It was one of the great Hollywood partnerships: the director John Ford and the actor John Wayne. They made a series of westerns together – The Searchers (1956) was perhaps the highlight. Wayne – Hollywood’s iconic, lumbering cowboy and action star – usually never “got the girl”. Either there were no women around or, if there were, Wayne’s character was too shy or bumbling or preoccupied to notice.

And that is what makes rom-com The Quiet Man such an oddity. When Ford (real name Sean Aloysius O’Feeney) cast Wayne in this paean to his Irish roots he left no cliché of the Emerald Isle untried. Wayne is Sean Thornton, an ex-boxer who has, from America, gone back to Ireland to take charge of his granny’s heilan hame. He encounters resistant locals before winning them over and even becalms the fiery redheaded shrew Mary Kate (Maureen O’Hara) which offers some horribly dated gender dynamics.

It’s a film that might well be the sort of thing shown on a loop in Irish pubs so evocative is it of the Ireland of the imagination. In his courting of Mary Kate, Sean angers her brother (Victor McLaglan) who withholds her dowry and until it’s paid the now-married Mary Kate withholds sex from the increasingly frustrated Sean. This is just one of the many ridiculous rituals that must have been dated even in rural Ireland of the 1920s when the story is meant to be set. The romance is played for laughs as if someone is too embarrassed to suggest it’s believable. In a clinch in the rain Wayne’s white shirt becomes transparent revealing that he is more tree trunk than true hunk.

Nothing will resolve matters except a punch-up. Sean, having accidentally killed an opponent in the New York boxing ring at a previous juncture, has sworn never to raise his fists again. It’s the plot of a musical comedy (like Brigadoon) and here the music accompaniment is pub singalongs of the weepie Wild Colonial Boy variety. The comedy often feels overstrained. The gentle rolling humour supplied by Guinness-tinged leprechaun-like locals never really catches fire and neither does the passion between Wayne and O’Hara despite both of them being prime specimens – he rugged and tanned and she with chiselled cheekbones. Ireland’s lochs and meadows never looked quite so handsome on film either (thanks to Winton Hoch’s astonishing Technicolor cinematography).

The Quiet Man is one of those easy, enjoyable matinees. But its weakly sentimental American viewpoint ensures it’s no Whisky Galore (a remake will be released this year) which treated its (Scots) yokels with a true, knowing affection rather than the curmudgeons here who seem to have their roots in Central Casting rather than Ireland’s real peat and heather.