The Rising of the Moon was apparently filmed after Ford had completed working on The Searchers. You would never know that the same guy made both of these films.
The Rising of the Moon was a small film based on a series of short stories about Ireland that Ford did to try and jump start the Irish film industry. Ford appeared to have run amuck with the Irish humor and sentimentality at the expense of the film. The humor is very very very broad and very very very corny. The Irish characters in each of the stories act like they have some sort of mental handicap.
The visual style of the film is pretty boring with Ford staging scenes almost like he was photographing a stage play. Ford was considered an expert in black and white film composition, but it would be hard to know that watching this film.
The final story called 1921 about an IRA leader escaping from the British has a little more going for it visually with lots of tilted camera angles and atmospheric photography, but I'm not so sure Ford had much to do with the look of this segment, since the photographer is Robert Krasker, who had filmed The Third Man. Frankly, 1921 pretty much looks like the outtakes from The Third Man.
John Ford was apparently going for a feeling of nostalgia with this small film, unfortunately he makes the entire Irish nation look like they could barely walk and chew gum at the same time. The film is mercifully only 80 minutes long.
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