No other American filmmaker has become more associated with Ireland (and Ireland on screen) than John Ford. Over the course of his fifty-seven years in Hollywood, where he directed more than 150 films, Ford traveled to the old country only a handful of times. Yet his filmography is infused with Irish America’s reverence for the homeland, whether in the form of barroom buffoonery or his protagonists’ stoic (read Catholic) martyrdom. The Rising of the Moon is a portmanteau film, based on works by Frank O’Connor, Lady Gregory, and Michael McHugh. By turns dramatic and whimsical, the end result (handsomely performed by the Abbey Players) is a bittersweet paean to the dying days of folk sedition and communal heroism. It remains one of Ford’s least known great films.