LEAN CUISINE! WE STAUNCHLY DEFEND (SORT OF)....THE RIDICULED "RYAN'S DAUGHTER".............

Ryan's Daughter (1970)    Master of epic-filmmaking David Lean took enormous amounts of crap from the uppecrust movie critics like Roger Ebert........they mocked and derided this movie with no mercy.....

                Why?   The story here, a semi-revamping of "Madame Bovary" by writer Robert Bolt wasn't substantial enough for them..... too skimpy to sustain Lean's overwhelming visuals and grandiose, almost mythic style.......

                Wow, did their panties ever get in a twist about Lean applying his Grand Opera directorial talent......to A LOVE STORY!!!!

                 These are all the same critics who'd make their funny little punnies about films like "Vertigo".....("....oh my, it's the same Hitchcock and bull story..."  yuk, yuk, yuk....How clever)

                   We kinda wonder how Ebert and that bunch would review today's output from studios..........200 million dollar, 2 & 1/2 hour movies about spandexed superheroes throwing each other into buildings.........(.....too skimpy for 'em, maybe?)

                    Here's the deal.......anyone who's visited this blog knows we're absolute suckers for Grand Opera filmmaking......in other words, big scale, ridiculously overblown sets, costumes, acting, storytelling.........

                      Many directors attempt this style, but precious few have a real flair for it, who aren't afraid to throw caution to the wind and go friggin' crazy with their films........regardless of  how bloated and sheer nuts the end results might appear.......

                      Our favorite examples.....Sergio Leone, Michael Cimino......and in this regard, David Lean.

                   In revisiting "Ryan's Daughter", we practically got legally high groovin' on Lean's stunning visuals......and the superb cast (with one horrible, lethal exception)......Robert Mitchum, skillfully playing against type as a shy, humble schoolteacher, Sarah Miles. Trevor Howard, Leo McKern, Barry Foster (vivid as the dangerous IRA leader)......and even John Mills controversial, Oscar-winning work as the Quasimodo-like village idiot......

                    Call us wacky, call us foolish, but we loved the whole, heaving, overblown, larger-than-life package.........who else but Lean would wait around a year for a real, spectacular coastal storm.......so he could film a real, spectacular coastal storm.........where you can watch Leo McKern come close to actually drowning in the middle of it.......

                    And the killer irony of it all.......Lean finished filming "Ryan's Daughter" for MGM just as the studio fell into the clutches of the Smiling Cobra, James T.Aubrey, who'd turn the studio into a cheapjack discount store.....(see our previous post about Aubrey and "Nightmare Honeymoon")

                     Aubrey arrived too late to inflict his usual damage on the film, so it went out into the world as a fully uncut Lean epic.......(probably the last time any old-school film would escape MGM unshredded in the editing room....)

                     Sadly, though, we found two flaws in "Ryan's Daughter".......one merely an annoyance......but the other a poisonous spear in the very heart of the film.......

                      The annoyance.......Maurice Jarre's score. Yes, he could write indelible themes that would forever energize and identify the film    (as in Lean's "Lawrence Of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago").......but then the rest of his scoring would drone on like hurdy-gurdy music coming from an amusement park carousel.........(sounded to us like Jarre didn't even bother watching some of the sequences where his music randomly wanders around, unrelated and unconnected to the images....)

                      The poisonous spear.........Lean's ruinous casting of the useless, blank-faced James Dean wanna-be Christopher Jones as the film's romantic touchstone.   To give you an accurate level of this disaster.......imagine "Lawrence Of Arabia" with a department store mannequin playing Lawrence instead of Peter 'O Toole.

                      Realizing the grievous mistake of inflicting his film with such dead weight, Lean tried cutting almost all of Jones' dialogue and dubbing his voice with a real actor....... to no avail.   Even with an actor's voice emanating from his expressionless, comatose lips......Jones was never more than a non-entity waiting to disappear......which he eventually did.

                      Despite Jones, we found more than enough in this movie to still make it a full ten-course David Lean meal.......(the storm sequence alone remains one of the most visually amazing set-pieces in film history)........but the culture-vultures' attack on it left Lean disheartened, waiting another 14 years til directing again with "A Passage To India".......

                    To hell with the critics.......we dearly love us some Grand Opera movie-making......a lost art that depended on huge emotions and eye-bulging cinematography.....(the real kind, not the stuff animated by 5,000 CGI cartoonists).....for that, BQ says 3 stars (***)
                   

                     
             

                 
               

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