cult film freak: DAVID LEAN'S IRISH LANDSCAPE MELODRAMA 'RYAN'S DAUGHTER'

Sarah Miles in RYAN'S DAUGHTER Year: 1970 Rates: ****

Whether it's desert-dwelling Peter O'Toole staring at the night moon in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or Omar Sharif's pallid moonglow gaze from a crammed train in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, within the whirlwind of historic epics, director David Lean's characters find small pockets of downtime to smell the roses. But in RYAN'S DAUGHTER, the roses... or in this case, Rosy... is practically all there is...

And it's where Rosy lives within the beachy cliffs of Ireland that's visually heaven on earth; then again, like all beautiful places, it can also be purgatory. While there is the historic aspect concerning Irish Revolutionaries seeking German guns under the guard of the occupying British, it's peripheral to this existential and at times Gothic and eerie artsy epic where one character complains: "This whole cursed country will capsize with talk!" And yet, as Christopher Jones is concerned, his dubbed voice doesn't hinder a performance relying on painful, melancholy expressions. Even without sporadic war flashbacks, a tattered near-past is all in the eyes...

Robert Mitchum outside Ryan's Daughter's Father's Pub

The James Dean-like WILD IN THE STREETS actor plays a young and handsome, limp-crippled British war hero having an affair with Rosy, played by Sarah Miles, who initially forces a rushed marriage to her (former) middle-age, widowed schoolmaster Robert Mitchum as Charles...

In one scene he's embarrassed to be shirtless in his own home (what his young wife prefers); and the sheepish way Mitchum hunkers-down at the kitchen table is, by itself, worthy of an Oscar nomination since we've rarely experienced such a vulnerable side to the iconic leading man who, in his youthful past, was usually a confident and impenetrable hero. Unfortunately, the only Oscar winner is John Mills, horribly overacting as the cartoon-like village idiot... mindlessly banal one-minute and then practically an investigating Sherlock Holmes via pantomime the next... saturated with bad makeup hybrid of Quasimodo, Frankenstein's Monster and (later) The Elephant Man, he's simply ridiculous...

Sarah Miles, Christopher Jones and Robert Mitchum

Meanwhile the best scenes occur when the oblivious Rosy thinks Mitchum's Charles is the man of her dreams. Her wedding day is filmed how THE GODFATHER would be: seeming part of a noisy and active, palpable real-time that the audience eavesdrops upon...

And later, while the rice continues to strike the window of their makeshift honeymoon suite next door, as she discovers life isn't like the romance novels that shaped her, it's a personal, contained side of David Lean that his two previous grand epics didn't (need or care to) capture. Another standout is a sunny beach scene after the affair has begun when Mitchum, with his students on a shell-collecting field trip, notices two pair of footprints and, while imagining who could have made them, we visually share in his thoughts...

Robert Mitchum and his new teacher's pet

Unfortunately, RYAN'S DAUGHTER suffers by how long and tedious particular scenes play out: One has Jones introduced to the military barracks by an officer whose rambling expository seems endless, even after the first two-minutes and then sustaining for what fees like fifteen more. Another has Jones in Rosy's father's barroom, being forced to recall a battle as the annoyingly intrusive Village Idiot taps and taps the wall...

If more strategic time was spent getting to know more about the eclectic side-characters... like Leo McKern's two-faced publican, Ryan; Barry Foster as the legendary, often violent revolutionary who Ryan surreptitiously worships before reluctantly forced to help; Trevor Howard as the stern yet sympathetic, down-to-earth vicar; or the town's young bitch bully, meaner than a Salem witch-hunter... and less time on the soap operatic and often sappy, over-symbolic melodrama... we'd experience what makes the characters tick in a story where the people should mean more than their surrounding landscape.