Movie Review: Ryan's Daughter (1970)

A grand romantic epic, Ryan's Daughter enjoys lavish visual splendour and a surprisingly spry story of an impetuous young woman seeking fulfillment.

The setting is a small rural oceanside town in Ireland during the late stages of the First World War. Father Hugh Collins (Trevor Howard) keeps an eye on everyone's behaviour, including Rose Ryan (Sarah Miles), a spirited young woman of marriageable age. She sets her eyes on widowed schoolteacher Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum), and they do get married. Rose quickly realizes she made a mistake: Charles is exceptionally polite and adores her, but is also boring and uninterested in physical intimacy.

Meanwhile Ireland is chafing under British rule. Rose's father Tom Ryan (Leo McKern) runs the local pub and expresses hatred towards the British, but harbours a hidden agenda. A small nearby British garrison welcomes handsome Major Randolph Doryan (Christopher Jones) as a new commander. He is a war hero but suffers from a damaged leg and severe shell shock. 

Rose and Doryan fall in love at first sight and embark on a steamy affair. The village idiot Michael (John Mills), who has an incurable crush on Rose, is the first to spot the scandalous liaison. Meanwhile Irish revolutionary Tim O'Leary (Barry Foster) is in the area plotting a gun smuggling operation from the sea, while a massive ocean storm approaches.

Director David Lean returns to the theme of love set against political upheaval, this time exploring unfulfilled expectations and the consequences of illicit lust. Robert Bolt wrote the script drawing inspiration from Madame Bovary, and the jagged Irish setting provides Lean with a bounty of breathtaking landscapes. 

The focus on characters helps offset the mammoth 195 minutes of running time. Lean maintains tight interest in a relatively few characters, and teases out several themes with Roses' arc underpinning the narrative. She is warned by both Father Hughes and Charles Shaughnessy her spirit is too big for a tiny Irish village. She anyway chases after Charles, and her disappointment is immediate, leaving her exceptionally vulnerable to the dashing young Major. With her father and pub owner Tom playing a dangerous game, the sturdy father-daughter bond will confirm her destiny.

Charles Shaughnessy is Rose's counterpart, a man so satisfied with domesticity he marries her flaming spirit then does his best to snuff it out through neglect. Yet when the world closes in on Rose, Charles' attributes come to the fore in a vindication of substance over style. Father Collins is a provocative and in many ways progressive character, using his man-of-religion status to poke his nose into everyone's affairs, but also exhibiting the necessary judgment to account for humanity ahead of strict morality.

Lean's storytelling is both luxurious and languid, Ryan's Daughter pausing frequently to admire wild natural beauty captured by cinematographer Freddie Young. Although the film always moves at the slowest possible pace, moments of drama and tension drawn from the political backdrop and the harsh terrain do provide jolts of momentum, with the mammoth storm battering the Irish coast a particular highlight. An undercurrent of almost unstated humour permeates through the film, most of it conveyed through Maurice Jarre's playful music score.

Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles are adequate in the two central roles, although both yield towards staid and sober. Trevor Howard and John Mills make up the difference in showy displays of Irish character, Mills in particular getting too much screen time as the mute but observant sensitive soul trapped in a malfunctioning body.

Ryan's Daughter is one young woman with a disproportionate impact, her spirit clashing with her culture, both ready to confront and neither easy to tame.



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Movie Review: The Big Sleep (1978)

A private investigation thriller, The Big Sleep moves Raymond Chandler's novel to modern day England but fails to recreate the requisite mood of pervasive dank criminality.

In suburban London, private investigator Philip Marlowe (Robert Mitchum) is hired by the elderly and paralyzed General Sternwood (James Stewart) to investigate and stop a blackmail campaign involving his wild younger daughter Camilla (Candy Clark). Marlowe also meets older daughter Charlotte (Sarah Miles), whose husband Rusty Regan has been missing for a month. The blackmail investigation leads Marlowe to book merchant Geiger, his assistant Agnes (Joan Collins), and her partner Brody (Edward Fox).

The trio are running a small scale pornography and blackmail racket, but soon Geiger is murdered, the Sternwood chauffaur turns up dead, and Brody is also summarily killed. One common thread linking the deaths appears to be slick gangster and casino operator Eddie Mars (Oliver Reed), whose wife Mona (Diana Quick) is also missing. With chief henchman Lash Canino (Richard Boone) emerging as a ruthless intimidator, Marlowe is intrigued that everyone he meets mentions the missing Regan, but no one is especially keen to find him.

A certain amount of courage is required to remake a classic, and to relocate a quintessential late 1930s Los Angeles crime story to 1970s England. This Lew Grade production insists on wedging a sordid American tale into a manicured British context, with English director Michael Winner also writing the screenplay. The result is predictable: despite the engagingly convoluted criminality, everything seems just off.

The story is faithful to the labyinthine book, but Winner never finds the style and mordant temperament required to stitch together the blur of killings and multiple conniving characters. The events are ticked-off with mechanical proficiency but zero chemistry, the staid English settings never clicking with the material and also left unexploited. Winner almost apologetically steers clear of contaminating Chandler's caustic attitude with any prim Englishness, leaving the film stranded in a vague blend of time and space.

Given the strength of the cast, the lack of any cohesiveness between people, events and places is almost tragic. Every key role is occupied by solid talent, but the stars appear to operate in detached parallel dimensions. The temperature between Robert Mitchum's Marlowe and Sarah Miles' Charlotte remains colder than the inside of a basement freezer unit. Oliver Reed is effective as the fashionable nexus of evil Eddie Mars, but never connects at a human level with any of his victims or enemies. And Candy Clark as Camilla lands on the side of childishly insane, missing all the essential nymphomaniac and rebellious undercurrents.

Although some of the dialgue wit survives and James Stewart rolls back the years to convey a stricken tycoon's heartache, this version of The Big Sleep is an exercise in transplanting the body but ignoring the soul.

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Movie Review: Hope And Glory (1987)

A child's view of World War Two, Hope And Glory has an innocent tenderness that is impossible not to like. John Boorman's childhood memories of the London Blitz are translated to a film where young spirits thrive while the terror of war grips a nation.

In a London suburb, 10 year old Bill (Sebastian Rice-Edwards) hears the adults talk of impending war. His older sister Dawn (Sammi Davis) is discovering boys and sex, while his father Clive (David Hayman) is eager to join the war effort despite his advancing years. When the shooting starts, it is left to the mother of the family Grace (Sarah Miles) to look after Bill, Dawn and their younger sister Sue.

Grace tries but cannot bring herself to ship her children to relatives in Australia, so the family buckles down to survive the aerial assault on London. As the neighbourhood is gradually destroyed by unrelenting waves  of German bombing, homes are lost and neighbours die, but Billy and his friends discover a world of freedom to do as they please, rampaging through the rubble to discover new adventures and create their own wars. In the meantime Dawn falls in love with a Canadian soldier, and the conditions of war just heighten the strain between her and Grace.

Structured more as vignettes from a life disrupted by war than a traditional narrative, Hope And Glory highlights the natural resiliency of children to make the best out of every situation. With an existential war raging around him, Billy still finds the opportunities to observe and learn, question and debate, and scrap his way into the neighbourhood gaggle of boys enjoying the rule vacuum created by the war. The older Dawn is already tugging at the edges of rebellion before the shooting starts. The war accelerates her journey from child to woman, with experiences that are both exhilarating and embarrassing.

Boorman captures the air of surreal optimism that ensures survival in the face of daily brushes with death.  Hope And Glory is true to its name, both hope and glory thriving on the home front while the grim business of war churns away. Boorman coaxes a winning performance out of a young Rice-Edwards, a non-actor helped by his lack of pretensions, easily slipping into the role of a child more amazed than scared by the world suddenly crumbling around him. Miles nails the frazzled mother having to look after her brood during a prolonged crisis, and Davis adds a measure of unpredictable wildness to the family, more worried about her love life than the irritating detail of a world at war.

Late in the movie a crusty Ian Bannen makes an appearance as the animated Grandfather, as Grace takes the family to the countryside for a belated reprieve from the fires of a burning London. Hope And Glory increases the comic dose as Bannen effortlessly swallows the scenery, and embroils himself in an epic confrontation with a rat. Meanwhile, an errant German bomber still chases Billy to the country, unknowingly exposing him to new and highly economical fishing techniques.

In Hope And Glory, as the adults fret about the war the children simply go about the business of growing up, discovering new playgrounds and amidst the suspension of all the rules, building everlasting memories.

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