Critics reviews

The film is a fairy tale from start to finish, impossible to mistake for anything like reality. What ultimately counts most is its glorious imagery, some of it intensely radiant, some carrying what Manny Farber called "the sunless, remembered look of a surrealist painting"... The Quiet Man isn't legendary like The Searchers or profound like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) or unjustly neglected like Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958), but it's arguably the most unforgettable of them all.

The film freely mixes crass barroom comedy, a lyrical and fragile romance, a sidelong study of Innisfree's generational and class fissures, and even a Rabelaisian fist-fighting finale. If it's an ungainly variety, it doesn't suggest directorial sloppiness, but the warmth of oral tradition as it dances around a cluster of themes (belonging, redemption, reconciliation) with the vigor of a yarn spun, porter in hand, alongside an open fire.

The film's verdant fairytale setting and glorious Technicolor artifice give the kissing-and-fighting love story theatrical resonance, as Wayne and Maureen O'Hara exchange stolen windblown or rain-soaked embraces.

John Ford's bluff and sentimental comedy, from 1952, set in the Irish countryside, is as much an anthropological adventure as a romantic rhapsody.

Shot partly on location in Ireland and designed in the lushest greens ever squeezed out of Technicolor, The Quiet Man is a movie that isn't about a whole lot, but yet seems to contain so much—from Wayne's easygoing charisma to the notoriously protracted climactic fight to the febrile, film-noir-like flashback to Sean's boxing days. To put it in simpler terms: if High Noon is a story, The Quiet Man is a whole universe.

A supremely wacky and moving movie in verdant Technicolor, and in the midst of his rather more serious and often even ponderous films, this pure comedy from a director who rarely with remark excels at comedy was a delight... A lively, irreverent, and unassuming part of the beautiful, complex dialectic found in Ford's cinema, the humor in all these films is (personally) hilarious but also (critically) structurally essential.

Ford's themes here are fulfillment, fertility and renewal (it is certainly the most erotic of Ford's movies, with its powerful evocation of the physical passion that draws the central couple together), while the community that collapsed into suspicion and factitiousness in "Valley" here unites into a unified chorus, with an ending that even hints at an end to "the troubles." If you're making a fantasy, Ford suggests, it's best to go all the way.

The Quiet Man remains one of the purest distillations of this charismatic filmmaker's diverse artistic nature.

A wonderful film, with a marvelous supporting cast headed by Barry Fitzgerald as Wayne's pixieish helper.

All this padding of what is supposed to be an illusive, impressionistic study of a land and its people is disturbing because it becomes the underlying motive for the scenes, revealing the limited significance of every pub brawl, horse race, or pastoral event almost before the scene is under way.