Pastoral Scenes in The Quiet Man

A Quiet Man Miscellany

by Des MacHale

(Atrium, €28.40)

Peter Costello

Though not the greatest Irish film ever made, The Quiet Man is certainly the most popular, and it has to be said, one of the most entertaining.

Des MacHale is a life long devotee of the film and an avid picker up of all kinds of information, important and trifling, relating to it. This is his third book about the film, so some might wonder if there was anything new or interesting for him to say about it.

However, not to be out done, the enthusiast triumphs. One of the recovered items are the letters home to America by Meta Sterne, who was involved on the production side. These are most amusing, with the sophisticated Californian lady at odds with the weather, the people and the food.

But of much greater general interest is a later chapter devoted to ''The Ecumenical Priest''. Now ecumenical was not a word that was ever heard in the 1920s when the film is supposedly set, or in the early Fifties when it was made. But I had always been intrigued by the scenes in which Fr Lonergan, the parish priest, covers up his Roman collar with a scarf and urges on his own parishioners to turn out to cheer ''like good Protestants'' for the Church of Ireland bishop who has been visiting the rector, the Rev. Mr Playfair, with a view to closing the local church and moving him out.

One might have thought this was an amusing conceit, but not one taken from life. But according to Des Mac- Hale the scenes were inspired by a real life incident, when the parish priest of Pettigo, a Fr Neal Ryan, a popular figure with every one in his district, in 1837 turned out his people to fill a service in Aughterdrum Church when the C of I bishop came to check up on the size of his friend Rev. Tuttle's congregation.

Remarkable in 1837; remarkable, as Des McHale observes, in 1951. But perhaps a sample of the human warmth that informs the whole of John Ford's classic.