David Lean must have turned in his grave recently when I finally got around to watching his Irish epic, Ryan's Daughter, 45 years after he made it, frame by painstaking frame.
The occasion was a wet afternoon in Dingle, and I was at a loose end. So on a whim, and knowing it was sacrilege, I downloaded this visual masterpiece, shot in “Superpanavision 70”, to an iPad. As if the great director hadn’t suffered enough from its mauling by the critics.
And yes, I could see why the critics didn’t like it much. Even by 1970 standards, it must have seemed a bit slow. By the end of the third hour, I found, the main source of dramatic tension came from wondering whether my iPad battery would hold out long enough, or whether I’d have to fetch the charger, which was in the car.
Then there was poor Christopher Jones, playing the British officer who turns the head of eponymous Kerry publican’s daughter (Sarah Miles). He had something of a nervous breakdown on set, apparently, and gave up acting afterwards. Suffice to say of his performance that it looked like he had retired already.
By modern standards, the film is a dinosaur – magnificent but unviable. Animals were indeed harmed in the making of it (albeit accidentally, when a bus on the set’s main street ran over a pig and some hens). But if it’s any consolation, so were humans.
No computer graphics, or even stunt doubles here – the famous storm scene was real. In fact, it was a composite of several storms – a greatest-hits collection of Kerry’s most violent weather – none of them faked.
In his commitment to cinema verité, mid-tempest, Lean gave two of his leading actors, John Mills and Trevor Howard, a sporting chance to drown themselves. They nearly succeeded, when a currach overturned in 20ft waves, knocking Mills unconscious.
All that aside, however, and even when it’s squeezed onto a eight-inch iPad screen, the film is still staggeringly beautiful. This is largely due to the Dingle Peninsula, which won a supporting Oscar for its role – or at least contributed handsomely to the one won by cinematographer Freddie Young.
The only other Oscar went to John Mills as the village idiot – a part that involved more ham than the pig in the bus accident. Certainly, of the two award-winning performances, the Dingle Peninsula’s has stood the intervening decades better.
Even at the time, it survived the critical panning unscathed; although the film’s negative reception may have been a factor behind one lingering source of local regret – the short-sighted decision not to retain the fictional village of Kirrary. With typical extravagance, Lean had built the 30-odd houses from solid stone. After filming, the production company even offered to finish any buildings that didn’t have a full structure, if Kerry County Council would assume responsibility for the site. Instead, insurance issues led to the village being bulldozed.
But village or no village, the film remained an advertisement for Kerry of a kind Bord Fáilte couldn’t have bought.
In the intervening years, of course, the canny people of Dingle have supplemented Ryan's Daughter with a more sustainable tourism generator – a bottle-nosed dolphin called Fungie.
It’s extraordinary that, of all the bays in all the towns in all the world, a marine animal of such star quality should have swum into this one back in the 1980s. Yet there he was, and there he remains – still performing after all these years, to the undying gratitude of local boatmen.
Small wonder that Dingle should marvel at its good fortune, or that a local playwright might link the themes of the movie and the dolphin into a reflection on late 20th century life in this Irish coastal town. And so it was recently that, having seen the 45-year-old film, I also went to see a new play, After Sarah Miles, then showing in Dingle's Beehive Theatre.
Written by Michael Hilliard Mulcahy, it was a funny, moving story of one man’s adventures in love, alcohol, and the fishing industry, with Don Wycherley, who was born to play neer-do-well Irishmen on the brink of redemption, winning a standing ovation for the performance.
Since then, the play has been on a countrywide tour, including a raid on millennial Clontarf. But Dubliners have a second chance to see it from this Friday, when it begins a week-long run at the Smock Alley Theatre. More information is at smockalley.com.
@FrankmcnallyIT
fmcnally@irishtimes.com