire Thornton’s fields, where he throws her violently back into the hands of the Squire. It is hard to see what this picturesque and vaudevillian violence is meant to be except either a comic critique of the widespread wife-battering in the Irish Free State, or an endorsement of it. Maybe a public and post-colonial festival re-enactment of the Roman rape of local Sabines?43 There is a self-conscious element of possible playacting by both Sean and Mary Kate, an over-the-top impersonation of an archaic, primitive custom – is he serious? is she frightened? – that enables the scene to be enjoyed, without requiring one’s approval of a social code of female subjugation.44

Publicity still from The Quiet Man of Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) being violently dragged along by Sean Thornton (John Wayne); the use of the image for publicity suggests an expectation that this ‘taming of the shrew’ would become a favourite part of the movie. (Lilly Library, courtesy Republic Pictures)

The fight with Red Will Danaher sportily (if not sportingly) won, peace settles back on Innisfree, according to the narrator, Father Lonergan. The whole story has unfolded as if it were his home movie (‘See, that’s me there …’), and now he is folded back into it in a playful device. In a theatrical ‘curtain call’ – as Luke Gibbons calls it – the characters each get a final close-up (all pretending to be Protestants, for the benefit of Reverend Playfair and the visiting Bishop).45 The last to take a bow are Sean Thornton and his wife in their cottage garden. Then Mary Kate whispers in Sean’s ear. He is amazed by what he has heard. She sprints off toward the cottage, and, once again rearing back one shoulder, then plunging forward, John Wayne follows after her.

A cult-movie secret is what Ford told O’Hara to whisper in John Wayne’s ear before she dashes off – something she at first said she would not dare to say, and then did say. If her words did not have to do with some very pleasurable thing that Wayne has always wanted and will get if he just comes inside, it would be a big surprise. Ford has made the audience wait and wait. Just as the curtain falls, they know impetuous, Homeric consummations are very soon to resume and will long continue.

14

What is even more noteworthy than Ford’s thoroughgoing characterization of the Irish woman as a fully adult, pleasure-loving person is how few objections were raised by Richard Hayes, the Irish censor. He cut to ribbons most Hollywood movies submitted for Irish circulation. In the case of The Quiet Man Hayes scissored out Mickeleen’s two best lines – ‘Homeric!’ ‘Impetuous’ – about the presumed feats of love that broke Sean Thornton’s big bed, and the appraisal by Feeney (Jack McGowran) of the bed itself: ‘Ah, a man’d have to be a sprinter to catch his wife in a bed like that.’46 While these excisions are ridiculous, they are mild exactions by the standards of the time in Ireland, which were the strictest in the world.

Ford was, of course, unlike Synge, a Catholic. Also, the sex that occurs in The Quiet Man occurs within marriage, off screen, and for the most part after the end of the story. Nudity is never an issue. But still it is surprising that no whisper was raised about the ‘unhealthiness’ of the way Mary Kate is depicted. She is often filmed from low down and in half-profile, so as to make Maureen O’Hara, already well-endowed, appear heroically voluptuous. It would have been silly to make a stink about what is overall such a light and affectionate portrait of Ireland, simply because Mary Kate Danaher’s breasts appear to be cinematically large, but the fear of being silly did not always stand in the way of the Irish censorship.

The failure to register the film’s two major innovations, its sexualization of Irish womanhood and its thematic concentration on the importance of regular and mutually joyful sexual intercourse to a happy marriage, meant that Ford’s chief criticism of Ireland went unnoticed. Like Synge, he saw the Irish rural population as starved of joy by Catholic sexual repression and nationalist chauvinism. He wanted to replace those false images with more natural truths and healthy teachings. A man would not have to be a sprinter to catch his wife in a big bed, because she would most likely not be running away from his embraces, but warmly returning them. This view of women was Ford’s gift from America to his homeland, but Ireland was not quite ready to accept the offering, or even to acknowledge it.

The Irish response to The Quiet Man was often embarrassment. It was commonly said to be all stereotypes. Squire Danaher as if on cue even produces an Irish bull: ‘He’ll regret it til his dying day, if he lives that long.’ The characters, situations and gags of The Quiet Man, however, are not so much stereotypes of a socially regressive kind, as ‘old chestnuts’ – oft-told tales and pieces of theatrical lumber. Ford’s Irish movie is like a Christmas pudding made from an ancient recipe, stuffed with nuts and fruits and coins and candies of every description, then soaked in liquor.

The cast was conscious of the twice-told character of the tale, and they gave to their playing the quality of an encore. They gloried in the recherché quaintness of the game. The acting is quite in the spirit of that Friday night in March 1935 when the Hollywood actors joined the Abbey regulars in a performance of The Playboy of the Western World. In The Quiet Man, however, the stars are not lost in the crowd; they come forward into central roles. Admittedly, those film stars playing Irish people ham it up in sometimes corny fashion, but Abbey actors had always done that too. Fifteen years after the Abbey actors had come to Hollywood for The Plough and the Stars, the dramatic furniture and playing style of the Irish Revival had been taken up into the working vocabulary of international performance. It is remarkable how well Victor McLaglen does as Squire Danaher, and how brilliantly the old football player and cowboy actor Ward Bond carries off the role of Father Lonergan. Irish priests aren’t like that? More’s the pity.

In a surprising coincidence, just as Ford was making The Quiet Man into ‘the greatest hits of the Irish Revival’, and Hollywood stars were demonstrating that the Abbey playing styles had been affectionately taken up into the vocabulary of global entertainment, the Abbey Theatre itself burned. As its home burned, the style took wing. The Irish Independent caught up with the The Quiet Man cast on the runway of Shannon Airport, just before their return to Hollywood, and asked them their reactions to the fire. John Wayne said he had known the Abbey actors since they began touring America in the 1930s, and they had become some of his best friends, often visiting his home, so he felt terrible for them; it was as if their own home place had been burnt. Yes, it was a terrible shock, Shields admitted, but the place was always a tinderbox. Anyway, ‘fire won’t stop the Abbey’.47

Barry Fitzgerald agreed. The old, beloved costumes were gone, and perhaps some valuable unpublished scripts, but the actors were still there to act and the playwrights were not going to vanish. It was more than time for the government to build a new and bigger theatre in Dublin. John Ford had the last word. The Irish people could expect the film he was making in Galway to appear in Irish picture houses the following March or April. The greatness of the Abbey Theatre, it was implied, had been captured and, in some degree, immortalized in The Quiet Man.

Abbey Theatre interior, intact but blackened after the 18 July 1951 fire. (Photograph made 1 January 1953, Gjon Mili/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Notes

1. Una [Aideen] O’Connor to My dear Daddy, 23 March 1935, Shields family papers, NUI Galway.

2. For the attendance of Heather Angel and Joan Crawford at the Abbey plays, see Joan Harvey, ‘Hollywood Beauty Gossip’, Los Angeles Times (20 March 1935); for the Abbey schedule, Los Angeles Times (1 March 1935).

3. An article in the Los Angeles Times alludes to talk of a Hollywood film starring the Abbey players, but says the idea is ‘sheer nonsense’ (16 March 1935).

4. Gerry McNee, In the Footsteps of the Quiet Man (Mainstream Publishing: Edinburgh and London 1990, 2004), p. 23.

5. Killanin, interview in McNee, In the Footsteps of the Quiet Man, p. 50.

6. Liam O’Flaherty to My dear Jack [15 March 1939], Lilly Library.

7. Maurice Walsh, The Quiet Man and other stories (Appletree Press: Belfast 2002), p. 140.

8. Ibid. p. 145.

9. Ibid. p. 149.

10. My thanks to Cormac O’Malley. See also Richard English, Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual (OUP: Oxford 1998), pp. 30–7.

11. McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 337.

12. Frederick S. Foote, Lt. Comdr, USNR, medical history of John Ford, 4 June 1942, Lilly Library.

13. James S. Simmerman, Major, 13th Armed Regiment, report on service of Commander Ford, 8 July 1943, Lilly Library.

14. OSS record of recent travel, John Ford, 24 January 1944, Lilly Library.

15. OSS record of recent travel, John Ford, 1 September 1944, Lilly Library.

16. Unsigned to Col. William J. Donovan, 15 June 1942, Lilly Library.

17. Elmo Roper to Dear John, 9 July 1942, Lilly Library.

18. O’Hara, ’Tis Herself, pp. 100–1.

19. As André Bazin noted, ‘The world conflict not only provided Hollywood with spectacular scenes, it also provided, and indeed, forced upon it, some subjects to reflect upon, at least for a few years.’ André Bazin, What is Cinema?, vol. 2 (University of California Press 1971), p. 151.

20. Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, John Wayne: American (The Free Press: New York 1995), p. 360.

21. O’Hara, ’Tis Herself, p. 136.

22. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Atheneum: New York 1992). According to his own son, James W. Bellah, author of the story on which the film was based, was a ‘fascist, a racist, and a world-class bigot’ (Roberts and Olson, John Wayne: American, p. 324). These qualities suffice to explain the story’s righteous defence of aggression. The fact that the remark comes from Bellah Jr may suggest something about the theme of bringing a son to heel.

23. No doubt when released on 15 November 1950, just as Chinese Communist forces were overrunning divisions from the USA and South Korea, and especially after President Truman threatened on 30 November 1950 to use atomic weapons against the Chinese army, Rio Grande was seen in light of debates about the conduct of the Korean War. It could have been predicted from the movie that Ford would support General Douglas MacArthur’s aggressive strategy, and he did. See McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 504.

24. For a wide-ranging discussion of post-war Hollywood movies in this light, see Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (Henry Holt: New York 1983), pp. 251ff.

25. After the song, Kathleen says goodnight to Kirby, and apologizes for taking his bed, and he in turn apologizes for having more forcefully dispossessed her fifteen years earlier. ‘You’ve grown more thoughtful.’ But has he? His broody sucking on a cigar is the movie’s main way of suggesting that he thinks.

26. In fact, the 1875 song was by a German-American, Thomas P. Westendorft, and makes no direct reference to Ireland.

27. The interior scene involving Mimi Doyle was filmed in the Republic studio; there is no evidence that she made the trip to Ireland.

28. Lee Lukather to Noel Huggard, Ashford Castle, 28 February 1951, Lilly Library.

29. Frank Nugent, ‘Pubs, Pictures, and “Nice Soft Days” in Eire’, New York Times (8 August 1951).

30. Arthur Shields to Christine Shields, 9 June 1951, Shields family papers.

31. In the script, it is assumed that Denis O’Dea would play Mickeleen O’Flynn, driver of the sidecar. O’Dea agreed to be in the film on 22 December 1950; by 22 May 1951, the cast had been set and O’Dea was not in it. The version must have been written in the interval, and probably closer to December than May. Frank Nugent, undated draft, ‘The Quiet Man’, Lilly Library.

32. In an influential monograph on The Quiet Man (Cork UP: Cork 2002), Luke Gibbons makes a case that the ‘quiet’ of The Quiet Man is a false quiet, just a surface; underneath it, sectarian conflict seethes, and the IRA is a constant and respected presence biding its time before it renews the Republican mission. The flashback in which Sean Thornton kills a man in the ring is said to be a ‘displacement’ of the ‘violence simmering … under the Irish landscape’ (p. 50), rather than simply a replacement of it. In all outward show, Ford removed the Troubles – present in some early drafts of the scenario – from the finished film. Gibbons also argues that Sean Thornton was a trauma victim, injured psychically not just by the accident in the boxing ring, but by American capitalism.

33. Edward A. Hagen also comments on Sean Thornton as a returning veteran in ‘From “Peace and Freedom” to “Peace and Quiet”: The Quiet Man as a Product of the 1950s’ in James Silas Rogers and Matthew J. O’Brien, After the Flood: Irish America 1945–1960 (Irish Academic Press: Dublin 2009), pp. 102–3.

34. George Moore describes the construction of the castle extension and gardens in ‘A Castle of To-Day’, Parnell and His Island (1887). The history of English gardens in Ireland is learnedly discussed in relation to The Quiet Man in Eamonn Slater, ‘The Hidden Landscape Aesthetic of The Quiet Man’, Seán Crosson and Rod Stoneman (eds), The Quiet Man … And Beyond (Liffey Press: Dublin 2009), pp. 139–58. Ford expresses his early intention to make The Quiet Man a ‘travelogue’ in a letter of 9 August 1946 to Lord Killanin (McNee, In the Footsteps, p. 32).

35. Luke Gibbons argues that the viewer is intended by Ford to detect the film’s artifice, and so Ford arranged that the joins between the assembled parts be made in a deliberately clumsy fashion (Gibbons, The Quiet Man, p. 19). What is obvious about ‘Innisfree’ is that it is jam-packed with beauty spots from far and wide on the Western seaboard (see the screenplay instructions from Ford to Nugent in Des MacHale, Picture the Quiet Man [Appletree Press: Belfast 2004], p. 134.).

36. O’Toole, The Ex-Isle of Erin, p. 21.

37. McNee, In the Footsteps, p. 132.

38. Fitzgerald himself made this point about Captain Boyle: ‘He was a Dublin original, a strutting Paycock, fond of his drink and vociferous with malapropisms.’ ‘Star System Opposed by Celebrated Irish Comedian’, Los Angeles Times (3 March 1935). Fitzgerald gets the same sort of O’Casey quality into his pronunciation of the syllables of Sean Thornton’s supposed American home city: ‘Pittsburgh, Massachusetts’ and his disgusted one-word comment on America: ‘Pro-hi-bi-tion!’

39. Synge, Playboy of the Western World, p. 67.

40. MacHale, Picture the Quiet Man, p. 131.

41. McNee, In the Footsteps, p. 133.

42. Roberts and Olson, John Wayne, p. 365.

43. At the end of The Quiet Man, Mary Kate significantly throws the stick away – the same stick that the old woman gave Sean ‘to beat the lovely lady with’, and that, after her rebuke from the parish priest, Mary Kate herself handed to Sean for that purpose.

44. For an interesting meditation on these complexities from the point of view of a contemporary Irish feminist, see Dióg O’Connell’s ‘Feminist Icon or Prisoner of Patriarchy: An Exploration of Mary Kate’s Character in The Quiet Man’, The Quiet Man … and Beyond (pp. 203–13).

45. It is tempting to suggest that this scene of the Innisfree villagers pretending to be Protestants is John Ford’s inside joke on the Abbey custom of Protestants pretending to be Catholics, with a kind of triumphalist smirk at the fact that there were scant few Protestants left in Ireland after thirty years of Catholic and Gaelic self-rule, but the tone of the scene is in fact simple and cheerful. There is, however, a Hollywood inside joke on the name of the Innisfree pub, Cohan’s. ‘We pronounce it,’ Mickeleen says, ‘Co-Hans,’ a slightly anti-Semitic, because unnecessary, correction. Would Mickeleen be likely to know much of Cohens or Cohns? Or that a prominent Hollywood producer was Harry Cohn? Shortly after completing The Quiet Man, John Wayne formed a production company with Robert Fellows, saying, ‘It had to be better than working with men like Yates and Cohn’. Ronald L. Davis, Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1998), p. 164.

46. See Kevin and Emer Rockett, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography (Four Courts Press: Dublin 2004), p. 13.

47. ‘Former Players High Hopes for the Future’, Irish Independent (20 July 1951), 7.