The Quiet Man (1951)

My stay in Galway was, all in all, a splendid experience. Fergus and Audrey were excellent hosts. They even indulged me on Saturday with a road trip out to County Mayo, and the scenic area along the coast called Connemara, where the Irish Gaelic language is still spoken on a daily basis. As we drove, Fergus kept a Gaelic language radio station playing. He was pleased that I could still speak it a little, even after years of hardly any practice.

Our first stop there was the village of Cong, which happened to be the location where John Ford shot most of The Quiet Man in 1951. The Quiet Man is one of my favorite movies for several reasons, one of them being that it is the only Hollywood movie I know that has spoken Gaelic in it (the scene where Maureen O'Hara's character tells the priest, played by Ward Bond, that her husband has been sleeping in a sleeping bag).

It's also the first movie I showed when I was a projectionist for my film class back as an undergraduate, and I still remember the stress of changing reels for the first time. Professon Nolley had chosen it as the first film because the theme was the class was how Hollywood possibly "constructs" our gender identities. Obviously it's a theme which continues to interest me to this day.

At the tourist office in Cong, I bought a five euro map that provided a self-guided tour of the shooting location for Ford's movie. My hosts were patient with me as I made them walk around the town and the nearby road while I read from the guide map. It turns out that the tiny village of Cong serves as both the nearby village, and the "market town" in the movie, which the locations of each barely a hundred feet apart. It was all terrific fun, despite the on-and-off rain.

Later we drove down the road to Ashford Castle, which is actually now a five-star hotel. You're supposed to pay to enter the grounds, but Fergus drove the wrong way down the exit road, half by accident. We got flagged down and stopped by a guy claiming to be the manager, who excoriated Fergus, telling him to turn around. He pretended to, but kept going until we were in the parking lot. Fergus and Audrey said the guy spoke with a "Posh" accent from the wealthy areas of south Dublin. It sounds as close to an English accent as you get in Ireland, evidently.

We compounded our transgression by having a picnic right in the car from the cheeses, fruits, olives, and bread that Audrey had bought at the market earlier that morning (there was a sign saying absolutely no picnics).

Then we got really daring, exploring the grounds around the castle, where we nearly got attacked by a falcon from a tour guide giving a demonstration of the art of handling such birds.

I thought this was daring enough, since we hadn't paid a pence to do any of this, but Audrey decided we just had to sneak into the castle/hotel itself and have a "wee look around." It turns out Audrey really as a spirit for these kind of things.

So we found an open door and sauntered around the ground floor, through the bar area. Then we went upstairs and perused the large collection of photographs of the famous guests, including Ronald Reagan, Prince Charles (eugenicist), and Brad Pitt. Audrey signed the guest register nearby. She was hellbent on having a cup of tea at the restaurant, but Fergus was skittish, saying that they would surely want to charge it to our room. I'm sort of a wimp about these things too, so she was outvoted two-to-one. In retrospect, we should have just gone with it. What's the harm in getting thrown out, anyway?

What would John Ford, the Duke, and Maureen O'Hara have done in the same situation? They would have gone for it, of course. But Ford and the Duke would have been drunk by then anyway,

We capped our day to a visit to the "Quiet Man Bridge," which is quite a distance from the other locations. It looks exactly as it did in 1951. We swapped cameras and took pictures of ourselves on the stone bridge where John Wayne as Sean Thornton first met Michaleen Og (Barry Fitzgerald) in the movie. I made sure to get a picture with "cowie," the little plastic longhorn cow that my nieces gave me before I left, and which they insisted accompany me. My sister said that they loved the "cowie" pictures I sent my email from Portugal, making two copies of them to carry around with them.

Plenty of cows in Ireland, by the way. Cows in movies, by the way, always appear as a symbol of happiness and love. The appearance of a cow, and how it is shown, is indicative of the theme of how the characters experience love at that point int he movie. It's a pet theory of mine. I call it "The Magic Cow of Happinness." Sometime I'll have to write about it.