Ryan's Daughter (1970)

Review...Ryans Daughter

What a wonderful epic about Love, Politics, War and Betrayal in 1940's Ireland. The characters are unique and well played...Trevor Howard and John Mills are a forceful precence.....and Oh, the scenery! Long,.... but a must see! June 25, 2008

Disappointing

I am quite surprised at all the glowing reviews for this film. With the exception of Trevor Howard, the acting was pretty bad. Rose's love scenes with the English soldier did nothing to make the viewer believe this was a passionate love that could not be denied. In fact, they didn't appear much different than her love scene with Robert Mitchum. There was nothing about either Rose or the English soldier that would indicate irresistability. Perhaps each was particulary attracted to woodenness.

While it was a good looking film in terms of scenery and mood, the story was rather ridiculous with many, many holes. We are expected to believe that Rose and the English soldier had an incredibly close relationship, yet he hardly speaks to her. I suppose the viewer must assume that the relationship was more developed than it appeared in the scenes they had together. Why did the soldier commit suicide? Because of the mess he had made of Rose's life? Because of his apparent post-traumatic stress disorder? Because he couldn't have Rose (for reasons, by the way, never made clear. She expected to part with her husband, so why not?)

Basically, I found the love story unconvincing and the acting bad. From a technical point of view, the DVD was disappointing in that the sound is terrible - very muffled which, together with the by and large fake Irish brogues, made the dialogue difficult to understand. A disappointment all around. February 20, 2008

Beautiful Irish coast is star of this over-blown melodrama

Director David Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt are the same team that brought us Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, so expectations prior to the release of this film must have been sky-high. That being the case, I can understand why this film was panned by critics in 1970. The pace is glacial. At times, the film is so slow it seems to be going backward. The film clocks in at 3 hours, 20 minutes, but the story could easily been told in under 2 hours, without sacrificing a single pertinent detail. Easily.

That being said, there are some wonderful performances here. John Mills, who plays Michael, the village idiot, won an Oscar for his outstanding performance. But the strongest performance was Trevor Howard's. Howard plays the village priest, heroically trying to exert an uplifting influence on his parishoners, most of whom are barely smarter than Michael, and much more savage. Robert Mitchum is cast very much against type; in most roles, he exudes casual but strong virility, yet in this role he is called upon to play a milquetoast aesthete who cannot sexually satisfy his young wife. And he does an excellent job, nailing the Irish accent, to boot.

The real star of the movie, however, is the beautiful west coast of Ireland, lovingly photographed. This DVD looks absolutely gorgeous in an anamorphic widescreen 2-disk transfer. The scenery alone is well worth the price of this DVD, even if you ignore the bloated, melodramatic plot. January 8, 2008

David Lean's Best

I don't know if this is David Lean's best film, because I haven't seen his earlier movies, but it is better than all his big budget movies, starting with "The Bridge Over The River Kwai, and it is one of the all-time great movies. A relevant fact is that the screenwriter, Robert Bolt, was married to Sarah Miles, the actress who played Rose. They later divorced, and rumors had it that their relationship was the inspiration for the script. If so, Bolt rose above his personal pain in heroic fashion, because the straying wife in the movie is depicted very sympathetically.

The movie received bad reviews originally, most famously from Pauline Kael. Since I haven't read her review, I'm not sure what her complaint was. I've always suspected that it didn't click with audiences at the time because Robert Mitchum was cast completely against type. Up to that point he had been one of the movies' sexiest leading men and always got the girl. In Ryan's daughter he was the older, cuckolded husband, who seems to be sexually repressed. I think this was too much of a shock for his fans (which probably included all adult filmgoers of the time.) Audiences don't like reminders of their own mortality. My God! Mitchum is that old?? Yet it was one of the most powerful performances of his life. He even managed a fine Irish accent.
Also,the political situation between the British and Irish at that time may have confused American audiences, who probably thought Ireland was part of England and couldn't figure out why the picturesque locals hated the handsome soldier. Why are all those people with British accents (?) shooting at their own soldiers? The fact that it was happening during World War One was probably also confusing to Americans, who don't know their own history, much less Ireland's. And yet, the inter-relationship between the political events and the two love stories is perfectly handled by the script. In nearly all other war movies, the love story seems pitifully out of place. The audience simply can't figure out how that beautiful woman got herself into that battle, nor how she manages to keep her dress so spotless in the midst of all that mud! Or,if a love story throws in some historical events, it all seems like boring, unnecessary exposition. Here every word counts. Every scene between the lovers raises the sexual tension, and every scene with the Irish and the soldiers raises the stakes for everyone.
There are two scenes in this movie which vault it into the best-of-all-time category. Both are the work of Robert Bolt, the scriptwriter, and both are entirely visual, with no dialogue. Both include the village idiot, a mute.
SPOILER FOLLOWS
In the first of these two scenes, the handsome soldier, new in town, stops in the pub to have a drink, trying to make friends with the locals. Rose, the barmaid, tries to be rude, since she has been taught to hate the British, but you can tell she is attracted. They are alone in the pub, except for the crazy mute, who begins to swing his leg mindlessly, banging it against the bar. It startles the soldier. Bang, bang, bang, in perfect merciless rhythm. The soldier tries to ignore it. The mute is happy, clueless. Bang, bang, bang. The soldier begins to crumble in front of our eyes as we see flashbacks of him in a trench in France, cringing in terror during a bombardment. Finally, he collapses, gasping on the floor, suffering a full-blown panic attack. Rose rushes to his aid, comforting him until his breathing slows and the horror leaves his eyes. It is a shockingly intimate moment, and entirely non-sexual. Yet after that moment, they are intimate, and they know it. He recovers, apologetic and confused, and leaves the pub. Rose thinks she knows why he was transferred from the Western Front to her sleepy Irish village: he was a coward under fire. But wait, he wears the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for bravery....
The second of these perfect, wordless scenes is carefully prepared. The mute begins to imitate the new captain. He begins to follow him, marching in his clumsy way, saluting. And he puts bottle caps and ribbons on the breast of his tattered clothes to imitate the soldier's decorations. The villagers understand. Ah, he is imitating the captain. One day he is doing his impersonation in the main street, and the villagers are laughing. Rose appears and the mute walks up to her and puckers up, expecting a kiss. Suddenly, the villagers know the horrible truth about their Rose. The mute has seen her kissing the captain! Rose instantly knows that she has been betrayed, and that there is nothing she can say in her defense. From this point on, the concluding tragedy is inevitable.
These two wordless scenes are perfect cinema and earned John Mills (the mute) an Oscar. There is a third instance of a major plot point being made visually, that is nearly as good. There is dialogue, but it is used by the characters to hide rather than reveal. Rose has been out riding her horse. Her husband says "Where did you go?" She replies, "To the mountains." She is in the other room, removing her riding clothes. He says, "So, you didna go to the beach, then?" She says again, "No, to the mountains." Then a closeup reveals that he is looking at her hat, which she left on the kitchen table. He is looking at the grains of sand on the bill of the hat. We see his face, we know that he knows she is lying, and why, and we also know that he will not confront her. These three scenes define the difference between books and movies. They are so perfect I can't figure out why Steven Spielberg hasn't stolen them.
Another point that irritated the politically correct critics was the horrible punishment of the unfaithful wife, which seemed so Victorian in the hip 1970s. I would like to point out that Rose is not punished for adultery but for treason, and that she is innocent. Furthermore, she chooses not to save herself by revealing the name of the real traitor.
I haven't seen this movie in thirty-seven years and I have never forgotten those scenes, and many, many others. Aside from the story and the characters, it also has the incredible photography that you can see in every David Lean movie. I'll bet a million people have visited the west of Ireland to experience personally the incredible landscapes they first saw in "Ryan's Daughter.

December 23, 2007

Lean at his best and, occassionally, worst

Another curate's egg from Lean, but redeemed by one of Robert Mitchum's greatest ever performances, bravely cast against type as the gentle Irish schoolteacher who becomes the village joke when his young wife takes up with a shell-shocked British officer. Ignored at the time for the showier attractions of Mills' village idiot (a role Norman Wisdom desperately wanted), it's a remarkably intelligent and subtly observed character study that holds far more appeal than Sarah Miles' title role. As always, Lean reserves the real talent (Mills, Trevor Howard, Leo McKern) for the sidelines and comes up with one of his blandest leads in the shape of Peter O'Toole lookalike and future down-and-out Jones while the force of history is reduced to background for a simple love story.

Maurice Jarre's score is something of a liability, but overall this is still the best of the director's post-Lawrence films and certainly not fully deserving of the critical slating that led to his 17-year absence from the screen. There is still a very real sense of the cinematic, with both colour and the widescreen ratio exploited to the full, something the increasingly TV-conscious director refused to even attempt with the surprisingly poor A Passage to India.

Although much impact is lost in the step down from 70mm to TV screen - particularly during the vivid storm sequence - the widescreen DVD makes it seem like a different and much better film if you've only ever seen it panned-and-scanned before. With some excellent extras, it's a fine presentation.
December 6, 2007

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