John Ford: The Quiet Man

“If there is any single thing that explains either of us,” John Ford once said to Eugene O’Neill, “it’s that we’re Irish.”

Their worlds intersected in 1940, when Ford directed his film version of O’Neill’s sea trilogy, The Long Voyage Home. That dark and moody film about men on a tramp steamer perfectly captured O’Neill’s Irish fatalism, and it was the playwright’s favorite among the films made from his work. John Ford (1894-1973) was a man of many varied and often conflicting moods, themes, and obsessions. Although Ford usually is identified with the Western genre, in which he made such masterpieces as Stagecoach and The Searchers, his vast body of work encompasses a wide range of subject matter. He made many films about small town and rural America, about men at sea, and about America’s wars from the Revolution through Vietnam. But perhaps closest to his heart were his films about his beloved Ireland, such as The Quiet Man and The Rising of the Moon.

At a time when it was not fashionable to do so, Ford took defiant pride in his ethnic origins. Born John Martin Feeney — not Sean O’Feeney, O’Fearna, or O’Fienne, as he variously liked to claim — he was the son of Irish immigrants who left their native County Galway and settled in Portland, Maine. His father was a saloonkeeper and Democratic Party ward boss. Contrary to Ford’ s romantic claims of poverty, he grew up in a comfortable lace-curtain environment, but he was always conscious of the struggles and slights that Irish-Americans had to endure in Yankee-dominated New England. In the words of Orson Welles, Ford had “chips on his shoulders like epaulets.” Following the lead of his older brother Francis, Jack Feeney changed his name to Ford and went into the movies. But legally he always kept the name of his birth.

Ford’s sense of having a dual identity as an Irish-American was a source of many tensions in his life and career, and he turned it to fruitful artistic advantage. Like many children of immigrants, he felt the need to prove his patriotic sense of belonging. This led Ford to a side career in the Navy that eventually, because of his exploits  as a U.S. government filmmaker in World War II and Korea, brought him the rank of rear admiral. Ford’s classic films about the U.S. Cavalry, such as Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, are filled with Irish immigrants moving up the ladder to achieve full social acceptance, often at the cost of their own self-sacrifice for the sake of future generations.

There was a subversive, anarchic side in Ford as well, enabling him to probe deeply into America’s failings and injustices as well as to mock the gunfighting heroics he sometimes celebrated. No other American director of his era was so attentive to the challenging roles played by minority groups in the national psyche. Not only the Irish, but also such groups as Native Americans and African Americans are strongly represented in his films, although sometimes problematically. Standing apart from his era in believing in assertive ethnic identity rather than melting-pot assimilation, Ford always hoped that the rich and diverse strains in the American experience would result in a greater national harmony.

Whatever his subject matter, a Ford film typically revolves around some very Irish preoccupations -the importance of family and community, the sense of exile, the tension between compulsive wandering and the need for home, and the melancholy sense of the transient nature of human existence and worldly institutions. His films often show the breakup of families and the collapse of entire societies; the intermittent periods of optimism in Ford’ s work, as seen in such postwar films as My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master, eventually gave way to a deep pessimism about the future of American society. Underlying everything in Ford are the typically Irish traits that make his work so moving and entertaining: a willingness to express powerful emotions without embarrassment and a tragicomic view of existence. Although shortsighted critics often fault Ford’s use of comedy, it is the Shakespearean virtuosity with which he interweaves the serious and the ridiculous aspects of life that gives his films such vitality and truth.

If there’s any single thing that explains either of us,” John Ford once said to Eugene O’Neill, “it’s that we’re Irish.”

Ford’s films about Ireland tend to be filmed from an exile’s perspective, seeing the land of his ancestors through a sentimental romantic haze, like Eden before the Fall, as the lavish Technicolor landscapes of The Quiet Man so strikingly demonstrate. Even Ford’s films about the struggle of the Irish against the British and the Irish Civil War — such as The Informer, The Plough and the Stars, and the 1921 segment of The Rising of the Moon — are filtered through an extravagant visual expressionism. The same aestheticizing tendencies can be seen in his silent films about Ireland, including The Shamrock Handicap, Mother Machree, and Hangman’s House. And yet, if Ford is not particularly attuned to capturing the mundane realities of life in Ireland, his Ireland has great mythic appeal and perhaps conveys more poetic truth than a strictly realistic treatment could ever hope to achieve. The dark and tragic side of Irish life and politics is never absent from Ford’ s films, even from such a joyous romance as The Quiet Man, which centers on a man’ s attempt to put his violent past behind him and includes several characters (including the village priest) who belong to the IRA. The Quiet Man is the film in which Barry Fitzgerald utters one of the most memorable lines in Ford’ s body of work, a line improvised by the director himself: “Well, it’s a nice soft night, so I think I’ll go and join me comrades and talk a little treason.”

Ford’ s ineradicable Irishness perhaps shows up most clearly not in his films set in Ireland, but in those set in the multicultural society of the United States, for if his Irish-Americans suffer from a “shamrock handicap,” they never turn their backs on their cultural identities in order to be accepted as Americans. In the very first film he directed, a 1917 two-reel Western called The Tornado, Ford himself plays a cowboy who wins a $5,000 reward and sends it to his mother in Ireland so she can keep their ancestral home. Ford films as diverse as The Iron Horse, Riley the Cop, The Long Gray Line, The Last Hurrah, and Donovan’s Reef pay tribute to the pervasive and life-enhancing influence of Irish-Americans on their adopted homeland.

Even a classic Ford film about non-Irish people, The Grapes of Wrath, is suffused with the director’s ethnic memories of poverty and injustice. Ford said he was drawn to the John Steinbeck novel about dispossessed Okies in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s because it reminded him of the Great Famine that drove so many of the Irish to America. By finding such universal qualities in the particularities of his own background, Ford was able to speak to people of all countries, all economic classes, all ethnic groups, and all levels of sophistication. It is that far-reaching quality of empathy and understanding that makes John Ford one of America’s greatest popular artists, perhaps the closest we have come since Walt Whitman to having a national poet.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November 1999 issue of Irish America. ⬥