By Des McHale
Quite incredibly, in this year 2026 we celebrate the 75th birthday of the filming of Ireland’s best known and most loved movie The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara and directed by the great John Ford. Ford was born John Martin Feeney in 1894 in Portland, Maine in the USA of Galway parents, but his ancestors came from Dunfeeney near the Ceide Fields in County Mayo. He had always wanted to make a blockbuster Irish movie as a tribute to his Irish roots.
In 1933, that great Irish writer Maurice Walsh published a story in an American magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and called it The Quiet Man. Ford read the story and liked it a lot—here at last was a possible basis for the Irish movie he had so long wanted to make. So he immediately bought the film rights to the story for the token sum of $10 and set about trying to raise money for the filming which he felt had to be on location in Ireland. For fifteen years he tried in vain—nobody seemed to be interested in what some called ‘this silly little Irish story’. But Ford did not give up; he had a handshake contract with the lovely Irish actress Maureen O’Hara for the principal female lead, Mary Kate Danagher, and also enlisted John ‘Duke’ Wayne to play the male lead, Sean Thornton, for only a fraction of his normal fee. Wayne too was very anxious to make and star in The Quiet Man because he also had strong Irish roots. One of his paternal ancestors was Robert Morrison born in the Glens of Antrim in 1782, and his grandmother Maggie Brown was an Irish Catholic born in West Cork in 1848. Other actors that Ford enlisted came from his ‘stock company’ and included the Englishman Victor McLaglen to play Red Will Danagher and the delightful Barry Fitzgerald to play Michaeleen Oge Flynn, when the time came.
John Ford
But despite a few promising leads and near misses, the late nineteen thirties and forties came and went without the making of the Quiet Man coming any closer. But when the breakthrough came, it was from an unexpected source. Duke Wayne had made some B-western movies with Republic Pictures run by a man called Herb Yates and Wayne suggested to him that he might like to move upmarket with a top director like John Ford. Yates was not impressed by The Quiet Man story either, but was very tempted by the suggestion, and so a deal was struck. First, Wayne and O’Hara would make a sure-fire money spinning western movie for Republic to cover any financial losses that Yates felt would inevitably result from The Quiet Man. And so Rio Grande, directed by Ford, was made in Monument Valley, shot in black and white, to cut down on cost. The film was a solid box office success, largely because of Wayne and O’Hara starring opposite each other for the first time and all agreed that there was an intense and electric chemistry between them.
Herb Yates then gave his financial backing to the filming of The Quiet Man amounting to $1.75 million US dollars, a huge sum at the time, but he insisted it be made in black and white to cut down on cost. For Ford this was a huge disappointment—there could be no Emerald Isle in the movie now. But Maureen O’Hara was a friendly neighbour of the man in Hollywood who controlled the rights to Technicolour, and they persuaded Yates to change his mind. And so The Quiet Man became the first feature length film to be shot in Ireland in glorious colour and in fact when Yates saw the first rushes, he thought that there was something wrong with the filters, because nowhere could look that green naturally!
John Ford was of course ecstatic and headed for Ireland in 1950 to seek out locations and make contracts with Irish actors. Ideally, he would have liked to shoot The Quiet Man in Maurice Walsh’s native county of Kerry where the story was originally set, but he could not find there suitable accommodation big enough for the cast and crew. Eventually he settled on the lovely village of Cong on the Mayo/Galway border, containing what is now one of the world’s finest hotels, Ashford Castle. He contacted his distant cousin, Lord Killanin and Maureen O’Hara’s brother, Dublin lawyer Charles Fitzsimons and asked them to seek out the most delicious scenery in the West of Ireland for use in the film. They did a great job and did not let him down.
The casting of The Quiet Man became a family affair, almost incestuous. Ford always believed that if you want to work with people you can depend on, work with family. Maureen O’Hara, the red haired Queen of Hollywood, who played the feisty Mary Kate Danagher, had two brothers in the film—James Lilburn, who played the curate Father Paul and Charles Fitzsimons, who played Hugh Forbes, the Old IRA man. Barry Fitzgerald, alias Michaeleen Oge Flynn, and Arthur Shields, who played the Reverend Cyril Playfair, were brothers, and the Connemara urchins in the film were in fact Wayne’s four children. Andrew McLaglen, one of the assistant directors, was the son of Victor McLaglen, and Webb Overlander, who played the stationmaster, was Wayne’s makeup man. Ford himself had quite a few relatives in the cast and crew—his bearded brother Frank played Old Dan Tobin, his son Pat was a stunt man and extra, his son-in-law Ken Curtis was the ballad singer Dermot Fahy and another brother Eddie O’Fearna was assistant director.
The story of The Quiet Man concerns an American boxer, Sean Thornton, born in Ireland, who accidentally kills a man in the ring and returns to Ireland for a quiet life. He falls in love with the beautiful Mary Kate Danagher, but her bully of a brother refuses to grant permission for the marriage. The conflict results in the longest fist fight in movie history, lasting eight minutes, until a resolution is found after a little conspiracy between the Parish Priest, the Church of Ireland clergyman and his wife, and the wily matchmaker, Michaeleen Oge Flynn. In between, Ford shamelessly uses the beautiful scenery of the West of Ireland as a backdrop and it has been said the The Quiet Man did more for Irish tourism worldwide than any other factor.
The screenplay writers, who are at the core of any film, tend to be forgotten about, and The Quiet Man is no exception. Perhaps not surprisingly, Ford did not turn first to Maurice Walsh because, great storyteller though he was, he had no experience writing for the movies. It seems he did think of using Liam O’Flaherty who had written the screenplay for Ford’s Oscar winning The Informer (1935) but he was not available. The first draft screenplay for The Quiet Man was written by Laurence Stallings who had a good track record in Hollywood but Ford was unhappy with the result. He then turned to Welshman Richard Llewellyn who had written the screenplay of another of Ford’s Oscar winning movies, How Green Was My Valley (1941). Ford instructed Llewellyn to turn Walsh’s story into a novella suitable for adaptation into a movie screenplay. The story was to be set in the Ireland of 1923 at the height of the Troubles, involving ambushes, kidnappings and the Black and Tans and had Sean Thornton coming back from America to do his bit in the fight for Irish freedom.
Llewellyn did a fine job and was well paid for his trouble, but Ford suddenly changed direction. He realised that music, laughter and fun were a better basis for the movie he wanted to make and that this was the image of Ireland that he wished to portray, so he hired Frank Stanley Nugent to lighten the script and give us the fine screenplay we know and love so much today. However, Nugent retained many of Llewellyn’s lines, plots and scenarios which were of very high quality.
Ford’s new outlook meant that The Quiet Man had now become something of a rollicking musical comedy built around a few more serious issues like land possession and Irish marriage customs. First there was the music to be chosen and Ford showed great taste in using many of the tunes he had learned at his Irish mother’s knee. But his choice of the opening music was a masterstroke—The Isle of Innisfree by Irish policeman composer Richard Farrelly. This sublime melody was reprised several times during the film and has since been recorded by dozens of singers, most notably Bing Crosby. Other lovely Irish melodies included were The Rakes of Mallow, The Kerry Dances, Galway Bay, I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen, The Wild Colonial Boy, Mush Mush, Thomas Moore’s The Young May Moon and the final Saint Patrick’s Day. Great credit must go to the arrangements and playing of Victor Young and his orchestra who gave new life and sparkle to those old Irish tunes. Young certainly deserved an Oscar for his efforts but was not even nominated. In fact, throughout his long career he was nominated nineteen times without success. Ironically, he won the Oscar for his musical contribution to Around the World in Eighty Days, but died before it could be conferred.
Maureen O’Hara
In every survey worldwide, The Quiet Man is always found among the top hundred films ever made and in Ireland it always tops the list, and has done so consistently for the last seventy-five years. Why is it ranked so highly and loved so much? To my mind it is like a rich Christmas cake—just look at the ingredients. The original story was by Maurice Walsh, one of the best storytellers this country has produced; the screenplay had inputs from some great writers—Stallings, Llewellyn and Nugent, with several ad libs from Ford himself; Ford , the director who won six Oscars, a feat unlikely ever to be equalled, one of the greatest directors of all time , was at the top of his form; the cast was teeming too with performance Oscar winners—Wayne who eventually won an Oscar for his part of Rooster Coogan in True Grit ( 1969 ); Maureen O’Hara who won a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in her later years; Victor McLaglen who won an Oscar for his part in The Informer (1935); Barry Fitzgerald who won an Oscar for Going My Way (1944) after uniquely being nominated in two different categories; Mildred Natwick, as the Widow Tillane, later Oscar nominated for her role in Barefoot in the Park (1967) and Winton Hoch and Archie Stout, cinematography Oscar winners for 1952.
As we have said , add to the mix the lovely music of Victor Young and the beautiful Irish scenery. Then there were the Irish Players ,as they were called ,drawn mostly from the Abbey Theatre, experienced actors who hammed it up for all they were worth. These included Eric Gorman, Eileen Crowe, Jack McGowran, Sean McClory, James Lilburn, Charles Fitzsimons, Michael O’Brian, Joseph O’Dea, and Arthur Shields. Include also local extras and bit players from Cong, Cross, The Neale and Galway City. Ford believed that every Irish person was a natural actor and gave speaking parts and significant roles to many untrained local people. These included Paddy O’Donnell, Robert Foy, John Horan, Kevin Lawless, Jim McVeigh, Jim Morrin, Joe Fair, Bill Maguire, Etta Vaughan, Paddy Clark, Joe Mellotte, Maura Coyne, Martin Thornton, Eileen Ryan, Mary Maguire, John Daly and many others. They responded enthusiastically and enhanced The Quiet Man considerably. Of course, Ford made sure they were all well rewarded financially from Herb Yates’s budget.
At the Oscar ceremony in 1952, The Quiet Man received seven nominations.These were: 1. Best Picture.
- Best Supporting actor: Victor McLaglen
- Best Director: John Ford
4.Best Screenplay: Frank S. Nugent
- Best Colour Cinematography: Winton Hoch and Archie Stout
- Best Art Decoration and Best Set Decoration: John McCarthy Jr., Frank Hotaling, and Charles S. Thompson
- Best Sound Recording: Daniel J. Bloomberg
Sadly, out of seven nominations, The Quiet Man received only two Oscars. Ford quite rightly won the coveted award for best director and Hoch and Stout were honoured for their superb colour cinematography. The best picture Oscar went to Cecil B. De Mille’s now largely and justifiably forgotten The Greatest Show on Earth, but Kramer’s High Noon with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly ran it close. Subsequent history shows that The Quiet Man was easily the best film of that year and should have taken the award. Victor McLaglen ,already an Oscar winner in 1935, was edged out by another actor of Irish descent, Anthony Quinn for his role in Viva Zapata. But perhaps as a consolation, there was a special Oscar for Merian C. Cooper, an associate producer of The Quiet Man and also famous for King Kong (1933).
However, even in the nominations, there was no mention of Wayne, O’Hara, Fitzgerald or Young—shameful omissions. In an interview, Maureen O’Hara told me that there was a lot of movie politics involved at the time, but that is a story for another day. Incidentally, when I first saw The Quiet Man in a makeshift cinema in Enniscrone in County Sligo in 1953, my favourite character was Jack McGowran as the toadying Feeney, an in-joke relating to Ford’s real surname. In recent years I had the honour of cutting the tape at the opening of Pat Cohan’s pub in Cong with Tara McGowran, Jack’s beautiful actress daughter.
If you visit the picturesque village of Cong at any time of the year, you will find Quiet Man fans from all over the world there, seeking out locations and communing with their favourite movie. Gerry Collins and his family run a museum there and conduct guided tours of the locations—these are thoroughly recommended. Pat Cohan’s Pub featured in the movie though it was then merely Murphy’s grocery store, but it is now a real pub and restaurant. The nationalities that seem to love The Quiet Man the most are the Irish, North and South, Americans of course, Continental Europeans, especially the French, Spanish and also Italians, who compare it to The Taming of the Shrew. Irish emigrants to the United Kingdom, especially Scotland seem too to have a soft spot for the movie and, perhaps inexplicably, our movie is very popular with the Japanese people.
The lasting and international popularity of The Quiet Man may be due to the fact that its basic theme is that of emigration and displacement—a universal dilemma. Sean Thornton was born in Ireland and went to America before returning to Ireland again. In the United States he is treated as a foreign Irishman, while in Ireland he is treated as a foreign American—he has no concrete roots or nationality and runs foul of local traditions and behaviour. John Ford experienced this feeling too growing up in an Irish-American family in Portland Maine and maybe the movie was his way of explanation.
It will be obvious to anyone who has read this far, that I am an out and out Quiet Man fanatic, or ‘Quiet Maniacs’ as we call ourselves. I have watched the film over five hundred times on video, CD, BluRay and in the cinema. Worse still, I have viewed all 200,000 individual frames which is a real eye-opener. I was the first Chairman of the Quiet Man Fan Club and it is the only movie to have such an organisation, with annual conferences. I spoke at and helped organise the first ever international academic conference on a single film at the University of Galway 2005 (Guess which film?). Naturally, it is my favourite film, the best movie ever made, and I am not alone in my opinion.
John Ford was a practical joker who liked to weave mystery into his movies. For example, he included several racy lines in the Irish language in The Quiet Man which he left untranslated on the screen. But he also left a mystery which ensured that his film would be talked about for many years to come—The Whisper. In the final frames of the movie, John Ford suggests that Mary Kate whisper something into Sean Thornton’s ear as an ad lib. She refuses because it is too rude, but Ford persuades her to do so by promising that only she, Wayne and Ford himself will ever know what it was and swears them all to secrecy. When I interviewed Maureen O’Hara in the late nineties, I asked her what it was , but she refused to tell me. She even refused to leave it to me in a sealed envelope in her will. But I have cracked it and am probably the only person on the planet who knows what it is. I have told nobody, not even my good wife Anne; nor have I told anyone how I did it , because that would give the game away. But here it is in code—so get cracking on breaking the code and finding the solution. And good luck!
7, 9,10,14, 212, 5, 8, 10,156, 0, 24, 6, 12, 73, 0, 2, 30, 0, 9, 8, 10, 21, 3, 20, 47, 0,1, 75, 46
Bibliography
The Quiet Man and Beyond Sean Crossan and Rod Stoneman The Liffey Press (2009)
The Complete Guide to the Quiet Man Des MacHale Appletree Press (2000)
Picture The Quiet Man Des MacHale Appletree Press (2004)
A Quiet Man Miscellany Des MacHale Atrium Cork University Press (2009)
