An Irish Love Story During Troubled Times-David Lean’s “Ryan’s Daughter” (1970)-A Film Review-For Saint Patrick's Day 

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Ryan’s Daughter, starring Robert Mitchum, Christopher Jones, Sarah Miles, John Miles, Trevor Howard, directed by David Lean, 1970

As those of us who were around during the 1960s and paid attention to the movies if, like myself, for no other reason than cheap dates and darkness, might have expected if they heard the name David Lean they would fully expect to have big lush vistas and cinematic epics, long cinematic epics. He had an already established pedigree with Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. And Lean does not fail us with this 1970 effort, Ryan’s Daughter, about the troubled love affair between a wistful Rosy Ryan, played by Sarah Miles, and an invalided British Army Officer, played by Christopher Jones, during the heart of World War I and the brewing troubles in the fight for Irish independence.

In a later time the wistful, restless, searching, reaching for rainbows Rosy might have been a classic “flower child”. I know I had dates with just such wistful women back in the 1960s and delighted in their company, as long as I could hold their attention. But our Rosy had two very big problems, maybe three, back then and it is not quite clear to me even after watching the three and one half hour masterwork (I won’t include extra time spent on the Special Features which were well worth checking out to get a feel for how an epic gathers itself together).

First and foremost she was a “flower child,” a free spirit in a rural Irish village isolated by the foaming sea and by its own staid traditions driven by the Roman church and an oppressed nation culture and while today a woman having an “illicit” affair would draw at most a few well-placed snickers back then the future held nothing but shaming, shunning and maybe worse. So her desire to “seek a newer world” as my old friend Sam Lowell would call what she was after was checked from minute one. Secondly, Rosy when she had that illicit affair was a very married women, married to a “quiet man,” a village intellectual, the widowed middle-aged village school teacher, Charles, played by Robert Mitchum. No man likes to be, or should like, to be cuckolded but Charles was the soul of rationality whatever emotional trauma was churning inside. A young lass and an older man set in his ways would seem to have been doomed from the start as both recognized in the end after the heat of her affair was terminated by the suicide of that troubled invalided army officer. Lastly Rosy was caught in the throes of the modern Irish struggle for national liberation where the nationalists were using Mother England’s troubles on the continent to spring for freedom. That made the British Army of Occupation all the more onerous. Made her “their” whore in the eyes of the locals. Worse made her subject to accusations, falsely as it turned out, of informing when the boyos from the IRA were trying to rescue weapons sent by the Germans which had been battered by the terrible wrath of Irish Sea and the British garrison was waiting in ambush for them up the road.                         

Name your chose of what would do Rosy in at the end (aided by a treacherous father who actually was a snitch) as she and Charles walked out of the village where they had stayed maybe too long but she paid dearly for that love-I hope she thought it was worth it. What, no question, is worth it is to watch this film unfold against the grandeur of the Irish countryside and those terrible seas.