Ryan's Daughter

UK, 1970. Directed by David Lean. Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Trevor Howard, Christopher Jones, John Mills, Leo McKern, Barry Foster.

Critically mauled on its release in 1970, David Lean’s epic tale of adultery in a small Irish village during the First World War was the last film he would make for 14 years, so hurt was he by the unsympathetic response. The plot is simple – a naïve young girl (Miles) marries a much older schoolmaster (Mitchum), has an affair with a shell-shocked young British officer (Jones) which is then discovered by the villagers. Some of the criticism is, I feel, unwarranted - the film is beautifully shot and one scene in particular, where the whole village battles with the elements to salvage a shipment of weapons and ammunition from the sea in the midst of a wild, raging storm is stunning to watch. But the overriding problem with the film is that the storyline isn’t best served by an epic movie, for all the wonderful widescreen cinematography by Freddie Young or the stirring, swirling music from Maurice Jarre. Lean’s previous film was the epic Dr. Zhivago and he evidentally hoped to repeat its success, but Zhivago is a wide-sweeping tale of doomed love set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution – it is epic in scale in a way that Ryan’s Daughter is not. Having said that, if you’re not too demanding there is plenty here to entertain – it is after all a superbly crafted film. The acting is mostly enjoyable, although you might wince a bit at some of the Irish accents from some of the non-Irish actors. The casting of Christopher Jones as the British officer probably didn’t help the film though – his voice was dubbed and, possibly because of this, the role is underwritten; he says very little throughout. Predictably it was John Mills, in his portrayal of the club-footed, mute village idiot, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.