John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara are two legends of Hollywood’s Golden Age who starred in five movies together, the most acclaimed of which is John Ford’s 1952 classic The Quiet Man. Wayne and Irish actor O’Hara first worked together in Ford’s Western romance Rio Grande two years earlier, when their on-screen chemistry quickly became apparent. But it was only with follow-up collaboration The Quiet Man that their acting partnership really came into its own.
The film features a rare comic turn from Wayne as Irish-American boxer “Trooper Thorn” Thornton, who moves to rural Ireland to manage his family’s homestead. O’Hara plays Thornton’s love interest, whose brother he must fight in one of John Wayne’s best fight scenes to win her hand in marriage. The Duke trades in his usual Stetson hat for a peasant’s flatcap, and his whiskey flask for “one of those black beers,” as he calls them. Meanwhile, O’Hara gives the only performance of her career set in her native Ireland.
The Quiet Man Was John Wayne & Maureen O’Hara’s Best Movie Together
It Took Risks Their Other Films Didn’t
The parochial setting of The Quiet Man diverges from the sweeping depictions of the American West and contemporary warfare with which John Ford is synonymous as a director. At the same time, it invokes the small-town charm of his 1941 Oscar-winner How Green Was My Valley, in which Maureen O’Hara also played the female lead for her first major Hollywood role. It’s this setting, combined with a performance from Wayne which reveals surprisingly versatile acting chops, that sets the movie apart from the four others starring the pair.
A rousing pub rendition of the Irish folk song “Wild Colonial Boy” typifies the film’s authentic portrayal of Ireland’s customs and traditions. This commitment to realism has earned The Quiet Man the only Rotten Tomatoes score above 80% for any Wayne-O’Hara collaboration, as well as Ford’s fourth Oscar for Best Director.
John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara’s other movies follow more risk-averse cinematic formulas, with Rio Grande effectively painting the romantic war western by numbers and 1971’s Big Jake leaning heavily into Wayne’s long-established curmudgeonly cowboy. Elsewhere, The Wings of Eagles more than earns its parodic reference in the satirical Coen Brothers film Hail, Caesar!, and the 1963 crowdpleaser McLintock! ultimately serves to demonstrate that Wayne and O’Hara weren’t really cut out for exploitation cinema.
Why John Wayne & Maureen O’Hara Were Such A Great Onscreen Pairing
O’Hara Could Handle the Duke’s Big-Screen Charisma
Nevertheless, there’s a reason why John Ford’s two favorite lead actors straddled three decades and four genres together on the big screen. O’Hara could match Wayne’s on-screen charisma like few other female actors at the time, while their compatibility for physical comedy is particularly evident in The Quiet Man.
Likewise, when it comes to romance, the pair offer up an easy mix of tension and repartee that belies Wayne’s legacy as a gun-toting hardman of Western adventure stories. “Who gave you leave to be kissing me?” O’Hara’s heroine Mary Kate Danaher demands of him in The Quiet Man. For once, the Duke defers to a woman’s strength of will, and O’Hara, in turn, opens up a tender side to him seldom seen across his half-century in cinema.