David's Irish Rose

By Mark Goodman

Small lives are not the stuff of spectacle. They are not performed on a vast screen to the fife and drum of a Colonel Bogey March. Unfortunately, Director David Lean seems to have become so obsessed with historical immensity (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) that he has lost the capacity to focus on the troubled existence of ordinary people. The loss is plain in his wide-screen nightmare, Ryan's Daughter.

A pity it is too, because the little hamlet of Kirrary, perched on the wild southwestern coast of Ireland, is populated with handsome and talented characters. There is Robert Mitchum, a solid, burly movie craftsman woefully miscast as Charles Shaughnessy, the weak-shanked schoolteacher. There is Trevor Howard, who makes the crustaceous Father Collins genuinely likable and credible against almost insuperable odds. In the role of Ryan's daughter Rosy, Sarah Miles is as tremulously lovely a colleen as ever graced a Kerry hillside. The elliptic, listless script is by Robert Bolt, her real-life husband, who has to his credit the literate A Man for All Seasons. Bolt and Lean did not lack time or money; the film was three years in the making, cost more than $10 million.

Heavy Breathing. But Lean has opted for bombast rather than character development, scope instead of dramatic tension. The time is 1916, and Britain's thin red line of empire is being besieged on two sides by the Boches and the Irish Republican Army. Rosy is a willful, discontented lass who scorns the bumptious town boys and chooses by default the widowed, middle-aged teacher. Shaughnessy warns her: "I only taught you about Byron and Beethoven and Captain Blood. I'm not one of them fellows meself." They marry anyway, and her wedding night is your standard virgin v. tired stag disappointment. Neither the audience nor Father Collins can mistake the meaning of her persistent frustrated sighs.

Enter Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), newly shipped from the German front with a gimpy leg and a bad case of shell shock. Doryan and Rosy fall into each other's arms the first time an imaginary artillery shell goes off in his mind. But of course all English-Irish love matches are star-crossed. Turns out that Rosy's publican father (Leo McKern) is the local informer for the British. Father surreptitiously blows the whistle on as grand a gang of Republican gunrunners as ever stepped out of the Abbey Theatre.

Lean supports his matchstick characters with the crudest possible symbolism. Rosy breathes and heaves beside a patch of openmouthed lilies as Doryan appears on the hill. Their couplings--and every potentially significant moment in the film --are drowned by the roar of the surf, the creak of windblown trees, the ta-pocketa-pocketa of a British power generator, and an overpowering score. Perhaps the rudest device of all is the misuse of John Mills as the village idiot who sees all and knows all, but can tell nothing. Like the film itself, it is scarcely worthy of Lean's demonstrated talent.

Mark Goodman

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