John Ford directed many great westerns, but while looking toward America, his heart was in his parents’ homeland, Ireland. This revealing documentary explores Ford’s most personal film, The Quiet Man (1952), about an Irish-American (John Wayne) reclaiming his place in his ancestral home. It is a mythopoetic narrative with an implicit invocation of W.B. Yeats from a director who disclaimed the role of artist and maintained he was only doing “a job of work.”
