The Quiet Man/The Mountain

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The Quiet Man (1952) is director John Ford's epic romantic comedy - a loving, sentimental, nostalgic tribute to his Irish ancestry and homeland. A rich, beautifully-textured Technicolor presentation deserving of its Color Cinematography award, it was filmed mostly on location in Ireland, although some backdrops and background studio shots were obviously intermixed. Its screenplay was based on Frank Nugent's adaptation of Maurice Walsh's Saturday Evening Post 1933 short story Green Rushes. Ford considered the rollicking, comedy love story one of his favorite films.

[The memorable plot, about the collision course between an anti-materialistic, Irish-American boxer nicknamed 'Trooper Thornton' (Wayne) in the town of Innisfree in the land of his Irish birthplace and a local, mean bully (McLaglen) - further entangled when he falls in love with the man's fiesty, red-haired, materialistic sister (O'Hara) who refuses to consummate her marriage without her dowry (350 Irish pounds in gold), was inspired by a Celtic myth about a monumental battle between two sacred kings (gods) who annually fought for the affections of a queen (or goddess).]

The famous director of westerns had already won Best Director Academy Award Oscars for three previous non-Western films - The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941). This sentimental film, Ford's first 'romantic love story,' received a total of seven Academy Awards nominations (including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor - Victor McLaglen, Best Screenplay - Frank Nugent, Best Art Direction, and Best Sound) and won two Oscars: Best Cinematography - Winton Hoch and Archie Stout, and Ford (at 57 years of age) won his fourth and final Best Director Oscar, establishing a record that is still unbeaten.

Because the film was an ambitious, personal pet project and not one of Ford's typical westerns, he was unable to find financial backing from the major Hollywood studios, so he turned to Republic Pictures, a smaller studio regarded as the studio for B-pictures and low-budget westerns. After the financial and critical success of Rio Grande (1950) for the studio, the third of Ford's 'cavalry trilogy,' he convinced Republic Pictures to support him for his next riskier film - an Irish "Taming of the Shrew" tale that was remarkably similar in plot. He brought the same stock company of actors from his western - John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, and Maureen O'Hara - to Ireland to film his humorous, epic romance. In the seventeen years of Republic's existence, it was the first film for the studio that was nominated for Best Picture.

It has been said that John Wayne represented John Ford on-screen as a younger 'alter-ego' of the famous American film director. [Ford was born Sean Aloysius Feeney/O'Fearna in 1895 in Maine, the youngest son of an Irish immigrant who had 13 children.] It is probably not just coincidence that Maureen O'Hara's character name is Mary (Ford's wife's name) Kate (the name of his unrealized love - Katharine Hepburn). Ford also cast his brother Francis (a silent film actor and director) in a cameo role as patriarch Dan Tobin - an ailing, white-bearded elderly man who refuses to die before witnessing the donnybrook fist fight in the finale.

The Mountain - Selfish Chris Teller pressures his older brother, a retired climber, to accompany him on a treacherous Alpine climb to loot the bodies of plane crash victims.  The music was composed by Daniele Amfitheatrof - A well-respected conductor and composer, who arrived in the US in 1937 and became a citizen in 1944. His education included studies with Wladimir Tscherbachev, Otto Respighi, and Jaroslav Krichka in the Conservatory and Pontifical Academy of Sacred Music of Vatican in Rome. He was assistant conductor of the Augusteo Symphony in Rome between 1924-1929; music director of the Italian Broadcasting Corporation between 1929-1937; and guest conductor of various symphony orchestras in Europe and the US. He joined ASCAP in 1948 and the Screen Composers Associaton in 1950, and was a member of the Motion Picture Academy Arts & Sciences. He was the American delegate to the Florence Music Film Congress. His symphonic works include "Poem of the Sea"; "The Miracle of the Roses"; "Prelude to a Requiem Mass"; "American Panorama" (Gran Prix du Disque); and "Piano Concerto". His one popular tune was "Major Dundee March".