Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Podcast

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: The Sundae Presents Episode 34

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. For the first episode of the year, Ciara chose John Ford’s late career masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as Dean’s third encounter with both Ford and John Wayne. They talk about its unusually unscenic take on the frontier, the role of violence in politics, and how it reflects on the western’s place in American culture.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – The Sundae Presents

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I Know Your People, Sean

The Quiet Man is the bogeyman of Irish cinema. Shot on location in County Mayo in the west of Ireland in 1951, it’s both the most significant—and most acclaimed—screen depiction of the country before an indigenous film industry developed in the 1990s, a go-to example of stage Irish buffoonery that Irish cinema has raced away from. When An Cailín Ciúin—the first Irish language film to be nominated for an Oscar—powered itself to the Academy Awards last year, its English title framed it as a reply to John Ford’s fantasy depiction of Ireland: The Quiet Girl. 

Irish people lay claim to and celebrate The Quiet Man—there’s a whole museum in the village where it was filmed—but just as often, cringe away from it. We anxiously imagine that this is how Americans see us. But the truth is, The Quiet Man is a much bigger deal to us than it could ever be to them.

I wrote about The Quiet Man and John Ford’s complicated diasporic nostalgia for Bright Wall/Dark Room. You can read it here!

Ciara Moloney Film

Westerns, Part 3

“I can name for you every western I’ve ever seen. It wouldn’t even be hard.” – 2018

“There’s something just better about westerns, I can’t explain it. A great western is a special thing.” – 2019

“… nobody wants to be the crotchety old man saying things were much better in the good old days. But then you sit down and actually watch a 1940s western and it melts your face clean off.” – 2020

There probably wasn’t an exact moment when I went from “getting into westerns” to just “being a big westerns guy,” but if I had to pick, it would probably be around the time I started watching the Friday western on TG4. TG4 is an Irish public broadcast TV station that mostly shows Irish language programming, but every Friday night, they show a western. I’m not sure why, but I’m glad. “An western”: Irish for “the western”, with the word western untranslated, the way you wouldn’t translate noir or giallo into English. The films they show range from established classics to obscure gems to stuff that really isn’t very good at all, but usually in an interesting way. I don’t always watch the western on Friday, but I’m always happy I did. There are some things in this world that are so purely joyful, so satisfying, that they make your heart feel like it will burst. They’re precious, and I try to hold onto them where I can. A great western is one of those. The particular pleasures great westerns offer make me fall in love with films all over again.  

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Ciara Moloney Film

Westerns: A Take

I can name for you every western I’ve ever seen. It wouldn’t even be hard. That’s not even close to true about any other genre: I always feel I came relatively late to horror, but the idea of listing all the horror films I’ve seen seems absurd, a job it would be impossible to finish. But I’ve seen, like, fifteen westerns – I’m a total novice, fumbling around in the dark in a genre in which I have yet to grow roots.

But as I slowly, stumblingly get into westerns, I’ve become acutely aware of the gap between the way people talk about westerns and what they’re actually like. The western – especially for people my age, who didn’t grow up watching them on Saturday afternoons – is treated less like an artform than a rhetorical device, and this means, necessarily, reducing a huge, varied film genre to a static set of characteristics. It means assuming that everything westerns were, are or can be fits in a little box.

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