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Ryan's Daughter (1970)

8 Votes: 4

Director

Starring

Last On

14:00-17:30 Mon 3rd Jan 2011 210m
Five

Synopsis

Released five years after Doctor Zhivago, this romantic epic from David Lean was not so much roasted by the critics as incinerated. The story of a dreamy girl, who marries a stolid village teacher and then has an affair with a shell-shocked British officer, began as a script of Flaubert's Madame Bovary that Robert Bolt had written for his wife, Sarah Miles. Set in a bleak Irish village in 1916, it co-stars a courageously cast Robert Mitchum as the teacher, a mountain of a man who presses dried flowers and can't take his shirt off without blushing. Trevor Howard plays a priest, John Mills a village idiot, Christopher Jones the Byronic soldier, Leo McKern a publican posing as a Republican and Barry Foster is Michael Collins in all but name. Stories about the year-long making of the picture have duly entered movie legend (read them all in Kevin Brownlow's biography of Lean); as an overblown romance it has no equal and now looks like a masterwork, thanks in no small part to Freddie Young's Oscar-winning images of the wild Dingle Peninsula.