STAGED IRELAND IN FILMIC TRANSLATION:

JOHN FORD’S THE QUIET MAN AND THE IRISH THEATRICAL TRADITION

Abstract

Introduction: John Ford’s The Quiet Man
Since the time of its release in 1952 and up to the present John Ford’s The Quiet Man, starring
John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, has remained one of the most popular movies in
America, as well as elsewhere. The film, set in the 1920s, tells the story of an American
prizefighter, Sean Thornton, who, having killed an opponent in a boxing match, decides to
return to Ireland, his ancestral homeland in hopes of finding peace. Once in Inisfree (Ford’s
imaginary village, whose name bears Yeatsian and poetic overtones) Thornton enters a premodern, pre-industrial world, whose idyllic landscape and archaic and traditional
community, with its rituals and jokes, loyalties and feuds set it at complete odds with the
world of the twentieth-century America that the hero left behind.