Shaking the Dead Hand of History: Reconciling the Past in The Quiet Man
By Sam Adams

The Quiet Man (1952) is one of John Ford's most beloved movies, and one of his most abused. With two Academy Awards, one for Ford, and one for Winton Hoch and Archie Stout's retina-searing Technicolor photography, and a place on one of the American Film Institute's innumerable lists, the film's certification as a classic is assured. But even the film's defenders have a tendency to treat it as a glorious whimsy, a sentimental indulgence that captures the lightheartedness of a simpler era. The terms used to praise The Quiet Man are not so different from the criticisms leveled by Manny Farber in his review in The Nation, who found it full of "clumsily contrived fist fights, musical brogues spoken as though the actor were coping with an excess of tobacco juice in his mouth, mugging that plays up all the trusted hokums that are supposed to make the Irish so humorous-sympathetic, and a script that tends to resolve its problems by having the cast embrace, fraternity-brother fashion, and break out into full-throated ballads."

Much of what Farber says is objectively true, and yet it is only part of the truth. The Quiet Man is, to be sure, as beguiling a bit of blarney as ever crossed the pond, a mythic vision of rural Ireland as a lost paradise teeming with hot-tempered lasses and bibulous priests, untouched by the ravages of modernity. It is the kind of place a man might go to escape himself, to erase his past and start anew, which is what brings Sean Thornton (John Wayne) from America to bucolic Innisfree, the village of his birth.

In the U.S., Sean was a boxer under the name Trooper Thorn, one whose substantial winnings came at a terrible price: the death of an opponent in the ring. His reasons for leaving, and particularly his vow never to raise his fists to another man, are critical to the unfolding of the movie's plot, but Ford keeps them hidden for the movie's first half. In fact, apart from a few suggestive lacunae, the film does nothing to suggest that Sean's motives for returning are anything other than as he presents them.

Even after it is revealed, via a wordless, abstracted flashback that occurs after Sean has been knocked to the ground by Victor McLaglen's beefy Will Danaher, Sean's secret remains literally unspeakable. Not until he is presented with a newspaper clipping detailing the fight by a village reverend who happens to be a devout fight fan does Sean unburden himself of his guilt, and then, so far as we know, he never speaks of it again. Even when his refusal to fight for the dowry that rightfully belongs to Will Danaher's sister, Mary Kate (Maureen O'Hara), causes his new bride to label him a coward, Sean does not bother to correct her. His deeds are his to reconcile, and his alone.

Like many Irish-Americans, Sean Thornton is enamored of his mother country but almost wholly ignorant of its history and traditions. Apart from his mother's description of the town's geography, heard in echoing voiceover as he first takes in the sight of its rolling hills and winding roads, he seems to recall nothing of his birthplace — save the identity of Michaleen Oge Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald), the sprightly leprechaun who picks him up at the train —  saying only that the town's name "has become another word for heaven for me."

Visually, the movie endorses Sean's Edenic vision. The vibrant greens and scalding reds of Innisfree are so bright as to make Oz look drab by comparison. Ford, who was born with the same surname as The Quiet Man's hero, invests the movie's images with an emigrant's longing for home. Innisfree is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a haven of realism, but a memory of the kind conjured in Sean's mind by his late mother's words.

Of course, there is a simpler explanation for the movie's quaint caricature of Irish life. After spending nearly a decade attempting to raise money for the picture, and then securing it only in exchange for making the more obviously commercial Rio Grande (1950) for the same studio, Ford knew The Quiet Man would be a tough sell, and that its primary hope of success lay with American audiences, who were used to seeing the Irish depicted as bright-eyed priests, stern coppers and alcoholic wasters (roles that, incidentally, earned some of The Quiet Man's players a steady and quite profitable living). A scrupulously realist mise-en-scene would only have confused them, and would in any case hardly have comported with the film's quasi-mythic tone. In some instances, Ford actively falsified details so as to avoid discomfiting American viewers. According to Dublin-born O'Hara, Ford made a point of having Michaleen instruct Sean to pronounce the name of Cohan's pub with a short "a" (as in George M.), notwithstanding the fact that no Irishman would say it thus.

But the movie's bold Technicolor splendor — which has, not coincidentally, driven tourists to visit its locations for more than half a century — is laid over a latticework of fine details: passing utterances and implicit dynamics that linger just below the surface, there to be seen by attentive viewers and overlooked by the rest. One wonders how many lovers of The Quiet Man's sweeping romance are oblivious to the presence of an I.R.A. cell within Innisfree's borders, or the carefully delineated relationship between the town's Catholic majority and its tiny clutch of Protestants. The colonial schism that has wracked the country for centuries is not in the foreground, but neither is it hidden.

In The Quiet Man, the past is always looming, waiting for any opportunity to push through into the present. From the moment Sean steps off the train, the country's factionalism rears its head. The simple act of asking for directions provokes a minor squabble between stationmaster and engineer. "If you'd take time to study your country's history…," one begins, although it's not clear what history has to do with which road to take. Whatever long-simmering argument Sean's innocent question has stirred up, the chances are it predates even the elderly men currently hashing it out, and will continue long after they are dust.

Sean has come to Innisfree in an attempt to reconnect with one past and sever himself from another. By regaining his ancestral cottage, White o' Morn, he hopes to efface all memory of Trooper Thorn, although not the prize money that allows him to conduct himself with brash impunity or his American disdain for creaky traditions. He is baffled by Mary Kate's inability to marry him without her surly brother's permission, and mistakes as greed her longing for her dowry, dismissing her concerns with no small degree of contempt. Fulfilling the role of the "wild colonial boy" remembered in song at Cohan's stools, he claims mastery over past traditions, his to accept or reject as he sees fit.

His own past, of course, is not so easily escaped, nor is Mary Kate's inconvenient attachment to her ancestral belongings. With Will insisting on fisticuffs as the proper way to determine the dowry's disposition, Sean is placed in the position of needing to reconcile his own past in order to regain hers.

The union of Sean and Mary Kate, of prodigal son and native lass, takes place at a crossroads. Between his preference for a vague and romanticized past and her immanent and material approach, a pact is brokered whose grace seems to fall on the entire town. A Catholic priest covers his collar and instructs the villagers to "cheer like Protestants" as a visiting Anglican prelate makes his way out of town. Will Danaher seems at last on his way to securing the affections of the elusive Widow Tillane (Mildred Natwick). And the Thorntons, their troubles at last resolved, wave and turn away from the camera, walking back into the house where Sean was born.

When Sean first sets foot in White o' Morn, it is a fearsome place, full of dark shadows and infernal lights, its shutters battered by howling winds that seem to have arisen out of nowhere. The mood is almost jarringly at odds with the movie's general lightheartedness, echoed only in the lovers' graveyard tryst, suggesting that White o' Morn is not so much mythic as it is mystical. Like the whirlpool in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going (1945), the cottage is a locus of conflicting energies, a place with its own rules, its own time. The romance between Sean and Mary Kate stirs up powerful forces, passionate but dangerous as well. Only when their marriage is consummated, their animosities quelled, can peace come to Innisfree.

Sam Adams
© FIPRESCI 2009

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