Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 5

  This is probably the Ford film which has taken me the longest to get around to - I've always been aware of it's subtext and critique, but it never fully clicked with me until now. Maybe it was the poor quality of previous home video versions of the movie, coupled with the jarring jump to this new one. But under this viewing I found it to be among one of Ford's most complex and audacious films - more than mere Irish "blarney," this is another film on issues of representation, and if it is not quite as successful as something like Fort Apache in this regard, it's merely because it's not as jarring, and dares to be entertaining at times…

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  Review by rischka ★★★★ 4

  it's been 10 years or more since i last tried to watch this - and found it a garish mess of blatant stereotypes and macho posturing, condescending and far too sentimental. barry fitzgerald's character might as well be a leprechaun in this fairy tale place. certainly the charms of john wayne eluded me. but a dozen ford films and as many years later it's a completely different experience. the green world is a mythic plane - like monument valley or tombstone. the music spins a web of community - one whose rites the american doesn't understand. the duke's physical grace has rarely been so apparent as when he strides across the fields seething with barely contained rage after his bride…

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  Review by Willow Maclay

  The Quiet Man is probably the best film that ends with a 20 minute WWF Attitude Era brawl.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★½ 22

  “The Quiet Man” is an image of Ireland as rendered through a rosy lens thick with saturated nostalgia the likes of which even Thomas Kinkade would gawk over. 

  Now, Kinkade isn’t an artist I would necessarily hang up in my own living room.... but, I’m not enough of a snob to knock those who choose to decorate with one of his densely lit cozy cottage paintings. 

  “A Quiet Man” is the Kinkade of Ford films. Just as the (in)famous populist artist used hyper unrealistic color and form to guide people through his easy-to-interpret works, so does Ford with “Quiet Man.” A critic or a cynic might say there’s less complexity in such art. Sure, but isn’t it pleasant sometimes to…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½

  Don't know what's mistier in this film: the Irish hills or Ford's eyes, yet even this double scoop of sentiment has a careful study of community that almost lends reality to what would otherwise be the Irish equivalent of Brigadoon. Ford may be in love with Eire, but he also tempers that with the realities that pierced the subjectivity of his own visits. The communal spectatorship of individual life feels as suffocating as quaint, as does the manner in which men drink and scuffle to create and maintain bonds. More importantly, though, Maureen O'Hara's hair is why Technicolor had to be invented.

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  Review by braden ★½

  “Who gave you leave to be kissin’ me?”

  John Ford’s The Quiet Man starts as a nice little film that follows John Wayne as an American returning to his birthplace in Ireland, building a quaint sense of community and life with its fairytale aesthetics and simple but pleasing romance story. However, despite this initially endearing exterior, there’re too many ‘of their time’ problematic elements that really offset the movie’s allegedly idyllic world; with reductive stereotypes, sexual assault, and continual misogyny that really don’t sit well when watching it today, making its sense of ‘innocence’ feel especially unpleasant and backward. Some aspects do stand out, particularly the cinematography and Maureen O’Hara’s performance, but beyond that it’s hard to fall for this film’s attempted charm; coming across as frustrating and cheesy instead of loveable, and feeling particularly outdated.

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 2

  it's like you took all the nostalgic fantasy of how green was my valley but then treated it like reality. a pure dream-world.

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  Review by Andrew ★★★½ 2

  Irish Stereotype Checklist:

  Violent------Check
  Drunk-------Check
  Stubborn-----Check

  Did I mention Drunk?

  Yet it all looks so gay and joyous. In this film John Wayne plays an American, born in a small village in Ireland, that is returning to his birthplace. Upon arrival he sees and instantly falls for a stunningly red-headed Maureen O'Hara. Only her brother despises Wayne and won't allow her to be courted.

  This is a movie about the customs and traditions of times gone past. It is also about ugly Americans and how we think that everything should function "our way". That is where the drama, and much of the humor, is found in this film.

  For a John Ford directed film, I found this to be a…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★½

  Director John Ford constructs an outstanding supporting cast around John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, who develop an impassioned connection for one another in The Quiet Man. Based on a short story by Maurice Walsh and set against the very camera-friendly looking countryside of Ireland, which is captured by the luxuriant cinematography of Winton Hoch, it follows a former American boxer who returns to the small village of his childhood and falls in love with a redheaded woman. Wayne’s leading performance transmits the films first misstep as he creates a strange tonal disparity in this old fashioned romantic drama which paints a fluctuating maudlinness of Irish life.

  Co-starring Ward Bond and Victor McLaglen who set into effect their fairest manifestations of…

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  Review by brintharaj ★★½ 1

  Don’t know what to feel about this. On one hand, the film does look very pretty and the colourful Irish characters are somewhat endearing, even if they’re one dimensional caricatures. However, at least to my foreign sensibilities, the film appears to romanticize sentiments and customs that seem horribly misogynistic. John Wayne manhandling Maureen O’Hara (it was done for laughs) made me uncomfortable, so I didn’t exactly warm up to the comedic sensibilities of the film either.

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  Review by Melissa Tamminga ★★★★★ 6

  Lush technicolor vistas and deeply warm sentiment, tempered by sly humor and taut sexual tension - and I'm left swooning, laughing, and heated up, all at once. In a word, irresistible.

  (Note for the record: This is the film that has made me finally fall for John Wayne. I get it now.)

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  Review by Muffintree ½ 11

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  There's a wonderful moment in THE QUIET MAN that's loaded with symbolic potential. Irish-American boxer Sean Thornton (Wayne) comes back to his ancestral home and he's painting the door. The local Anglican minister comes by for a visit, laughs, and says "only an American would have thought to paint it emerald green." It's a wonderful statement on the romanticism of the Irish-American imagination and how they saw Ireland as an artifact frozen in time rather than a living, evolving society. If the film demonstrated any self-awareness, I would think that Ford was winking at the audience and letting them in on the joke - THE QUIET MAN is an Irish diaspora fever dream. It's the most Irish Irish thing that…