Ryan's Daughter

Introduction

After the enormous, Oscar-winning success of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, David Lean considered several subjects for his next film, including Gandhi, but they came to nothing. Then Robert Bolt produced a script version of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, which he and Lean eventually turned into a new story, Ryan's Daughter, set during the Irish Civil War in 1916.

The production was beset by difficulties - disagreements with some of the actors, Bolt's reservations about the script's ending, the awful Irish weather and endless technical problems. The projected six-month shooting schedule lasted a year.

When the film was released, it was a critical and popular failure, although Lean was always proud of its two-year run in London's West End. He did not make another film for fourteen years. Over thirty years on, one can appreciate that Ryan's Daughter is made with all of Lean's legendary craftsmanship, resulting in sequences of breathtaking beauty and erotic symbolism (the dancing at Rosie's wedding, her tryst with Doryan), and which perfectly captures the wonderful Irish landscape and seascape, as well as the claustrophobia of village life.

The film reunited him with actors John Mills and Trevor Howard, the former unrecognizable as the deformed village idiot Michael, a transformation achieved with a simple make-up, rather than the grotesque one originally encouraged by his director. Lean devised a self-referential reprise of his famous cut from an extinguished match to the rising desert sun in Lawrence of Arabia, but this time in reverse - from the setting sun to the striking of a match.

Janet Moat