Ryan's Daughter (1970)

Just perfect...

Expected more

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Spoilers. Observations. Opinions. John Mills steals the show. He is excellent as Michael, always communicating in his own way and showing a loving personality to the people about whom he cares very much. I never liked Robert Mitchum in his typical noir roles, but here he is very different as the cardboard school teacher and dolt of a husband. Sarah Miles is excellent. I like her umbrella and her clothes. I feel that she does the love scenes well. Christopher Jones is excellent. His character is almost wooden, but during the sylvan love scene he comes alive.Trevor Howard is also excellent as the priest. He cares for everyone. Where was the mayor? Does the priest rule the village? The hooligans are filthy, uneducated and extremely ugly in their looks and behavior. The mob rules the village, and they are all very dumb clucks. They have no brains, even though as children they supposedly attend the local schoolhouse. Does Rosy get pregnant from all of this? We will never know.

David Lean's Great Expectations, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, are all timeless masterpieces, but his Ryan's Daughter will simply have many viewers repeatedly checking the time, wondering when this plodding film is actually going to get somewhere.And please don't misunderstand, I was not looking for an action film. Having seen Ryan's Daughter during its 1970 release I remembered that it had a deliberate pace, when my wife, my mom, and I sat down to watch it on our giant screen TV six years ago. But, boy does RD ever crawl along. The 3 hour long film Schindler's List is longer than Ryan's Daughter, but feels like half it's length. And one of my favorite films, A Man For All Seasons, consists entirely of dialog, with virtually no action, yet its 2 hours feels like 45 minutes compared with the glacial pacing of Ryan's Daughter.If David Lean had carefully edited Ryan's Daughter down to 90 minutes, I feel it could have retained all of its plot elements, while resulting in a much tighter film.Yeah, I had to keep asking my wife and mom to stick with the film, but I still rated Ryan's Daughter as high as 7 due to its beautiful cinematography.I guess Ryan's Daughter stands as a good example to illustrate that even a master of epic film making can not hit a home run with every film.

On the one hand, there's a fine cast, beautiful photography, serviceable music, and sensitive direction. On the other, an over-long, laborious script and stagy crowd business. There's also a rather small, intimate romance that seems to need a smaller-scale production format (like a "Brief Encounter") rather than a grandiose blockbuster presentation (like a "Laurence of Arabia").However, the film seems to be improving its image as time goes on, and David Lean's slow direction and grandiose production scale appears to be less criticized. The challenges the production experienced were formidable, from drugged and dubbed actors to injured and conflicted production personnel. Fortunately--especially for MGM Studios--the film wasn't a financial disaster.Poor Chris Jones received a public and critical pounding, which probably contributed to his abandonment entirely of the acting profession. Still, his final product came out alright--a kind of Dean/Brando quality piece of work. Robert Mitchum's against-type performance was surprisingly successful, and Sarah Miles was strong throughout.Likewise the ugly, though exaggerated, nature of the townsfolk mob contrasted well with the breathtaking landscape. In the end, the film rates about 2 1/2 out of four stars, and only time will tell whether it will further improve.

Lean's Ryan's Daughter is sadly undervalued by many as they thought him past his best, when, five years after Doctor Zhivago, he constructed a whole new village on the Dingle Peninsular on the west coast of Ireland and spent over a year on his indulgence.This beautifully filmed epic, on 70mm negative, might not have the cold harshness of Zhivago, or the scorching majesty of Lawrence of Arabia, but still remains my very favourite film set in and filmed in Ireland.John Mills, as the village idiot steals every scene he's in and leaves us his legacy as a very adaptable actor and Trevor Howard, as a priest. In a brave casting, Robert Mitchum is the teacher who is married to the beautiful and beguiling Sarah Miles, whom she finds his lack of husbandly attention responsible to her becoming attracted to others. The film, a first for Lean, is rated as '15' for a very tasteful outdoor sex scene that involves Miss Miles....The political agenda is always bubbling away, set in both World War 1 and the Uprising, with the locals even siding with the Germans, so anti- British was the feeling. Leo McKern, as the village's Publican, who poses as a Republican and such was Lean's quest for reality that there's actual bloody injury detail incurred during a real storm that the director insisted they filmed in. That it wasn't edited out afterward is also testament to Lean's personal stamp on his cherished creation.Perhaps the star of Ryan's Daughter will always be Freddie Francis' Oscar winning cinematography - the backdrops really are akin to giant, living canvasses. However, unlike the majority of Lean's epics, only two Academy Awards were scooped, the other going to the deserving John Mills.