The Quiet Man (Collector's Edition)

Fantasic movie. One of my favorite John Wayne movies even though it was not a western. The soundtrack is beautiful.

This film is a classic for both John Wayne and John Ford. Perhaps it because the film echoes a great dream of the Irish - to return prosperous to the Old country of Ireland where one can live a simple life, fall in love with the most beautiful girl in the county and live out one's years in an idyllic farm. Wayne is the American boxer who returns to encounter a spunky Irish girl (Maureen O'Hara) and her cantankerous brother (Victor MacGlaglen). The film won numerous Oscars for performance, direction, cinematography and more. This was a very personal project for John ford who was from Ireland.

One of the greatest movies of all time (AFI and others agree), but ....

The quality of ALL the existing DVD versions in the marketplace are far inferior to even the print used in repeated airings by Turner Classic Movies (TCM).

Several years ago, the UCLA film restoration geniuses created a wonderful new print from the originals that has been seen in Los Angeles and Ireland.

The ownership of the home video rights has passed through several corporate hands. Right now, Lions Gate owns these rights. Until such time as a Blu-Ray version comes out using the UCLA restoration, I would avoid buying this movie on DVD and simply watch the superior version shown by TCM.

This and Robin Hood were two of the very few films I've had an irrational desire to actually own rather than simply rent. I read the earlier reviews with care, and thought I was getting a good copy, but this Collector's Edition seems to have been the one copied from a poor VHS tape. I am perplexed how it can even be sold. Maybe one day it will come out in a revived copy, in which case I will buy it again.

I have owned practically every VHS and DVD release of this film since 1992's "40th Anniversary Edition," and they all appear to have been transferred from the same print. The color saturation is fairly strong, but the detail is indistinct. I would accept that perhaps this film's unusual distribution history (the fact that many distributors have owned the release rights to this movie over the years) may have contributed to the poor quality, but I recall many years ago seeing a featurette on "Dateline" highlighting the restoration of a number of historic Technicolor films, including this one, and the footage in that featurette appeared to be fully restored--or at least superior to all the video transfers I have ever seen.

Given its place in the John Wayne/John Ford filmography, "The Quiet Man" is an important piece of film history, and it deserves better treatment than it has received. It is only because this film is such a gem that I give three stars to this lackluster transfer of a five-star classic.