RYAN'S DAUGHTER (MGM, 1970) Warner Home Video

“I like to have long holidays between movies. I work very hard when I’m doing a movie but I find it terribly difficult to find a subject to film and I search around. I go into bookshops looking for novels and I think within six feet of me there must be a marvelous movie waiting…there never is.” – David Lean

In the spring of 1970, David Lean arrived in America to face a delegation of the New York critics who had just had the opportunity to screen his latest magnum opus, Ryan’s Daughter, wholly unprepared for the evisceration he was about to endure. It had taken Lean nearly 5-years to will the movie into existence, a follow-up, at least ‘thematically’, and, in scope to Doctor Zhivago (1965). MGM, the studio footing the bills, had begun this lengthy sojourn with Lean some 2 years earlier, an alliance to sour, then curdle after Lean’s initial half-year trek to Ireland ballooned into 52 nightmarish weeks abroad due to chronic inclement weather on the Dingle Peninsula, forcing Lean and company to relocate to Cape Town, South Africa for the penultimate wrap up of the shooting schedule. Lean also encountered opposition from his star, Robert Mitchum whose ‘one-take philosophy’ on picture-making, and, ‘get it right the first time’ work ethic clashed with Lean’s fastidious need to shoot an abundance of coverage to explore his many options. And Lean and screenwriter, Robert Bolt, while syncopated in their singular vision to see the project through to completion, had some legendary rows – hammer and tong - Bolt’s intellectual and wordy prose pared down and finessed to satisfy Lean’s impeccable visual style. Lean had, in fact, made other sacrifices along the way, beginning with several central casting decisions he felt had compromised the movie. Robert Mitchum was Robert Bolt’s first choice for the role of Charles Shaughnessy. However, when Bolt telephoned the actor to inquire about ‘what’ he was doing, Mitchum’s droll reply ‘About to commit suicide’ was met with a pithy retort; “I’d be happy to afford you the expense of the funeral if you would concede to do our movie first.” In the meantime, Lean pursued Alec Guinness to play Father Collins, the caustic Catholic priest of this narrow-minded conclave – a role eventually assigned to Trevor Howard. Lean had also sought out Peter O’Toole for Michael, the village idiot. Yet, this too would eventually be reassigned to John Mills who won the Oscar for it.

The crux of the initial draft by Robert Bolt had, in fact, centered on this mute simpleton, the movie entitled ‘Michael’s Day’. Bolt came to Ryan’s Daughter second best, having first approached Lean with the idea of doing a remake of Madame Bovary – a project that held absolutely no appeal for Lean, who then commissioned Bolt to begin anew on a totally original concept to take place either in India or Ireland. In some ways, Bolt managed to retain at least part of Gustave Flaubert’s framework for Ryan’s Daughter, the character of Rosy Ryan less intensely damned, perhaps, but just as willful and driven in her own youthful follies, ultimately to prove her own reckless foil. In some ways, by 1965, Lean’s own approach to story-telling had become faintly formulaic and even slightly passe, the era of the ‘road show’ spectacular, complete with overture, intermission/entr’acte and exit cues, fast coming to an end, and virtually all but swept under the front lobby carpets of movie palaces already headed for the wrecking ball, even as Ryan’s Daughter was preparing to mark its theatrical premiere.  Lean always favored the plight of humanity, telescoping the thought-numbing grandeur of some great historical unrest into an intimate saga, fraught with tragedy and hardship: in short, creating a tapestry of life to humanize the Hollywood epic.

However, just as Lean feared going into Ryan’s Daughter, the project evolved into a bauble from ‘the little gem’ class of his picture-maker’s past. “You can’t spend a lot of money on ‘little gems’,” Lean explained in an interview. And yet, on Ryan’s Daughter, the director had been rather extravagant. Stephen B. Grimes’ production design created an entire village – rather than simple false fronts – along the Dingle coastline; a magnificent assortment of period shops, homes, a pub and schoolhouse, and, a military encampment, all from real brick, mortar, thatch and shingles to withstand the elements. Ryan’s Daughter is, as its title suggests, an intimate tale of a naïve woman torn between a dutiful husband and a passionate lover. Occasionally, this slender narrative is threatened by the movie’s sprawling back story of civil unrest, but also by Lean’s desire to create some truly awe-inspiring visuals from the unruly natural splendor of his surroundings. And Lean, once invested wholly on a project, could arguably, not see the proverbial forest for its trees. Indeed, in a 1972 interview, Lean’s production manager, Eddie Fowley teased that if not for producer, Sam Spiegel, chronically coaxing Lean on his way throughout the shooting of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) “…David would still be in the desert today, finding new things to shoot.” Such perfectionism came at a price. But again, on Ryan’s Daughter, Lean felt secure he had found the kernels of wisdom to compel an audience into that nearly 4-hour odyssey of romantic love denied.

At least in hindsight, the crucifixion of Ryan’s Daughter by the New York critics seems to have come out of nowhere – or rather, the critics’ collective desire to see the master builder of such epic entertainments be ruthlessly dismissed as ‘divine retribution’ for their initial disdain of Doctor Zhivago back in 1965, virtually ignored by audiences who made it one of the irrefutable worldwide smash hits of the season. That snub against their own highbrow theorizing was about to be repaid in kind, in these ‘unkind’ attacks on Ryan’s Daughter. Quite literally, their vitriol was incomprehensible to Lean who turned to Richard Schickel, then the chairman of the organization, for clarification. To his ever-lasting chagrin, Schickel’s cruel response, “I think they don’t understand how the man who gave us Lawrence of Arabia, and Oliver Twist and Bridge on the River Kwai could have made this shit,” effectively devastated Lean, shaking his artistic sensibilities to their core. Immediately following his trial by fire, Lean withdrew from public view and effectively went into a self-imposed creative cocoon from whence he would not re-emerge until 1984’s A Passage to India. Ryan’s Daughter did respectable business and, in fact, received some glowing reviews elsewhere (and a pair of Oscars besides). Alas, the movie would forever remain – at least in Lean’s mind – a demoralizing ‘footnote’ and very bitter pill to swallow.

In retrospect, Ryan’s Daughter is hardly the excrement Schickel’s callous and misplaced remarks suggests. Time, while exposing its shortcomings, has illustrated too that they do not outweigh its virtues. Lean had invested everything of himself to tell this story – and the final impressions are, indeed, a testament to his one-of-a-kind artistry. No one has ever attempted to emulate a David-Lean-esque creative style. Arguably, no one dare try. Lean’s mastery of the camera is, bar none, undiluted, exceptional and enveloping. Seemingly almost by osmosis, Lean’s hawk-eyed visual precision lures his audience into an expansive labyrinth; the canvas of a David Lean movie somehow twice as large and engrossing, even at a glance; his spell-binder’s vision of life, retold from his own keen reflections in 70mm widescreen, washing over the audience in great, encompassing waves of luxuriating melodrama, and those phenomenally composed vistas, to immaculately glisten and/or rustle with both the newness and rawness of life itself, somehow, more so than we could ever experience it for ourselves in real – rather than Lean’s ‘reel’ time.  Ryan’s Daughter is an imperfect Lean masterpiece. Yet, oddly enough, this too is part – if not all – of its charm. Undeniably, it shares certain qualities with its predecessor, ‘Zhivago’, particularly, in the tortured lover’s triangle set against a political tapestry of civil unrest.

Yet, unlike ‘Zhivago’ – whose central figure, while disreputably to betray a wife with a mistress, is forgiven, the marital infidelity indulged in by Ryan’s daughter, Rosie is afflicted with the added taint of a never-to-be absolved heroine, cruelly judged, not only by her peers, but the audience, for similarly transgressing against her marital vows. Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) has misguided fancies and daydreams about life and love. Inadvertently, these bring the wrath of her village upon her when she is suspected, and later exposed for having indulged in a torrid sexual liaison with British officer, Randolph Doryan (Christopher Jones). Robert Bolt had, in fact, written the part of Rosy expressly for Miles; then, his wife. But Miles wisely declined to become its de facto star without first submitting to a screen test among other hopefuls to convince Lean, as well as herself, she was the ideal candidate. Lean sought out Christopher Jones after screening The Looking Glass War (1969), believing the actor was on his way to becoming the next Marlon Brando. Although undeniably handsome and possessing certain gifts and qualities, Jones proved difficult almost from the moment he agreed to do Ryan’s Daughter, his method approach clashing with Lean’s own workman-like precision. If Ryan’s Daughter has a flaw, it remains Christopher Jones’ performance - wooden, complacent and wholly lacking in any sort of spark to make Randolph’s affair with Rosy the convincing erotic fantasy of any impressionable young woman’s dreams. Thankfully, Ryan’s Daughter is a movie of such immense treasures to be mined elsewhere, of so many extraordinary moments imbued with David Lean’s trademark visual flair, one is immersed in the story on other levels. Bolt’s close collaboration with Lean has yielded a minor masterpiece, no small feat in the wake of their other titanic offerings, ‘Lawrence’ and ‘Zhivago’. Removing Jones’ from this critique, the performances are otherwise and uniformly solid, far better than competent and, in some cases, exceptionally well-crafted. John Mills’ mental defective, Michael, is the obvious standout - an extraordinary transformation of the cultured, articulate actor into a remote, sad but all-seeing/knowing social outcast, whose inner torment and outward humiliation are on par with the very genuine insecurities harbored by our story’s heroine.

Sarah Miles is a supremely conflicted enigma for most of this movie - a girl, cripplingly disillusioned in her marital expectations, but shaken to her foundation by a more earthy passion set to unravel her entire world. Robert Mitchum’s Charles Shaughnessy remains one of the greatest performances given in the actor’s repertoire, Mitchum’s naturally laconic presence peppered with a modicum of introspection best articulated by a flinch of his shoulders or intonation in a careworn sigh. As Rosy’s cowardly father, Thomas, Leo McKern is a sublime villain - a man of property and some distinction in his own small world, but who cannot shake the terrible angst of his own betrayal to save his daughter her indignation in his stead. But perhaps the most poignant of all the star turns is owed Trevor Howard’s fiery Father Collins, the stern moral compass, able to distinguish between moments in life that require sober thought and those affording a properly clenched fist. Howard’s performance went all but unnoticed by the critics in 1970. Yet, in reviewing it today, one cannot imagine Lean’s first choice - Alec Guinness – as fine an actor as he is – doing it equal justice.  Howard’s clergyman is an embittered man of honor, unashamed to use force to convey the Lord’s will when mere words will not suffice. “I knew it would be the best part of a year of misery,” Howard explained in accepting the role, “…but 99% chance of being a great picture.”

Yet, for all these cogs in the great wheel, the lion’s share of praise is still owed to Lean, oft’ described as a cinematic novelist. Viewing Ryan’s Daughter from this rubric, one not only bears witness to Lean’s formidable and unique craftsmanship, but can wholly appreciate his contributions as the undisputed grand master of his medium, someone who truly relished the art of movie-making as few of his ilk – and virtually none since his time – has been able to duplicate. Lean’s great gift remains his ability to immerse the audience in another world. While today’s movies try much too hard, and all too frequently, to assault the viewer’s sensory capacities with a stifling bombardment of dizzying camerawork that anesthetizes, but never enthralls, Lean coaxes us gently into his ‘sweet night’ of stardust and dreams. He takes us to places we want to inhabit for more than an hour or two and are often very reluctant to surrender once the screen has faded to black. There is an instinctive, intoxicating textural quality to Lean’s visual art, a ballast of reality – stylized perhaps – but concrete and alive nonetheless – with a thriving intangibility to make us believe and feel, and, be moved by the experience of seeing his movies for the first time or viewing them thereafter as though it were the first time, all over again.

Ryan’s Daughter opens large – on a stark windswept beach with the precocious Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) chasing after her wayward umbrella as violent tides come smashing onto the shoreline.  Rosy’s mind is filled with whimsy, a commodity in short supply in this small-minded community. Father Hugh Collins (Trevor Howard) attempts to educate the girl in the error of her present mindset. But Rosy is willful and stubborn in her beliefs. Her infatuation with schoolmaster, Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum) is nothing more than an extension of this very shallow imagination. Charles is kind, sophisticated and well-read. But he is also a middle-aged, complacent gentleman who attempts to dissuade Rosy from her quixotic illusions about him, before inexplicably agreeing to fulfill at least part of her fantasy by marrying her. The wedding night, however, leaves much to be desired as Rosy’s credulously anticipation for some splendiferous whirlwind of passion remains denied. Instead, she is gingerly stripped of these rather vacuous expectations by Charles’ all too brief, and perhaps even mechanical and perfunctory seduction. For Rosy, it is a crushing moment, one to compound rather than abate her disenchantment with life in general. Hence, when Rosy is first introduced to Randolph Doryan (Christopher Jones), a soldier from the nearby British military outpost, come for a drink at her father’s pub, she is both instantly smitten, yet wholly empathetic towards his shell shock. All of Rosie’s upbringing has taught her to harbor an intense distrust of the British. But when her father, Thomas (Leo McKern) is called away, Rosy is left to tend bar with only Michael and Randolph as her clientele. The steady cadence of Michael’s tapping shoe against the wooden booth sets off a repressed memory within Randolph, reducing him to a cowering mass upon the floor. Rosy rushes to his side and is met by a hot-blooded embrace she cannot deny. The couple are momentarily caught in the throes of their mutually coveted lust. 

In the meantime, the villagers are stirred by a rumor Irish rebel, Tim O’Leary (Barry Foster) is afoot in the countryside, having escaped from a British stronghold and, at present, preparing for a new strategic assault. Having wisely assessed the zeitgeist of popular anti-British sentiment all around him, Thomas Ryan (Leo McKern) publicly champions the cause of evicting the British from Ireland. Secretly, however, he is a British informant who will conspire against O’Leary and, in fact, the whole town, alerting Major Randolph and his forces of a conspiracy to salvage stockpiles of weaponry during a violent storm at sea. While Charles is busy educating his pupils Rosy sets out for the horizon. Her clandestine ‘cute meet’ with Randolph in a secluded forest, allows the couple to consummate their affair. As ridiculous as it now seems, Ryan’s Daughter received an ‘R’ rating for this lusty encounter, shot tastefully in a greenhouse under controlled lighting and weather conditions with Lean using nature itself as a counterbalance and metaphor for sexual intimacy. Charles becomes suspicious of his wife’s increasing disappearances but keeps his thoughts to himself. Lean’s moment of brilliant foreshadowing just before the intermission has Charles test Rosy, his suggestion she might leave him met with a tearful embrace, despite having only just made love to Randolph, the sound of the generator at the British base growing more prominent with Randolph pensively seated nearby, thus intruding on Rosy and Charles’ all too brief moment of martial solace.

The second act of Ryan’s Daughter opens on an uncharacteristic – at least for David Lean – dream sequence. Charles has taken his pupils to the beach, discovering footprints in the sand leading to a cave where he believes Randolph and Rosy are carrying on. While his pupils explore the coastline, Charles conjures to mind his wife and this soldier before his very eyes, dressed finely and strolling hand-in-glove together. Lean’s choice to incorporate Charles in these shots creates a rather taut unease, that perhaps Rosy and Randolph will discover him in their midst at any moment or vice versa. Unable to satisfy his growing jealousy, Charles explores the cave. He finds nothing to suggest Rosy has been there with her lover, although she is, in fact, very nearby with Randolph. Later on, however, Charles unearths a conch shell in Rosy’s dresser drawer and discovers remnants of sand in the brim of her riding hat. Despite these obvious signifiers to confirm his suspicions, Charles remains circumspect and silent. The town’s folk are neither. “The way I see it there’s loose women…” Mrs. McCardle (Marie Kean) forewarns Rosy after she has come to her shop for household items, “Then there’s whores. And then there’s British officer’s whores!”  Tim O’Leary and his rebels engage the town to rescue a shipment of German arms from the raging sea during a perilous storm. The whole village, including Father Collins, invest in the cause. David Lean waited almost six months, the extras and stars on constant standby for just the right set of circumstances to occur, Mother Nature’s wrath on awesome display. Principals were suited up in wetsuits beneath their costumes and tethered to ensure their safety. But the working conditions endured can only be described as wretched, everyone pummeled by towering walls of water further enhanced by a dump tank, and frigid, howling winds curling against the craggy moors. Having loaded stockpiles of weapons into the back of a waiting truck, O’Leary and the town’s folk are ambushed by Randolph and his forces waiting on the bluffs.  In his attempted escape, O’Leary is wounded by Randolph and taken back to the British base camp, presumably to stand trial for treason.

Meanwhile, Charles has finally worked himself up to inform his wife that he knows of her infidelities. Yet, even so, he is less confrontational than compassionate and tells Rosy he can only hope her infatuation will pass with time and maturity. Although she prudently declares the affair is over, Rosy later skulks away to be with Randolph and Charles – hopelessly deflated – wanders off in his nightshirt in the dead of night toward the beach. In the morning, Rosy returns. Fearing the worst – that Charles has drowned himself – she confides the whole mess to Father Collins who sympathetically takes Charles clothes from her before going in search of him.  Discovering Charles on a craggy rock facing the bulkhead, Father Collins provides sincere comfort. David Lean now moves into his penultimate climax - the brutalization of Rosy Ryan. Having collectively – and incorrectly – concluded it was Rosy who tipped off Randolph about O’Leary and the armaments, the town’s folk rush the schoolhouse, forcibly dragging Rosy into the streets. They wrestle Charles to the ground, forced to watch while the town folk strip his wife bare and sheer off her handsome auburn locks. It is a shocking and frankly barbaric moment in the picture, one Charles is powerless to stop and almost unable to endure. The sheer elation of the crowd is diffused only after Father Collins rushes in, parting the leering, jeering and cheering masses to rescue Rosy, left shivering and shell-shocked on the muddy ground.  Mr. McCardle (Arthur O’Sullivan) attempts to justify the assault but is struck by Father Collins instead. “You overstep your authority!” McCardle begrudgingly warns. “That’s what it’s for!” Father Collins proudly declares chasing the angry mob away.

That evening as Rosy and Charles quietly sit by their fire, uncommunicative and uncertain of their future together, they hear the sudden echo of an explosion on the beach. Michael, having led Randolph to the cache of weapons, including dynamite, has run off. Randolph, unable to come to terms with what their affair has done to Rosy’s reputation, now commits suicide by blowing up the stockpile. The next day, Rosy and Charles leave Dublin. He takes her hand with pride as they pass through town, assailed by jeers and catcalling. Father Collins and Michael join the couple on the open road where they wait for a bus to collect them. Michael is his usual benign self, moderately playful as he observes Rosy’s rather demure appearance, her near-bald pate appropriately sheathed by a rather large bonnet. Father Collin’s suggestion of rain approaching prompts Rosy to politely comment perhaps it too is a sign of good luck, all hopes dashed a moment later when a strong gust tears her bonnet loose, revealing to Michael the squalid tatters made of her once beautiful tresses. As the two exchange glances of mutual despair and disbelief, Rosy unexpectedly recognizes the parallel in their plights. The moment is fraught with poetic sadness. For at the start of the movie, Michael’s gift of a dead lobster he tears apart in Rosy’s presence had once disgusted her. Like all the rest in town, she then regarded Michael from a vantage of smug superiority and antipathy. But now, Rosy gingerly offers Michael a kiss on his cheek – the similarities rather than the differences between them having become much clearer. In the meantime, Father Collins pulls Charles aside. “I think you have it in your mind that you and Rosy ought to part,” Father Collins informs him, “Well, maybe you're right and maybe you aren't but I doubt it. And that's my parting gift to you. That doubt.” The movie ends with Father Collins and Michael observing as the bus drives off, Collins shaking his head and muttering to himself as he prepares to return to a village forever changed by their departure.

In this twinkling of farewell, Ryan’s Daughter achieves the same sense of damnation and finality Lean so eloquently conveyed at the end of Lawrence of Arabia – the triumvirate of Peter O’Toole’s past, present and future running parallel along the parched and isolated desert landscape. The stark backdrop of rain-soaked Ireland is just as enfeebling to our heroine, its emerald fertility strangely at odds with Rosy’s two-fold deflowering - physical and emotional – as isolated and friendless as Lawrence. That Ryan’s Daughter lacks the towering presence of a T.E. Lawrence to mark the occasion as profoundly does not negate the intensity of the moment itself, as critics of the day seemed too readily to dismiss both it and the movie in totem as an over-embellished lover’s tripe, overweening and unbearably light. It is perhaps all too easy to misconstrue the ending of Ryan’s Daughter as merely depressing. At the very least, it is profoundly introspective – the starry-eyed dreamer brought to heel, yet made to realize an arguably brighter future ahead. The narrow-minded conclave Rosy and Charles are leaving behind was always too small for their dreams, both independent and/or as a couple. And the ending is cyclical to Lean’s own visual design, opening and closing the narrative with a celebration of wide-open spaces. In these concluding moments, Ryan’s Daughter achieves an almost operatic gestalt, the kilning of a wild heart to refine the purity of the soul.

For one reason or another, Ryan’s Daughter remains the only epic from David Lean’s post Bridge on the River Kwai tenure not to have made the leap to hi-def. Curiously, in the days before Blu-ray’s assuredness as the format du jour, Warner Home Video made the movie available in the competing, but now defunct HD/DVD format. So, a hi-rez file of the movie does exist – just not on any currently playable format on home video. For shame!  For now, we have Warner’s 2-disc DVD - adequate, and, at times, even exemplary. But isn’t it about time Ryan’s Daughter came to Blu-ray? Let us be so bold as to suggest 2021 is the year for that petition to be fulfilled! But I digress. The DVD, now well over 14-years-old, exhibits a fairly crisp image throughout. The movie has been divided at its intermission across 2-discs – forgivable – particularly since it affords a far better bit rate and thus preserves the integrity of the visuals. Colors pop. Contrast is bang on. Age-related artifacts have been cleaned up. The image is smooth without appearing to have suffered from undue DNR or other digital enhancements. The 5.1 Dolby Surround sounds strong with Maurice Jarre’s memorable themes quite stunningly reproduced. We get a very comprehensive – slightly meandering – audio commentary spread across both discs, with standout notations provided by Lean’s wife and Sarah Miles. Infinitely more pleasing is the 3-part documentary on the making of the film, housed on Disc 2, produced by Laurent Bouzereau (a master at these supplemental features) with intimate reflections from Sandra Lean, property master, Eddie Fowley, star, Sarah Miles, a litany of film historians and archival footage of Lean, Robert Bolt, John Mills and Robert Mitchum on the set. Bottom line: Ryan’s Daughter is a David Lean masterpiece – one overlooked and dismissed for far too long. While I would sincerely hope Warner Home Video has this one in the hopper for an ‘Archive’ release sometime soon. Until then, the DVD has been more than competently mastered. Very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

4