Alphabetical Movie – Jamaica Inn

I can pretty much bet this post will get about ten views because nobody has heard of Jamaica Inn.  The film is an early Hitchcock talkie and I don’t think it is fantastic, although it does have Maureen O’Hara in it and I’ve always been a little bit in love with Maureen O’Hara.

The thing with Jamaica Inn is that she is, for me, too young.

I first saw O’Hara in The Quiet Man.  

We all undestand why John Wayne Was taken with her, right?  She’s beautiful, yes, but maturity is also very attractive.  She actually looks like a grown-up.  I like grown ups.

So that’s my first impression of Maureen O’Hara.  Beautiful, Irish, and fully capable of being just as much of a fighter as John Wayne.  I already had a pretty major league crush.

Then I saw Miracle on 34th St.

She continues to be absolutely stunning but she’s also an atheist!

I mean, she never says she’s an atheist but she talks about wanting to raise her child without fairy tales like Santa Claus.  Religion actually doesn’t come up in conversation so I’m probably just projecting.

Granted, she only objects to fairy tales because she’s a divorced single mother who’s clearly pretty bitter.  She also gets “converted” at the end of the movie but that is sort of the whole point of the narrative.

Point is, there is a maturity to her character that is quite attractive aside from the fact that she’s…you know…Maureen O’Hara.

She’s a bit older in McClintock! and still crush worthy.

She seemed to get lovelier with age.  I wasn’t nuts about what they did with her character in this one.  She was kind of  like her character from The Quiet Man except she was almost completely impossible to like.

Still, by this point I’ve already got a major crush going so I’m not going to hold some bad writing against her.

Now here’s what she looks like in Jamaica Inn

Still beautiful, yes.  She’s Maureen O’Hara – that’s not going to change.

But to me, she looks like a kid.  She doesn’t look like the mature, powerful woman that I found so attractive in those other  movies.

Her character is pretty immature as well.  Given the choice between supporting her family (even though she is morally opposed to what they do) and helping the police officer trying to stop them (who saved her life), she picks her family.

She sure looks guilty about it, though.

Then she gets kidnapped and spends most of the time feeling sorry for her almost rapist because he’s clearly lost his mind.  That may be but she sure seems to have a problem sympathizing with the wrong sort.

I’d have a hard time sympathizing with the guy who was trying to rape me.

Point being, she looks like a kid and she acts like a kid.  Not nearly as attractive.

I still have a major crush on Maureen O’Hara.  I’m just going to focus on the movies in which she looks (and acts) like an adult.