Drunkenness, angry outbursts, violence, squalor: are these how we think about the Irish? It is if John Ford and John Wayne have their way. At least the casting of Maureen O’Hara and her flaming red hair—to say naught of her temper—lend the proceedings a fair amount of verisimilitude. Truth be told, this is a relentlessly silly film, and I can’t say it is particularly to my taste. The visuals are fine to look at, including but not limited to O’Hara, but the rest of the tale comes across as either ridiculous or profoundly cliched, in a way that suggests an outlook that is either too lazy or unsophisticated to try to create something with more nuance. Even the serious background—Wayne’s ex-boxer character is haunted by a death in the ring—does little to temper the story’s more ridiculous excesses. I suppose this isn’t really a bad flick—the execution isn’t incompetent or anything—so I'll spare the flick a HISS, but I couldn’t ever really find a way to appreciate this effort. Irish eyes, it turns out, smile at the weirdest things.
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