It's not been helpful for John Ford's legacy that many of his major films - like The Quiet Man - conceal their profound and ambivalent ruminations on tradition and culture and tolerance beneath such seemingly whimsical surfaces: it means that many inattentive modern viewers will come to his films unprepared for their manifold complexities and likely to dismiss them out of hand as little more than quaint and antiquated trifles.
Just one thing that leapt out at me on a first viewing is that the romance between Wayne and O'Hara must be one of the richest and strangest ever put onscreen: they're equal parts lovers, dupes, fighters and tormentors - both strong-willed and myopic yet sympathetic fools who goad and misunderstand and love each other, and can't see past their own cherished ideas to conceive of their partner's full subjectivity, until, blissfully, they finally do, in the movie's magnificent extended climax.