Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Verity Robins Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

blanche-2 As often happens with great talent, the public's expectations often bring the artist down with a crash. We saw it with as disparate talents as Tennessee Williams, David O. Selznick, and here we see it with David Lean.Lean was one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century, capable of doing intimate films like Brief Encounter and huge epics like Lawrence of Arabia. And therein lies the problem. How could the director of Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia give the public anything less than a masterpiece? Well, even the greats are entitled to take on a challenge, and not everything they do has to be magnificent. Artists should be allowed to grow and expand.In doing Ryan's Daughter, Lean faced some challenges that were difficult to overcome.First, let's look at the positives. On the big screen, this must have been overwhelmingly beautiful to watch. The landscapes, the beach, the town, the incredible storm -- a feast for the eyes.Then there are sublime performances by Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles as a schoolteacher, Charles, and his wife, Rosy. He's a simple man and not very exciting; she's a young woman with no worldly experience whose life is turned upside down when she falls in love with a British soldier (Christopher Jones) with PTSD. Leo McCrary plays her father, a gruff but weak man, and he's excellent even if he did hate making this movie. He wasn't alone. Robert Mitchum had messages to Lean delivered by Sarah Miles, and Sarah Miles was furious having to act opposite Christopher Jones.To continue with the cast, most of them are excellent, including Trevor Howard as the local priest and John Mills as the Village Idiot. The latter is the kind of role that wins Oscars, and this one followed the formula, winning one for Mills.In making this film, Lean was faced with the difficulty of the weather, which at times hung up the filming for as long as four weeks. No matter how good you are, crossing paths with Mother Nature somehow never works. The best part of this film is the storm scene, terrifying in its scope. How Lean filmed it at all is a miracle.His other problem was Christopher Jones, a total disaster. Lean cast him on the basis of seeing him in another film, but at the time, he didn't realize the actor had been dubbed. He soon learned that not only could Jones not act, but he refused to do the kind of love scenes that Lean had been eager to shoot since his Brief Encounter days, when the code was in place.Jones would not participate in the love scenes with Miles, which angered her. What angered her further no doubt was the fact that Jones apparently said he wasn't attracted to her. I guess he thought he was attending a college mixer and not there to do a job. Did he think she was attracted to him, and that's why she was willing to do the scenes? They were critical to her character, showing her in a passionate love affair, her awakening as a full woman.Lean wound up cheating the love scenes and hiring Julian Holloway to dub Jones, after taking most of his lines away from him. Jones should have been embarrassed, but he probably wasn't. I interviewed him some years ago. He was given a lot of opportunities. He blew them.Set during the Easter Rising of 1916, Ryan's Daughter is a beautiful movie, if overlong and with too sprightly music given the plot. The ending is ambiguous, but I think we can conclude what will happen.This is a story of betrayal, adultery, cruelty, passion, and love. It's not Lean's greatest. But any Lean film is worth seeing and a lot better than probably 80% of the films out there.

hamlet-16 I have trouble with Ryan's Daughter . It is astoundingly beautiful (esp. in 70mm in the cinema). At its heart it is a story of a woman trapped in a violent time and suffocating society symbolised by her marriage. I don't really quite know how to express this: I have never liked films where there is mob violence. But is it a sign that Lean succeeded when I say I find these elements of this film disturbing? The sequence when the mob attacks Rosy are truly horrible.As for those who accuse Lean of racism I ask how would Rosy have fared in Derry in 1971?This is a dark story really,despite the beauty of the scenery, a story of deep seated hatred, of sexual repression and of treason. With those themes in play how is this a small story as some critics state.Whether Lean and his cast bring it all off I do not know. Sarah Miles has never been a favourite actress of mine but in this she glows on screen. Mills is really fine as is Howard and McKern but Mitchum never quite convinced me.Christopher Jones seems to have had problems with the part and Lean was unhappy but in many ways he is perfect. He is a cypher. A symbol of an outside world. Little more.It is ironic that he and Sarah Miles reportedly did not get along at all.But in the end this is an exquisitely made film. Lean was always a great craftsman. So in the end I still do not know what I think about Ryan's Daughter. I do know it makes me think about the themes at its heart. Is that a sign of the success of Lean? Perhaps.I am sure critics will keep arguing about it for another 40 years.

lionel-libson-1 When "Ryan's Daughter" first appeared, my mind was addled with leftist cant. Every entertainment had to pass a litmus test of relevance and adherence to popular political myths. Thus, when I finally saw the film on TCM last night it was a revelation.Having retired a few years ago, to live in the craggy paradise of Maine, I was especially overwhelmed by the visuals of the gun runners facing a raging sea; incredible cinematography, music, spare, yet powerful, and the seemingly impossible scurrying of the villagers, dwarfed by thundering waves and spray. I'm not sure if the visual or audio components were more successfully realized.We had visited Ireland 4 years ago, passing through the magnificent terrain and clustered villages near Dingle and the Cliffs of Mahre.As a photographer, I was astounded by the perfect portrayal of this startlingly beautiful region. By comparison, "The Quiet Man" looks theatrically artificial.The story seems to have caused most of the negative criticism. For me, Lean maintained a steady balance between scenic splendor and pinched, frustrated lives. All are suitably restrained and all too human. The result is a truly timeless film, life and lives confounded by ignorance and anger, but as universal as a Greek tragedy."Ryan's Daughter" can be compared without embarrassment to "The Dead", my other favorite Irish cinema.

dreutter@cox.net In retrospect the problems in this film grow larger than they were at the time. Though Mitchum plays the passionless schoolmaster, in real life he was said to have a low or average libido. (Some said because of marijuana, for which he was arrested) It was not long after that at Cannes that he staged the famous topless shot with an actress, perhaps to put his female admirers more at ease, that the sexy leading man lived up to the billing.The wedding night scene in this picture then becomes an incredibly bad inside joke. What curious casting, Mitchum, who looks every bit a man, plays the mooshy schoolmaster, and Jones, a pale flower of a man, can barely stand up, exudes the passion Rosy is seeking. Then of course Sarah Miles was an actress whose reputation tended to proceed her. Audiences looking at this in retrospect are laughing at her school girl shtick. Trevor Howard gave one of his most awkward performances. John Mills served to provide the cutaways whenever the action grew too tense, (not often). I saw one shot in the film which made sense, the Major looks out the window of the lorry at the Irish coastline, and Lean gives us a shot of his view, the light off the ocean, a small island, the view of a military man thinking about the land as an obstacle, an impediment. Good counterpoint.Like Kipling's Light Brigade, this film rode into the valley of film death. I turned it off rather than watch the carnage.