September's here, bringing a bouquet of solid cinema - among them, the Best Picture nominee The Quiet Man.
Long in development, The Quiet Man started life as a short story by Maurice Walsh, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1933. Director-producer John Ford originally envisioned it as a more dramatic story with the Troubles and the IRA firmly part of the story, as in The Informer. By 1952, we'd had a World War and were in the middle of a Red Scare; except for two joking references, the Troubles and the IRA were no longer part of the picture. Instead, what we get is the story of a man escaping his past by following an ideal of someone else's memory, the Ireland his mother told him about. Indeed, what we get is a love story between an American and an Irishwoman, each learning how to adjust to the other's culture.
The film was a hit with audiences and the Oscars, and was one of six or seven exceptional films released that September:
