Ryan's Daughter
Not unlike Heaven’s Gate a decade later, Ryan’s Daughter (1970) entered the annals of Hollywood as a fiasco. The film was the hugely ambitious undertaking by a director, David Lean, who drove forward like a fast car without breaks. Enormously expensive and difficult to film, Ryan’s Daughter tanked at the box office—or did it?
For Ryan’s Daughter: The Making of an Irish Epic, Irish investigative journalist Paul Benedict Rowan read the biographies of all parties concerned, gained access to private letters and conducted interviews with numerous participants. Rowan does no damage to the generally accepted account of a production bloated by extravagance and bristling with animosity. MGM was counting on Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt, deemed “the hottest creative team in Hollywood” after Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago, to deliver an epic with global appeal. They were disappointed.
Much of Rowan’s narrative concerns the drunken abandon on set. Trevor Howard, cast as a priest, hurt himself by falling off a horse, proving that drinking and riding can be dangerous. The unlucky actor nearly drowned during a shoreline scene when his boat capsized. As a stakeholder in MGM, Seagrams shipped cases of its wares to the film’s location shoot in a remote corner of Ireland, where many residents still lacked indoor toilets. Robert Mitchum (not Lean’s original choice) sparred with the director, drank lavishly and displayed his usual flippant attitude. As Rowan puts it, “Mitchum’s view of the film business was that it wasn’t a serious business at all.”
Because the tiny village on the Irish coast included too many modern conveniences to be convincing for a story set in 1917, as the Irish revolt against Britain began, Lean built his own village at great expense. The weather was fickle and even dangerous. Retake followed retake. Spending was out of control.
Rowan posits that Ryan’s Daughter wasn’t the box office flop of legend and repeats the rumors of creative accounting. Ryan’s Daughter received a couple of Oscar nominations but was dissed by film critics. The largest problem may have been that the public wasn’t in the mood for a three-hour historical epic at the time of the film’s release. The New Hollywood of Easy Rider was on the rise and Lean’s vision looked old fashioned in those headlights. Perhaps it’s time to look at Ryan’s Daughter again.
Ryan’s Daughter: The Making of an Irish is published by University Press of Kentucky.
