Ryan's Daughter

David Lean can hardly be accused of pandering. He wrote once in a late 1940's essay that it went without saying that an important purpose of the cinema was to give a momentary dream to young people on Saturday night dates: for "her" that she was beautiful, exquisitely dressed and adored, for "him," that he was handsome and had conquered."her." And so they wrapped arms about one another and drifted away for two hours. There was no cynicism in it, however, or Brief Encounter certainly would not exist. And, of course, there is Dr. Zhivago, kind of an ultimate Saturday Night hug movie. And Ryan's Daughter.

Through the good graces of a good friend, I got to see a screening of a (relatively) uncut 35mm Anamorphic print of Ryan's Daughter just a few days ago.Before you put this down for fear of some ravings about techie things, I'll come back to it later. Romantic as it is, this film never sweeps you away like Zhivago. Instead, it has a kind of raw tragedy and raw sexuality that is both uncharacteristic of Lean and in many ways ahead of its time for mainstream movies.

So then, what's wrong with this picture. To begin with, it was filmed in 70mm. My recollection of seeing it at the Granada Theatre in Buffalo, NY in its uncut roadshow version projected through the original hand-ground Todd-AO prototype projection lenses, is of a truly stunning and glowing motion picture.

But to every one of my four companions in an almost deserted theatre during opening weekend, it was boring beyond belief. My girlfriend at the time was so bored, she wanted to leave and we had a terrible fight about it afterwards. I was, on the other hand, fascinated by it, and the glow of the film is almost unshakeable in my memories.

That is the first thing that is missing from a 35mm print: the incredible visual detail and the stunning play of light from a 65mm negative projected with the proper lenses on a slightly curved silvered screen from a 70mm release print. Every color is crisp. Every grain of sand is visible. Every mote of dust in every glory of sunshine. Wow.

The second thing is the sound. 70mm mag stripe had seven channel stereo (or perhaps it was six channel stereo, who's counting.) Five channels behind the screen so that the dialogue would move across the vast image with each character as they spoke. Then one (or was it two?) surround channels for scenes with huge waves crashing against the beach. Long since abandoned for the modern super surround systems where all dialogue is mixed to the center channel and the three front channels are basically used to have the sound of a car move from right to left and the surrounds for helicopters flying all over the place (pretty kewl actually), the original stereophonic systems were very focussed on human speech: where it was and who was saying it. Sometimes this got disconcerting when cutting between over the shoulder shots and having dialogue pop back and forth from right to left. That's why it was abandoned.

But in its glory, you couldn't beat it for dramatic scenes!

It's a pity, then, that this recent screening was of a 35mm print (and with no stereophonic sound either) because one of the big losses was of visual sensuality. It is like a different movie then, making you focus on the characters and dialogue and less on the image. A companion remarked that he had rediscovered the film on television, and I realized that it would probably work very well there with its big close ups and medium shot conversations.

That, in fact, is what is so uncharacteristic about Ryan, and why, I think, it don't all hang together. Compared to Brief Encounter or to Odd Man Out or The Rising of the Moon there is virtually no intimacy in the film, and the only characters who are shown in intimate settings are Sara Miles and Robert Mitchum. Nothing is ever revealed about the private lives of anyone else! And it is all played out against the most gorgeous landscapes ever revealed on the screen!

It is a thin story on a huge, huge, huge, huge set. Trevor Howard's is virtually the only character written with both the size and the subtlety to match the huge rocks, crashing waves, and desolate countryside. Setting a romatic tragedy against emptiness cries out for some internal life in the characters. And stunning art direction won't fill that hole.

Imagine that Rose was brilliant as well as beautiful and think what a tragedy that would have been. Instead, we have a woman craving, unknowingly, for a good fuck, for the big "O." Albeit that a woman's sexual life was ignored and to some extent consciously repressed those many years ago, that the story takes place in Ireland (home of the Irish Sex Manual -- filled with 200 blank pages) amongst Irish Catholics, it strikes me that it is not tragic enough that she simply be deprived of physical fulfillment. There is not enough history to the characters to make this compelling: who was Rose's mother really? where did her Dad come from? is it enough only to know that the British won't let the young people work and that all they have to do is to hang out on the main street and look at each other lustfully and make fun of the town fool? It seems to me that these are characters that are conceived of as monolithically and simplistically as the rocks on the seashore.

But, Lean and Bolt manage to pull this out of the fire somehow. Having seen this film now around 4 or 5 times in various incarnations and butcherings, I've never fallen asleep, nor have I ever felt like I was wasting my time. This is not damning with faint praise. Even Lean is entitled to come a cropper. And bad Lean is pretty good. Nonetheless, I think that the only way to appreciate what they meant to do is in the original 70mm format with sound intact. Then all the pieces are in place. It's all very well and good to see the strengths of the story as they reveal themselves (at proper scale) in the P&S TV version, but Lean set out to tell a mythic story with mythic sized characters on a now mythical sized screen with technical systems that seem sadly to be lost in time. Let's bring it all back in IMAX with all its visual and aural beauty and all of its dramatic blemishes.

New York City, December 20, 1996