Ryan's Daughter

LUNACY

Robert Bolt wrote Ryan’s Daughter for his wife Sarah Miles; acknowledging it was based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovery, he neglected to say how much he borrowed from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and to a lesser degree Heathcliff Heights. Odd, though, neither the critics nor IMDb users pointed out that once the screenplay got into David Lean’s hands and Freddie Young’s Super Panavision 70 camera sights, the movie, while sometimes reminding us of Julie Christie’s Lara in the way Miles is occasionally attired and tormented, tipped over to become a less fatal version of what happened to Irene Papas in Zorba the Greek. In lieu of demise is a lunacy so hyperbolicized as to become camp mick community theatre—without the permission to snicker. But snicker we do and long before we see those menacing clippers: as soon as we catch sight of John Mills’ limp and teeth, we know it’s only a matter of time before we’re introduced to sex-obsessed villagers and their mocking prejudices and can predict, because they’re bored and ignoble, they’ll come up with some rather ugly amusements. Is there any husband who could get it up on his wedding night knowing the local loonies are very nearby to hear him putting it to his virgin wife? Yes, Robert Mitchum. Clichés abound, with Evin Crowley’s Maureen the fattest offender, but the more obvious is thankfully missing: the boozed celebrants demanding to see the sheets. Lean had planned on making the movie in three months, but due to bad weather and mishaps, filming stretched to over a year. Perhaps out of his own and the crew’s boredom, and the drink and the grass reportedly supplied by Mitchum, the movie’s visuals blew to proportions beyond what the story could sustain. Getting our first glimpse of the village—recalling the labor class setting in How Green Was My Valley—it’s manufactured for the camera to best reality; the single street’s stones have been dirtied up to such applause-getting effect we envision Lean’s set decorators working overtime to pound the freshly-arrived earth into the cracks and crevices. Toward the picture’s end, the roofs are masterpieces of an accelerating aging process. With various brain-dead antics happening in the village, Young seemed to shift his goal of visual equity to immortalize seaside imagery: his beach front scenes are framed for everlasting effect, except many of them are painted from the sands of South Africa, not Ireland. The impressive sea storm a composite of five separate storms and the soaper’s only “drama.” One of the least-discussed sequences is Trevor Howard searching for and coming upon Mitchum sitting on a rock behind which is a magnificent formation of stone stretched against the sea. As we absorb its humongous size, we now realize it presages the Marabar Caves in Lean’s next movie A Passage to India. (Took him more than 14 years before returning to make that one, claiming he had been creatively wounded by the negative press greeting Ryan: “When you’re a movie director,” he said to the N.Y. Times, “the only people that you really believe are the critics. You mistrust your friends because you think they’re being nice, but there in black and white with the power of the printed word it says you stink and you have no idea of what you’re doing.”) Miles isn’t bad considering the insurmountable barriers set against her: she has to pretend to have romantic inclinations for Mitchum (whose Irish accent and miscasting as the classical music-appreciating, flower-pressing schoolteacher-cuckold are enough to sustain interest) and then fall in speed-breaking lust with a zombie named Christopher Jones, who can’t act and apparently can’t speak intelligible English, either. (He’s been dubbed.) His singular specialty is being a pretty boy mutation of Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Davis and Robert Forester, with a bizarre sprinkling of Dr. Strangeloveness. With supersized pannings mostly empty of genuine purpose, there’s a respite of pleasure in looking at Mitchum; despite his intakes of legal and illegal, his face looks remarkably free of bloat, his cheeks recessed to disappearance, and no period piece wardrobe can hide his amusingly everlasting slummy gait. Movie lovers end up having a perverse sympathy for Trevor Howard’s priest and his unenviable task in tending to his flock of cowardly clowns. Read somewhere online Lean admitted he hadn’t paid much attention to the rushes, explaining why he and his script continuity supervisor Phyllis Crocker failed to notice not only was a murder of a British officer forgotten, but no one in the village bothered to confirm if Miles’ daddy Leo McKern actually did what he was told to do. (In a Greek tragedy, he’d have done himself in, and oh how you wish.) For all the dumbheadedness in this tragifarce, the most defenseless is Maurice Jarre’s score, lifted from his gagging Doctor Zhivago compositions, mingled with slobberings of Fellini kitsch. (Opening 12/18/1970 at the Michael Todd in 35mm, sans hardticket for seven weeks; with a Super Panavision 70 print replacement, the run switched to reserved seats, lasting eight additional weeks.)

Oscar wins for best supporting actor (Mills) and best cinematography; Oscar nominations for best actress (Miles) and sound.

ROLL OVER IMAGES

ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com