Film

Ryan's Daughter (1970)

Director: David Lean

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

An awe-inspiringly tedious lump of soggy romanticism, set in Ireland amid the Troubles of 1916, but with much of the action centring on clifftop and beach, where the characters tend to congregate either to have sex or to brood about not having it, and where the wind and waves have a pathetically fallacious time of it. Pert Rosy Ryan (Miles), as Trevor Howard's wise old Father Collins knows, isn't one to settle for just any old lad from the village. So she marries the kindly, prosaically middle-aged schoolteacher (Mitchum), but is soon prancing into the woods with a dashingly battle-scarred English officer (Jones), to dally while spiderwebs glisten, dandelion puffballs flutter away in the soughing winds, and so forth. Banal, utterly predictable, ludicrously overblown, it drags on interminably, with our heroine finally getting her comeuppance by being accused (falsely) of betraying the Nationalist cause and having her hair cut off by a flock of rhubarbing peasants.

---

• 
•