Best of DVDs...with M.V. Moorhead
The Quiet Man

Assuming your St. Patrick’s Day plans allow for enough consciousness to enjoy a movie, and for motor skills sufficient to operate a DVD player, there are innumerable Irish or Irish-themed films with which to mark the occasion.

If Irish eyes feel like crying, choices range from grim, true-life sagas like My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins and the recent Magdalene Sisters to John Huston’s exquisite screen rendering of the James Joyce story The Dead and John Ford’s sentimental tragedy The Informer, among countless others.

But most celebrants will probably prefer a more lighthearted Gaelic outing, and while recent years have brought us such charming efforts as The Matchmaker and Waking Ned Devine, there probably isn’t a more quintessential Hollywood smooch of the Blarney Stone than Ford’s much-beloved 1952 romance The Quiet Man.

The title character, played by John Wayne, is Sean Thornton, a former boxer in America who returns to the little Irish town of his birth, and buys the small cottage in which he was born. The story traces Sean’s courtship of fiery-haired, fiery-tempered local beauty Mary Kate Daneher (Maureen OHara), and his clash with her brother Will (Victor McLaglen).

There’s a dark secret to Sean’s past, and a big jocular fistfight at the finale. But the plot, derived from a short story by Maurice Walsh, is loose and meandering, with frequent digressions for singing songs, drinking pints, riding horses, stumbling romantically through bad weather and the like.

Wayne is unusually warm and romantic here, O’Hara is glorious, and the supporting cast, from McLaglen to wonderful Barry Fitzgerald as the local busybody to Ward Bond as the priest to Mildred Natwick as the Widow to Jack McGowran as Will’s toady to John Ford’s older brother Francis Ford as the old-timer, are all in infectiously joyous form.

Shot in ripe, heavy-on-the-green Technicolor, this was plainly John Ford’s ultimate love letter to his country of ancestry. To complain that it’s a coyly sentimentalized, stereotypical, exaggerated, sanitized portrait of a country and its people is no more than to say that it’s perfectly in the spirit of St. Paddy’s. Erin Go Bragh, and enjoy.

The DVD—The Collector’s Edition disc packs quite a punch. It comes—in a green sleeve sporting a shamrock, no less—digitally remastered, sporting both its original audio track and enhanced original restored audio, and loaded with such extras as an interesting Making of documentary hosted by Leonard Maltin, a short montage of iconic scenes set to lusty Irish music and titled Remembering the Quiet Man, and a documentary called The Joy of Ireland, hosted by Maureen O’Hara.

O’Hara also narrates a lucid and affectionate commentary track, probably the best of the special features. The Quiet Man would generally be regarded as family-friendly entertainment, despite its fixation on drinking and brawling.

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