In The Time Of The First Troubles-With David Lean’s “Ryan’s Daughter” In Mind –For Saint Pat’s Day   

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[Recently my old friend (and at various times competitor, usually friendly, when I was a film critic for now long defunct The Eye out in the Bay Area and he was doing the same for the American Film Gazette then out of a brick and mortar New York now on-line) mentioned that he was preparing a short review of the David Lean 1970 masterwork, Ryan’s Daughter to be published around Saint Patrick’s Day. Not that Sandy had any Irish blood in him, none mostly German and Jewish, but he thought that film’s subject appropriate for the publication date. He told me that he had been impressed by the film’s beautiful cinematography when he first watched the effort back in 1970 although in those days he was not a film critic but trying to scratch out a living as a newshound, a journalist.           

I mentioned to him that I had missed the film entirely, had not come across many later references as against the big masterwork Doctor Zhivago either, because I was in Vietnam trying to keep my ass in one piece just then. When Sandy summarized the film’s plot for me though I knew I had to take a peek, had to see what Sandy could not see not having been brought up shanty Irish in this country. Knew too that I would have a vastly different perspective on the thing. Although I have given up most of the grind of film reviews I have reserved the right on occasion to comment on some films from let’s call it a “social” perspective. This one is for those Irish brethren who take national pleasure in Saint Patrick’s Day. For the boyos of Easter, 1916 too.]

Damn, the “shawlies” in my old Acre working-class neighborhood, my almost totally Irish working-class section of Riverdale out about forty miles west of Boston (where most of the Acre Irish had emigrated from Southie when the linen factories were still up and running in the town a couple or three generations back), would have had a field day with the plotline of the film I am thinking about just now David Lean’s 1970 vast epic Ryan’s Daughter. For those not in the know the “shawlies” in Dublin, the Irish countryside, in Boston, in the Acre where in her time my grandmother was a leading figure were those virtuous women, mostly older women like Grandma Riley, who controlled the day to day mores of the section (the priests, especially Reverend Doctor Lally, took care of the Sunday and holy day chores). They controlled the mores in the time-tested ways from the old country (where in my youth most of them had either immigrated from as children like Grandma or had come over as first generation adults complete with brogue and their funny ways) of shunning, shamming and cackling like geese, if that is what geese do over the word of mouth “grapevine.” That grapevine for its instant intelligence about matters neighborhood matters small and large would be the envy of any CIA or NSA operative (the only grapevine better was the teenage Monday morning before school boys’ or girls’ restroom [okay, oaky lavatory] who did what, meaning who did the do, or said they did, okay who had had that holy grail sex we were all preoccupied with. Nothing was faster than that not even close and those older women, including Grandma, would have been shocked out of their undies if they knew who, or who was not, “doing the do” among the younger set.)    

The reason the Riverdale shawlies, and probably shawlies everywhere in Ireland or in the diaspora, would have had a field day is that the central story line of the film is the illicit love affair that young Rosy Ryan, played by Sarah Miles, had had with a British Army officer, played by Christopher Jones, during World War I, during the early part of World War I when not only were the British fighting in France and elsewhere on the continent against the Huns, against the Germans and their allies but were continuing their eight hundred year occupation of Ireland. Ireland then nothing but the number one colony across the Irish Sea. One of the village shawlies where almost all the action takes place out in the boondocks near that Irish Sea just mentioned gave the whole game away once they found out that Rosy was having that illicit affair when she uttered “there are loose women, whores and then there are a British officer’s whore” [lowest of the low] within earshot of the departing Rosy. That loose women category by the way included in the old neighborhood, divorced women, even divorced women with children, who seemed like some weird anomaly in the large family two parent main social situation.

Oh yeah, to add insult to injury Rosy was a married woman, married in the consecrated local Roman Catholic Church by the old worldly priest to the widowed middle-aged school teacher Charles Shaunessey, a “quiet man” as they used to say around the neighborhood, played by Robert Mitchum (an aging Robert Mitchum by then who back in the day, back in the 1940s would not have played it so rational when some frail like Jane Greer in Out of the Past twisted him every which way.)

This cuckolded husband business is nothing new in film, in Irish lore as well if you look at the lyrics to many Irish folk songs, especially those that deal with rural life out in the potato fields. What makes it note-worthy is that Rosy was having that affair in a very public manner at a time when Irish patriots were gearing up to show the British what for (this is the time around the unsuccessful if heroic Easter, 1916 uprising hailed by poets like William Butler Yeats). Needless to say the local villagers were eager to do harm to her-and they did.   

Beside the shunning and shaming of a “collaborator” (they would before she left the village with Charles holding her up emotionally stripped her naked and cut of her hair reminiscent of what the Resistance fighters in France did when they rounded up female collaborators, whores, who went around with the Germans during the occupation of France in World War II) they tarred her with the label “informer.” Maybe a worse epithet than a whore, even a British Army officer’s whore. Like I said this time frame was deep in World War I where the Irish who sought independence from Mother England decided to use her preoccupation with the continental war to take a stab at liberty. This included, which has happened in liberation struggles before and since, grabbing whatever weapons, you know, guns, hand grenades, dynamite anything, from the “enemy,” enemy of England in this case the Germans. An Irish Republican Army unit was in the area to grab some of this weaponry which the Germans had delivered by ship along the rocky ocean-splashed coast near the village. The seas were up and the IRA unit decided to brave the storm to see what could be salvaged as it washed ashore. And they with the help of the suddenly aroused local people were able to retrieve a lot of the materials.

Problem was that the British garrison headed by Rosy’s soldier boy lover had been forewarned and were waiting to stop the transport of the weapons. Somebody must have “snitched,” a sin in my old Acre neighborhood worse than lots of things like some married woman going under the linen sheets with somebody not her husband, or not married, more so among us schoolboys who had larceny in our hearts and would rather face seven a rations of hell than get that reputation. So Rosy took the fall, took a beating, got stripped and clipped, even as her ever understanding husband Charles physically tried to defend her. She didn’t do it though, her old man, her father the bastard did the dastardly deed. Boy the shawlies of Riverdale would have sliced and diced that bastard, done it up good.  So would we young boyos. Check this film out now that we are in a Saint Patrick’s Day mood.