"Now people like it very much and they can't believe it got such terrible notices. I think people didn't like it because they said, "Oh, it's David Lean doing another epic" and in this country particularly I think, if you do anything big and expensive you really are suspected quite a lot. It's in our upbringing, isn't it? Don't show off." ~ David Lean on Ryan's Daughter

After a run of gilt-edged cinema masterpieces David Lean took a critical mauling over Ryan’s Daughter and an extended break from filming as a result, but the film remains in all its devastating beauty and messiness, a monument to Lean’s excess and a fascinating tone poem to a wild Ireland, both her people and her ragged, windswept coasts. Lean’s regular writer, Robert Bolt, originally wanted to adapt Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s celebrated novel, but Lean convinced him to write a variation of it set elsewhere, leading to both an Ireland location and Bolt’s wife, actress Sarah Miles, filling the dainty faux-Bovary shoes. Lean fleshed out the cast with some big names in Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard and John Mills but chose a relative nobody in Christopher Jones to play the pivotal part of the British officer who set tongues wagging and hatreds festering.

Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) feels trapped in her dull life in a small Irish village and dreams of love with the handsome, widower school teacher Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum). She marries him and finds him uninterested in her idealised vision of romantic love and they fall into a numbing routine. The village is stirred by an increase in British soldiers, away from the European front and on the lookout for Irish Nationalist plots in the wake of the Easter Uprising. Leading the soldiers is Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), a decorated hero who is also suffering shell shock. Doryan finds little welcoming amongst the villagers.

David Lean was coming off commercial and critical masterworks in Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago when he started on this film and used Freddie Young, his cinematographer from those epics, to shoot the wild and spectacular terrain of the Dingle Peninsula. As with many Lean films he examined a close group of people under stress and the impossibility of romantic love in those situations, echoing Lara’s dilemma in Zhivago or even (distantly) Laura’s in Brief Encounter. Lean spent much of his professional career putting the idea of romantic love under a microscope, often times doomed love, to give a beating heart to his broad canvasses – by Ryan’s Daughter the notion of a ‘small’ canvas in a Lean film was gone, as if all his small, personal films of the 1940s were just a distant chimera.

Lean employs the vast coastal canvas as a backdrop but it seems to be taunting the human characters as much as contrasting them – ‘you are all as insignificant as ants’ it seems to whisper, no more so than in the central and astonishing set piece of the villagers trying to save the smuggled German supplied arms for the rebels, dropped off the coast in a raging storm. It is the implied natural corollary to what the weary and frustrated priest (Trevor Howard) utters repeatedly when confronted by the flawed flock he is (mostly) impotent shepherd to. The priest is at the centre of all the villagers lives, privy to their faults and schemes and vainly trying to keep the community together in the face of ever increasing tumults, diversions and threats. The priest also knows the truth of the lack of character of Ryan the publican (Leo McKern), Rosy’s father, the person she will take the rap for in betraying the rebels to the British.  

Ryan’s Daughter is nothing if not an essay on betrayals, some large, mostly smaller and grimier. Rosy betrays both her husband Charles and her country with Doryan for passion, as her father sells out his fellow Irish for money – but the smaller, uglier betrayals loom. Charles betrays Rosy’s hopes by sexually (and emotionally) being unavailable to her. The villagers betray the simpleton Michael’s (John Mills) humanity with ritual degradation, not dissimilar to the fate they dispense to Rosy – punishment to them both for being outsiders. Doryan too is an outsider who is ridiculed behind his back by his men and his bravery on the Western Front is revealed to be a fraud via a flashback that shows his cowering and shaking in battle. It is to this shell shocked and vulnerable man that Rosy is drawn, with all the romance and passion that has been denied her from Charles.

What tends to get lost in the Lean legend, coloured by his successes with vast landscapes and histories great canvases such as the Russian Revolution and the World Wars, is the way he manages to sympathetically portray the women central to these tales. Putting aside his men-in-conflict tales like In Which We Serve, Bridge On The River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia – his films are full of fleshed out female characters coping under stress or war and some - Summertime (with Katharine Hepburn), Brief Encounter (Celia Johnson), The Passionate Friends (Ann Todd) contain some of his finest work. Lean used Julie Christie to great effect in the epic, Doctor Zhivago and did the same with Judy Davis in A Passage To India. In the same way as those two films, Sarah Miles is the beating heart of Ryan’s Daughter and Lean captures every moment of the young woman’s passions and flightiness and Miles more than pays back his faith in her ability.

Sarah Miles had made her mark in her debut Term of Trial with Laurence Olivier in 1962 and consolidated it with Joseph Losey’s The Servant the following year. She was a RADA trained actor with plenty of stage experience and after a small part in Antonioni’s Blow Up in 1966 she retreated into stage work for a couple of years. During that time she married Bolt and he concocted the abortive Bovary attempt that led to Lean and Rosy. Miles is superb as the dreamy Irish rose who is forced to grow up and face the harsh realities of life during wartime and it’s her presence that stays with the viewer long after the credits fade. She benefits from being surrounded by some serious talent – Trevor Howard towers as the frustrated cleric trying to bring a semblance of civility to situations where it is a scarcity. Robert Mitchum wades into what looks for all the world like a poor casting choice but his stolid aloofness makes for a convincing part and he carries it off with style – Alpha male Mitchum playing a knowing cuckold waiting for his wife to find out the sombre life lesson that he already knows - how the world will let you down - should be a stretch but he makes it work.

Lean cast the relatively inexperienced screen actor Christopher Jones - who was a Lee Strasberg trained Broadway actor and had also married Lee’s daughter Susan) and had only made some TV and a couple of cult type films until then. Lean had seen something in the aloofness and fragility that Jones could offer but the director and the actor had a difficult relationship and the long shoot was fraught for most of the cast due to Lean’s fastidiousness and demanding behaviour. It took its toll on Jones who suffered the added indignity of having his voice dubbed by a British actor, Julian Holloway. That being the case, what remains is surprisingly coherent and engaging and his shattered Prince Charming is a perfect pairing to Rosy’s deluded dreamer. They are a pair of frightened, damaged birds who find a cage they can share in a vain attempt to keep the outside world at bay, not knowing that they are both spectacle and prisoners.  

John Mills will be a problematic choice for modern eyes, but in truth the cliché of a ‘village idiot’ exists for a reason and to include the character of a simpleton is not to automatically imply ridicule from the filmmaker. The problem is in the way the ‘normal’ villagers interact with Michael as he bears the brunt of their frustrations, hatreds and scorns and functions as much as a scapegoat as a villager. In an era where playing an intellectually impaired character was seen as an acting challenge for actors Mills does an outstanding job of presenting Michael with sympathy and nuance and duly won an Academy Award for his efforts. Leo McKern is wonderful as the titular Ryan playing both sides and not above letting his daughter take the rap for his treachery, and many of the smaller roles are filled by top shelf character actors like Barry Foster and Gerald Sim.

Ryan’s Daughter is a fine film with lots to offer, unfairly maligned and due for rediscovery. It’s negative reception was enough to end Christopher Jones’ career and sent Lean into a depressive spiral that took years to recover from before he attempted another film. Ryan’s Daughter was not the film for the counterculture times but from the distance of the 21^st century it feels timeless and assured, like much of David Lean’s work, and deserves to be in the conversation when it comes to his singular cinematic legacy.