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Popular Culture Review
sociocultural point of view from much of his previous (and later) work; it’s a rare
film in his canon in which the protagonist happily ends up exactly where he wants
with very little compromise, including no acceptance whatsoever of urban
industrialism. Remarkably, considering the film takes place in Ireland and not the
American West, close examination reveals that the cultural conflict between
urbanism and agrarianism is just as present here as it is elsewhere in Ford’s work.
Just as in other films of his major period there is a clear winner in the battle
between urban and rural; in The Quiet Man, however, the winner is the rural
agrarianism of our most sentimentally pastoral dreams. Although it takes place in
Ireland, The Quiet Man is nevertheless an American fantasy, with Ireland serving
as the mythical frontier land beyond city limits that Americans, even today,
desperately want to believe still exists. We should pay much more attention than
we’ve been willing to pay to this remarkable film.
Tellingly, the film begins with a train cutting across the amazingly
beautiful Irish countryside (Ford was accused of having painted the fields, but if
he did, he never admitted it [Gallagher 283]). The train recalls the stagecoach at
the beginning of several Ford films, including Stagecoach and Fort Apache.
Regardless of the similarities, that it is a train and not a stagecoach changes
things. In Ford’s other works, the stagecoach is a sign of an encroaching era, a
precursor of quickly approaching industrialism. But a train, especially in The
Quiet M an3s idealized rural landscape, signals that the industrial age has already
arrived. By starting with a train Ford has placed us in a time, though not
necessarily a place, in which we can assume the idea of a further frontier has been
long since dead.
This opening scene features a literal manifestation of what Leo Marx
calls “the machine in the garden,” which he illustrates by citing a July 27, 1844,
Nathaniel Hawthorne journal entry, in which Hawthorne records his thoughts
during a morning reverie. In it, Hawthorne joyously, and seemingly without
irony, recounts the sound of a train barreling through the idyllic rural landscape.
This scene served as a precursor to the eventually common literary trope of a
machine’s sudden appearance in the landscape, famous examples of which
include Thoreau’s hearing a train whistle along with a hawk’s cry in Walden,
Moby-Dick3s Ishmael seeing a whale’s skeleton morph into a New England textile
mill before his very eyes, Whitman’s flawless intermingling of seemingly
contradictory industrial and rural imagery in “Song of Myself,” and the steamboat
smashing through the middle of Huck and Jim’s raft in Adventures o f Huckleberry
Finn. Marx writes that Hawthorne’s notes “mark the shaping of a metaphoric
design which recurs everywhere” in American literature (15-16). Not only does
this metaphoric design occur in American literature, it recurs throughout the films
of John Ford.
Although Ford’s parents were Irish immigrants, he was nevertheless
bom in America and, accordingly, spent his cinematic career grappling with his