John Ford presents an idealized portrait of a mythical rural Ireland, where the key visual elements are the emerald green grass and the fiery red hair of Maureen O'Hara. O'Hara plays Mary Kate Danaher, the headstrong colleen courted by American Sean Thornton (Wayne), a disgraced boxer who has come to Ireland in search of his roots. The film's cinematographer is Winton C. Hoch, who shot several of Ford's color films, including The Searchers (1956) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), for which he won an Oscar. Little remembered today, Hoch is one of the Hollywood cinematographers most closely associated with Technicolor. Straight out of Cal Tech, he began his career working for Technicolor, where he helped invent the 3- strip process. From there he went to work as a director of photography in Hollywood, without ever having shot a black-and-white feature.