The Quiet Man

It's hard to believe that John Wayne filmed this one after shooting Rio Bravo, where he played a scene-chewing pistoleer helping Dean Martin clean up a town.  And it's kind of strange watching Wayne in something that isn't a Western.

But here it is.

The Quiet Man isn't even an action movie.  At least, not until the legendary fight at the end of the movie.  It's a romance and a comedy of errors as an American marries an Irish woman and doesn't quite understand all the implications of the dowry her brother is supposed to pay for her.

The story is deep and moving, based on a short story by Maurice Walsh that was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post.

I'm posting it here, as a boxing blog, because it's a great little movie and has that tremendous boxing sequence at the end that has to be seen to be believed.

THE CUTMAN

I intend for my first Fight Cards novel to be an homage of sorts to Robert E. Howard's Sailor Steve Costigan stories.  Mickey Flynn is a throwback to that kind of hero, only moved into the 1950s.  I'm staying with a first-person point of view and have tried to capture the language and richess of that kind of two-fisted brawler.

Howard was a wonderful writer, and not just of Conan stories.  I'm also looking forward to the new movie coming out later this year.



FIGHT FICTION: REDISCOVERING JIM TULLY!

FIGHT FICTION: REDISCOVERING JIM TULLY!

KNOWN FOR HIS HARD-BOILED, REALISTIC BOOKS ABOUT THE OUTCASTS AND VAGABONDS OF AMERICA – THE HOBOS AND BOXERS, IRISH DITCH DIGGERS AND PROSTITUTES, CIRCUS CARNIES AND PRISONERS – EARNED JIM TULLY RAVE REVIEWS IN NATIONAL PUBLICATIONS AND CELEBRATED COMMENTS FROM THE LIKES OF H.L. MENCKEN AND GEORGE JEAN NATHAN . . . THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER HAS A COOL ARTICLE TODAY REDISCOVERING JIM TULLY, ONE OF OHIO’S FORGOTTEN SONS . . .

Jim Tully hardly fit the portrait of the poet as a young man, at least the one of popular imagination. He came out of St. Marys, Ohio, the son of poor, alcohol-bedeviled Irish immigrants -- "shanty Irish," he called his family.

After his mother died young, he spent six brutal years in a Cincinnati orphanage and another year in virtual bondage to a cruel farmer. At 14, he ran away to spend six years riding the rails as a "road kid," a sort of junior hobo.

He then went on the small-town boxing circuit as a featherweight, survived the hot furnaces of chain-making factories in Columbus and Kent, and worked as a traveling tree surgeon, even tending the trees of future U.S. senator and president, Warren G. Harding . . .

FOR THE FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE

KEVIN I. SLAUGHTER MAINTAINS JIM TULLY’S LADIES IN THE PARLOR BLOG. TO CHECK IT OUT CLICK HERE

HAT TIP TO JOHN STICKNEY