The theater director Hilton Edwards declared, "I cannot for the life of me see that (The Quiet Man) has any relation to the Ireland I or anyone else can have seen or known." Yet Luke Gibbons, the Irish film scholar, has written of Ford's use of Irish themes-"collective violence, family ties, rituals of solidarity, a longing for community"-and his awareness of his myth-making. Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen note, "The director's impish spirit...is trained on a thriving Irish community of congenital busybodies as they gather around the spectacle of two lovers (John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara) in a Homeric idyll....From the moment that Wayne's returning native falls under the spell of the landscape and lethargy of Ireland, he seems enmeshed in a dialectical conflict between the warm browns and reds of carnal passion and the cold blues and greens of Catholic protocol." Whether Ireland was used or abused, it is against the backdrop of such productions that Irish independent cinema reacted two decades later. (KG)