Maureen O'Hara: An Alternate Canon

With Tyrone Power in The Long Gray Line, John Ford, 1955

The memori­al enco­mi­ums for Maureen O’Hara have ten­ded to stress the same bunch of movies—Hunchback Of Notre Dame, How Green Was My Valley, Miracle on 34^th Street, The Quiet Man. Which is all well and good, except, you know, they’re not the only pic­tures O’Hara made that are of cinephile or even gen­er­al interest. 

Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939)

O’Hara’s more-or-less debut film (her first, at least, under her stage name) is fre­quently pooh-poohed as “minor Hitchcock,” and the dir­ect­or him­self dis­par­ages it in Hitchcock/Truffaut on account of hav­ing been giv­en a hard time by Charles Laughton, but let us nev­er for­get that “minor Hitchcock” is bet­ter than 95 per­cent of “major” who­ever. This is a highly crack­ing, cinema-wise, peri­od piece—”[Hitchcock] did not fall into the trap of his­tor­ic­al recon­struc­tion but focused instead on mak­ing a baroque and highly embel­lished work,” Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol aptly enthused in their study of Hitch—and young Maureen, entrus­ted with the job of both car­ry­ing the nar­rat­ive and act­ing as audi­ence sur­rog­ate, does an excep­tion­al job, espe­cially for an 18-year-old. 

The Immortal Sergeant (Stahl, 1943)

Andrew Sarris: “In The Immortal Sergeant, for instance, Henry Fonda is in the desert with a men­tal image of Maureen O’Hara emer­ging drip­ping wet from a swim­ming pool. This is the cinema of auda­city to the point of mad­ness, and yet always prefer­able to the rel­at­ive san­ity of dis­cre­tion.” I won’t tell Jeffrey “I always had this fantasy O’Hara was great in the sack” Wells about this if you won’t.

This Land Is Mine (Renoir, 1943)

It is inter­est­ing to con­trast Renoir’s affec­tion­ate near-exasperation with Laughton with Hitchcock’s dis­missive account of his frus­tra­tion. But we’re not here to dis­cuss Laughton, O’Hara’s ment­or (had her under con­tract and everything). This too-little seen war­time quasi-allegory (set “Somewhere In Europe”) fea­tures O’Hara quite con­vin­cingly por­tray­ing an ordin­ary per­son under extraordin­ary cir­cum­stances, a school teach­er beloved of sad-sack col­league Laughton, who finds his cour­age and voice after being accused of killing O’Hara’s quis­ling boy­friend (George Sanders!). Renoir seems hemmed-in by RKO’s back­lots, but the movie is not without its touches—a firing-squad scene wit­nessed by Laughton, the rel­at­ive nuance of Una O’Connor, of all people, and more. 

Buffalo Bill (Wellman, 1944)

One of Wellman’s goofi­er pic­tures but not unat­tract­ive visually—like the more-frequently-cited (with not ille­git­im­ate reas­on, I sup­pose) The Black Swan, it’s part of O’Hara’s  claim to “Queen Of Technicolor” 

The Long Gray Line (Ford, 1955)

Many would call this Pedro Costa favor­ite a truly improb­ably tear­jerker, but it gets me every time. Must be some Irish thing. Seriously, though, this is a remark­ably rich movie and O’Hara’s char­ac­ter is one of her damned­est, in a way an even more stub­born lass than The Quiet Man’s Mary Kate. Tag Gallagher cites “Maureen O’Hara’s mar­velously full-bodied styl­iz­a­tion, con­trast­ing with Tyrone Power’s woodenness.” 

The Deadly Companions (Peckinpah 1961)

Early Peckinpah in lyr­ic­al mode, with Brian Keith as a scarred (in many respects) ex-soldier and O’Hara as a dance hall girl whose son Keith has acci­dent­ally killed. They band togeth­er to cross Apache ter­rit­ory to bury the dead by his fath­er. O’Hara (who found Peckinpah “objec­tion­able”) is fiery in grief; the chem­istry between her and Keith is rather dif­fer­ent than what they dis­played in The Parent Trap, on screen that same year.

Spencer’s Mountain (Daves, 1963)

O’Hara and Henry Fonda, two dec­ades after Immortal Sergeant, in a proto-Waltons fam­ily saga based on a nov­el by  Earl Hammer, Jr., who’d later go on to cre­ate…The Waltons. Solid in that Daves way, with Mimsy Farmer adding some jaw-dropping-for-their-time notes of hotsie-totsieness as a girl­friend of a Spencer clan member. 

UPDATE:

My young friend Diana Drumm, a fine writer on film and a fam­ily friend of Ms. O’Hara, com­men­ded me, on Twitter, to Sentimental Journey, a 1946 film dir­ec­ted by Walter Lang. Diana cited a “bizarre plot that goes off the emo­tion­al deep end” and adds “O’Hara is won­der­ful in it.” After The Quiet Man, Diana says, it was a “great per­son­al favor­ite” of O’Hara’s. 

Mr. Joseph Failla, whom George Harrison might refer to as “a friend to us all,” wrote to me to say “Don’t for­get about Dance, Girl, Dance (Arzner/Del Ruth, 1940), which may be my favor­ite Maureen O’Hara film out­side the group that is nor­mally men­tioned. The dif­fi­culty here is that most people recall it as hav­ing Lucille Ball’s best per­form­ance (which it does) but O’Hara gets her chance to shine here too as a hard work­ing young woman who pur­sues her dream to be a bal­let dan­cer. It’s also refresh­ing to see in a movie of this vin­tage, the lead­ing lady choose her pro­fes­sion over a man and believe in herself.”

And below, in com­ments, The Self-Styled Siren extols the vir­tues of The Forbidden Street (Negulesco, 1949).