David Lean is one of cinema's most revered figures. He is the man who proved that Charles Dickens' work could be filmed with Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, he brought us the great screen romance with Brief Encounter and made the greatest epics in history - The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Without question, he is the greatest director from the U.K.
But behind all that success, there is one blemish - Ryan's Daughter, the 1970 romance that would have ended his career if he didn't decide to come back for 1984's A Passage To India.
Ryan's Daughter started out as an attempt by screenwriter Robert Bolt to make an adaptation of Madame Bovary and he had it in mind that his wife, Sarah Miles, would play the title role. He brought the idea up to Lean, but the director was interested in finally doing an original idea after adapting stories for his previous three epics. Bolt decided to keep some elements of Bovary, making his female protagonist an adulteress and the setting was moved to Ireland, that way Lean could work in a drama behind his lovers – the tension between the British and Irish during World War I.
The story of Ryan's Daughter is a simple love triangle. After Rosy Ryan (Miles) marries Charles Shaughnessey (Robert Mitchum), an older schoolteacher she admires, she falls madly in love with Major Randolph Doryan (Christopher Jones). The townspeople are at first fully supportive of her marriage to their children's schoolteacher, but soon they learn about her affair with the British officer and they quickly turn against her. Even her father, bar owner Tom (Leo McKern) goes against her, mostly because he's too much of a coward to go against his neighbors.
There are three people who support Rosy. First, there is Father Hugh Collins (Trevor Howard), a hands-on priest who let's Rosy know that she has done a horrible thing, but he can't approve of how the Frankenstein-esque townspeople want to destroy her. Charles is also supportive, mostly out of his love for Rosy. He is still her husband and while the marriage hasn't gone as either intended, it appears that they could learn to move past it. And then there's Michael (John Mills), the village idiot who can't speak but knows everything. He is a total outsider and, in the end, the only one who can really understand Rosy.
The major criticism lobbed at Ryan's Daughter is that its excessive scale overwhelms the intimate story enfolding on the Irish coastline. In a sense this is true. No love triangle or story about a cheating wife should take up three hours and 26 minutes to tell, yet Lean was so focused on making another epic, almost as if he felt that he couldn't go back to a simple story like Brief Encounter. Ryan's Daughter is filled with stunning imagery from cinematographer Freddie Young and the most poetic sex scenes committed to film, but all that makes you feel as if the story takes a back seat. While audiences can enjoy every minute of Lawrence or the sweeping love story of Zhivago, the scale of Ryan's Daughter's plot just doesn't gel with an epic vision.
Ryan's Daughter is also hurt by the dull, cardboard performance from Christopher Jones. Lean was fooled by his performance in a film called The Looking Glass War, in which Jones was dubbed and made to appear taller. Lean didn't learn this until Jones arrived on set and he quickly figured out that Jones was no Brando. It certainly didn't help that Jones and Miles couldn't get along, but Lean does manage to get some wonderful scenes with the two.
However, the other performances in this film are top-notch. Miles shows incredible command of emotions, saying everything with her face in some of the film's most tragic moments. Mitchum hid his distaste for the director well and proved that he was really a great actor. That tough guy in could act and it just amazes me that he never won an Oscar. Of course, the one performance in the film that did win an Oscar was John Mills' touching turn as the mute Michael.
I don't think Ryan's Daughter is a complete failure – if it was, there wouldn't be a single aspect worth talking about. But when you hold it up against Lean's other films, it just doesn't stand the test. Lean's 'novelist' approach works when dealing with the life of a single man or when adapting a story that started as a novel (and would work again so well with A Passage To India), but it failed him with Ryan's Daughter. Particular aspects like the acting (except for Jones) and the cinematography do make it easier to sit through, but I can't help but wonder how much of a masterpiece it would have been had Lean gone back to his roots and made an intimate story on an intimate scale.
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