On the one hand this is a beautiful looking movie, with some great actors and also potentially entertaining and good characters in it but due to its story and the storytelling I feel that this movie isn't really as great and classic as it potentially could had been.
To be honest, the storytelling of the movie just seemed silly to me at times. The movie does some surprising and unexpected things and I don't mean that in a positive way. Here we have two persons desperately trying to get married but once they have they never allow themselves to be happy with each other and complain and means like a couple that have been married for 15 years to each other. I had a hard time figuring out the different characters and what they exactly wanted. The one moment they are angry and fighting each and the other they are laughing and drinking together. And no, I'm of course not just talking about the John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara characters.
The treatment of women in this story is also hardly complimentary. Sure, it's about the Irish somewhat old fashioned culture but seeing John Wayne dragging around his wife for 5 miles and slapping her on the butt for comedy effect just seems wrong to me.
It's still not really hard to see why this is being regarded an 'Irish' classic, despite being an American, Republic Pictures, movie. It's a movie that shows the beauty of Ireland, I mean I've never seen John Wayne so colorful and in such a beautiful environment before and it's also really a movie that is all about Irish culture. They seem to have some strange customs and of course there are some of the stereotyped Irish characters here but overall this really seems like a great advertisement for the country and for that purpose the movie and it's franchise is still being used today. There even is a The Quiet Man tour to take, that makes you visit some of the locations at which this movie was shot.
To me the movie didn't really started off as a comedy and it seemed more to be a dramatic/romance movie. However as it progressed the movie become more and more fun and entertaining to watch, which was also really due to the entertaining characters of the movie, that inhabit the small town the movie got set in. They however never really went all the way with this and it seems to me that if this movie wasn't holding back with this it could had really been a very entertaining and classic movie.
A good movie that suffers from some incoherent storytelling and the choice to not make this movie entertaining all throughout.
7/10
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