The Quiet Man

(John Ford, US 1952, 129 min., 35mm)

John Ford’s robust, luminously Technicolored, and unabashedly sentimental Irish love story–comedy became perhaps his biggest commercial success and garnered his fourth Oscar for Best Director (still the record). John Wayne plays a popular Irish-American prizefighter who, after having accidentally killed an opponent in the ring and sworn off fighting, returns to his long-unseen homeland, buys the cottage of his long-lost mother’s dreams, and falls in love with his neighbor’s sister (Maureen O’Hara). Whimsical drunks, wise priests, two-fisted brawlers, stubborn redheaded Irish beauties: they’re all here, transformed from clichés into archetypes by Ford’s direction