‘Quiet Man’ A Tradition For St. Pat’s Day Spirit

Quietly over the last few decades, “The Quiet Man” has become a staple for St. Patrick’s Day, just as “It’s a Wonderful Life” has for Christmas. Described as the ultimate movie about Ireland by those who love it and the ultimate piece of Irish blarney by those who don’t, it is a love story. And in 1952 the director John Ford won an Academy Award for it.

“The Quiet Man” is one of Blockbuster Video’s top classic rentals throughout the year, with rentals higher in Irish-American urban enclaves, according to Wally Kenees, a spokesman for Blockbuster.

And any television station with the right spirit and the right licensing - 42 stations across the country - will run the film at least once this week. TBS will show it, as usual, on St. Patrick’s Day evening. Kevin Little, a publicist for TBS, says it is “the only John Wayne film in our library that attracts as many women as men.”

By now the story, set at an unspecified time, is a familiar one. Sean Thornton (John Wayne), an American ex-boxer, goes back to the small, rural Irish village he left as a child and falls in love with a native, Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara).

Her brother (Victor McLaglen) takes a dislike to Sean and forbids the match, and it requires some scheming by a few of the locals, led by Barry Fitzgerald, before the marriage can take place. It does, but there is that matter of Mary Kate’s unpaid dowry, which leads to a comic fistfight between Thornton and Mary Kate’s brother.

“The Quiet Man” began life in 1935 as a short story, “Green Rushes,” by the Irish writer Maurice Walsh, in the Saturday Evening Post.

John Ford, who in 1895 was born Sean Aloysius O’Feeney, the 13th child of Irish immigrants, purchased the film rights in the mid-1930s; Frank Nugent wrote the screenplay. But Ford’s sporadic, initial attempts to get the project off the ground always stalled.

“Each year,” O’Hara, reached in Beverly Hills, recalls, “we would say, ‘When are we going to make the picture? When are we going to make the picture?’ Year after year went by. Every studio it was taken to turned it down. It was a silly little Irish story, and it would never be successful.”

Finally, John Wayne took Nugent’s script to Herbert Yates, head of Republic Pictures, which was best known for making B westerns. Yates didn’t like the story either. But, O’Hara says, he said that if Ford, Wayne and O’Hara would make a western for him, he would make their pet picture.

The resulting film, “Rio Grande,” was a big hit for Republic in 1950. In the early summer of 1951 Ford and his cast arrived in the village of Cong, in County Mayo, on Ireland’s rainy west coast, for less than three months of shooting, a remarkably short schedule for an expensive film - about $1.5 million - at that time.

“With John Ford you got one take,” O’Hara says. “Something would have to go desperately wrong to get a second take.”

Rounding out the cast was a group of Irish stage actors, many from the Abbey Theater in Dublin. “For nine weeks I was just playing a straight man to those wonderful characters,” Wayne once said.