Now today is the right day to watch The Quiet Man, if you can. It is one of the greatest good movies ever made. But the Warner Bro's didn't think it could make any money, a movie about Irish Americans and Irishmen.
So they told John Ford and John Wayne that they had to make another movie, a cavalry movie, to fund their Irish movie. It turned out to make more by far than the very successful Rio Grande.
There's a small matter of fitness: can you ride like the ancient Romans?
It breaks my heart to think how far we have fallen from this display of respect of man to woman; this loss of chivalry. We aren't half our grandfather's generation. God help us.
3 comments:
Hard to find a man to handle a horse properly, or be willing to run out in front of a pair at full gallop and wave your arms to stop them, either!
We have so much materially, and so little within us as a people any more.
Once I stopped a horse that had broken free from a woman, by just walking in his path and putting my hand out. He stopped and let me caress him in those places in the face of a horse where the bones give way. She came hurrying up to put a rope on him, and told me I must know a lot about horses. I told her I didn't think so; but maybe I knew enough to know how to communicate with him.
I've occasionally written about men and horses, and how the horse maybe is an important part of training the man. It's the true heart of chivalry, men and horses together. If you can't do that one thing, you'll never understand; and if you can, you already do.
This is also the movie in which the John Wayne character explains, "He must learn that a man's word to anything, even his own destruction, is his honor."
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