One of the films that helped kill Margaret Lockwood's career. Is it so hard to rip off The Quiet Man? Republic and Herbert Wilcox got the same writer and Victor McLaglen. And if they couldn't get John Wayne they tried with Forrest Tucker.
Tucker is no John Wayne - he can act and lumber but doesn't have the same charisma. He isn't helped by the dumb story. He's an outsider (an American who served in the army during the war) and so too are Margaret Lockwood and father Orson Welles. Why have three outsiders?
Actually you don't need Tucker in the film. The movie should have been about Lockwood and Welles moving to Scotland, being fishes out of water... and she has a romance with Scotsman John McCallum. Tucker is an adjunct and so is that polio riddled girl they shove in and spend far too much screen time on
Also for a Scottish Quiet Man the film is incredibly non Scottish. The Quiet Man had Maureen O'Hara, Barry Fitzgerald and all these Irish actors plus was filmed in Ireland. This feels totally un Scottish. It seems to have been mostly shot on the backlot and has non Scottish actors like John McCallum and Victor McLaglen. Was Finlay Currie not working?
The slackness of this just got to me.
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