I must re-watch The Quiet Man, John Ford’s 1952 film starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.
The studio (Republic Pictures) were not confident as Ford and Wayne were stepping outside their usual genre; Westerns. In fact a condition they imposed was for them to make a Western first. So Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne starred in Rio Grande, directed by John Ford and released in 1950. Ironically The Quiet Man was much the most successful of the two films, grossing $3.8 million in its first year and earning Republic Pictures its only Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
The Quiet Man first appeared in 1933 as a short story in the Saturday Evening Post where John Ford read it and snapped up the film rights for $10. Two years later it was included in Green Rushes, a collection of five short stories with the same characters. The author is largely forgotten today: Maurice Walsh. He was born in 1879 near Listowel in Co Kerry and much of his writing is set in the West of Ireland or Scotland. He joined the Customs and Excise service in 1901 and was transferred to the Highlands where he had what must have been an agreeable post, monitoring whisky distilleries on Speyside. In 1922 he transferred to the Irish Free State Excise service.
Maurice Walsh followed in the footsteps of Anthony Trollope who you may remember served in the General Postal Service as a postal surveyor’s clerk in central Ireland. Just as Trollope found time to write prolifically while in the service of the Post Office, Maurice was able to be a public servant while writing twenty novels and a large number of short stories. He was one of Ireland’s best selling authors, largely forgotten today. I nearly forgot, the success of the film version of The Quiet Man ended up with Walsh receiving in excess of $6,000.
I watched it during lockdown and, all I can say, is that it is a movie “of it’s time”! Yet, it continues to have appeal and there is even a small “Quiet Man” museum in Cong (County Mayo) where much of the film was shot. Indeeed, there are daily “Quiet Man” walking tours in Cong during the summer season. During the shoot, John Wayne stayed in Ashford Castle Hotel (former country home of the Guinnesses) and I believe that the film is shown every afternoon in the hotel’s cinema.
One of my all-time favorite movies – I love it in spite of its flaws, or maybe because of them. Who knows? It’s simply a barrel-full of fun.
I have read the short story, though probably not in fifty-odd years. I don’t remember whether it appeared in an anthology, or in a textbook I found. The US had an enormous appetite for Irish material, and wasn’t especially picky about the quality.
As a very young Galwegian I remember being brought to a garden party in Spiddal during the making of the Quiet Man ,though it was a few years before I saw the film. Ward Bond and Victor McLaglen were the firm favourites of the parental generation, The Informer and similar perhaps . It is a personal favourite, a John Ford tribute to Faith Hope and Love, echoed perhaps by The Quiet Girl/ An Cailin Ciuin a very recent and lovely Irish movie.