It's St. Patrick's Day, and along with the wearing of the green and the prodigious consumption of alcohol, and, as sure as the nose on your face, John Ford's The Quiet Man will be playing at a TV set near you. Sodden with boozy Irish sentimentality, the sign of the cross and the fisticuffs, the fiery-haired Colleens, the rolling green fields, and Barry Fitzgerald mouthing Celtic dicta, you're sure not to find more bog fodder than this piece of fine Irish-American treacle. Where one can find the inherent contradictions of the Hibernarian soul -- its brutality and its sentimentality, its conservatism and its joy in poetry-- as inpenetrable as your fifth pint of Guinness, The Quiet Man feels as authentically Irish as green Budweiser.
pieces of tattered celluloid