An epic year of misbehaviour, hedonism and havoc behind the scenes of ‘Ryan’s Daughter’
NON-FICTION
Making Ryan’s Daughter: The Myths, Madness and Mastery
Paul Benedict Rowan New Island, €17.95
IT is one of the greats paradoxes of remote landscapes that they can imbue a sense of confinement. Ask any of the crew of Ryan’s Daughter, the hulking production that embedded itself in the Dingle Peninsula for a year in the late 1960s, and they’d probably agree.
David Lean’s romantic epic was the original Waterworld, a film so swollen, expensive and problematic that the scars of its burden would always show through over its sprawling three hours-plus running time. A flawed Oscar-winning classic or a swollen mess, depending on your viewpoint, by the time Ryan’s Daughter was released in 1970, the production had run 135 days over schedule and gone $3.5m over-budget.
This added expense that accounted for a quarter of the final $13m cost was down to paying cast members overtime. In those 12 months when Kerry became a movie set, there was an ever-present factor that put paid to any notions of a streamlined shooting schedule — the Atlantic weather. The concept of a call sheet, an agenda drafted before filming setting out a timetable for scenes, locations and cast, was impossible as the Atlantic threw five seasons a day at the filmmakers.
Add to this the demanding attitude of Lean and the result was countless days of inertia. Throw in the then-47 pubs of Dingle and customary showbiz attitudes of the era and Ryan’s Daughter became a sodden kneesup where resentments festered among the under-stimulated Hollywood egos trapped there.
A gift from the non-fiction gods, then, for Paul Rowan, the award-winning sports writer who first heard about the film from his parents during one of countless childhood holidays in the area. This expertly-researched romp is the result of 15 years of interviews with those on set or looking on at the time, and arrives right on cue for the film’s 50th anniversary this year.
Reading though the book, you wonder might the filming of Ryan’s Daughter make a better story than the actual movie itself. Between its end-of-the-world location, the injection of cash and glitz into the frugal rural community, and the clashing colour schemes of preening film stars and reserved locals, it has the hallmarks of some brand of hair-raising Ealing comedy.
With a catalogue that included The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965), Lean was the golden goose of a financially unsound Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. When he and scriptwriting foil Robert Bolt had set out to retell Flaubert’s Madame Bovary against the backdrop of post-Rising Ireland, he had carte blanche. The studio needed this to bail them out of the red.
Lean, meanwhile, was chasing his biggest hit to date and pushed the throttle too far. He insisted on shooting in 70mm, which, while giving the film a majestic sweep, requires bigger technical specs. This gets interesting when trying to shoot a currach scene in the wind-lashed surf. If the Kerry light and weather was misbehaving — which was all it did — he would cut and postpone filming. Self-important cast members waited in bars for calls that never came, sozzled and embittered about Lean’s unyielding, joyless style of helmsmanship.
Robert Mitchum, as the cuckolded schoolmaster Charles, was at the peak of his devil-may-care years, and decided that he wasn’t going to play ball with Lean. Relations got so sour between the two prize bulls that they couldn’t stand to be in the same room as one another.
Mitchum didn’t lose sleep over it. He turned Milltown House, the hotel he rented in its entirety, into a notorious party den where booze and broads were flown in and a marijuana greenhouse was cultivated around the back. When Mitchum’s longsuffering wife Dorothy paid a visit, a pause button was pressed.
In the title role of the sexually unfulfilled Rosy was Bolt’s wife, Sarah Miles. She admitted to an affair with Mitchum occurring in the aftermath of the production, but other sources here are not so sure. Lean quickly took a disliking to the brattish ingenue, but far more problematic was a rift that emerged between her and Christopher Jones, who would play her love interest, Major Doryan.
Jones, a Tennessee pretty-boy who sleepwalked into movies, infuriated Lean with the woodenness of his acting. So hopeless was he at accents that a voiceover had to be recorded in post-production using another actor.
When the time came to film what would become one of the most scandalous cinema sex scenes of that era, Jones’ refusal to co-operate with Lean and Miles held up production for days. To make him more malleable, Mitchum and Miles spiked his breakfast with a sedative.
Despite the hell-raising and juicy gossip, Rowan reminds us that this was ultimately an unhappy film, one that ruined marriages, shortened lifespans, and sent careers into decline. Ryan’s Daughter met a critical mauling on its release, and despite a decent box office and two Oscar gongs (for supporting actor John Mills and cinematographer Freddie Young), the film has not aged well.
But as a tale from a bygone era when filmmakers couldn’t just “CGI-in” the world at will, Rowan’s book is a lively and perceptive addition to Irish cinema literature.
He achieves a real intimacy as he charts Kerry’s own Fitzcarraldo, an endurance test of a production where the best screen performance was given by the one element that caused the most grief — the location itself.