Troubled Epic E-Book

Michael Tanner

• Herausgeber: The Collins Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Ryan's Daughter, winner of two Oscars, was a very successful film that lured Michael Tanner to the Dingle Peninsula. He researched this story by focusing on identifying locations and interviewing local people involved in the film's shoot. The result is an unvarnished account of the troubled shooting of the film, both on and off camera, and how its stars - Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Trevor Howard, Christopher Jones and John Mills - coped with a year on Ireland's west coast in 1969. The story is largely told in the words of local people who were drivers, extras, prop men, landladies, actors or mere observers. Also included is a gazetteer to the locations used on the Dingle Peninsula and elsewhere in Kerry to enable fans to follow in Rosy Ryan's footsteps. With pictures and archive material, much never published before, this is the behind-the-scenes story of a film which changed the Dingle Peninsula overnight, saw more antics than usual by stars off and on set, and resulted in David Lean making no film for 14 years.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Sources

Maps

Part 1: A TROUBLESOME DAUGHTER

1 Rosy’s Story

2 Rosy’s Conception

3 Finding Rosy a Home

4 The Last Travelling Circus

5 Trouble On Set: Lean and his Actors

6 Trouble Off Set: Location Fever

7 A Legend on Location: Mitch Enters Dingle Folklore

PART 2: TRACKING HER DOWN

8 Finding the Principal Locations

9 The Role of Each Location

PART 3: BIDDING HER FAREWELL

10 God Save Our Lean!: from the critics

11 God Save Our Lean!: for his legacy

Appendix: Cast; Credits; Awards

Picture Credits

SOURCES

The principal sources for this book were the primary interviews conducted with the people of the Dingle Peninsula and County Kerry during the period October 2005 to March 2006:

Kate and Tomas Ashe DINGLE

Seamus Begley BALLYDAVID

Junior Brown DINGLE

Owen Casey KILLARNEY

Richard Clancy KILLARNEY

Tim Collins DINGLE

Noreen Curran DINGLE

Lis Daly DUNQUIN

Maire Daly DUNQUIN

Kevin Devane LISPOLE

Piaras Ferriter FAHAN

Seamus Ferriter DUNQUIN

Tom Fitzgerald DINGLE

Jackie Goodwin THE MAHAREES

Mary Griffin CAHERBULLIG

Pauline Griffin CAHERBULLIG

John Guerin BALLYHEIGUE

Bertie Hughes VENTRY

Aine Keane DUNQUIN

Lis Kelliher DUNQUIN

Steve Kelliher DINGLE

Tim Kelliher DINGLE

Des Lavelle VALENTIA

James Long FAHAN

Seamus McConville TRALEE

John Moore DINGLE

Sean Moran DINGLE

John Moriarty DINGLE

Gerard O’Connor DINGLE

Mollie O’Connor DUNQUIN

Danno O’Keeffe DINGLE

Eileen O’Shea DUNQUIN

Mary O’Shea FEOHANAGH

Michael O’Sullivan DINGLE

Mary Quinn BALLYFERRITER

Patrick Sayers CARRIG

Margaret & Celsus Sheehy DINGLE

Walter Sheehy DINGLE

Kevin Tangney KILLARNEY

Rosula Ward ANASCAUL

Val Whelan DINGLE

Among primary sources consulted, back copies of The Kerryman proved invaluable; for expediting access to these, and other Ryan’s Daughter material at Tralee Library, I should like to thank Eamon Brown and Mike Lynch. ‘Junior’ Brown kindly loaned posters and magazines from his personal collection and Sean Moran gave me access to material in his possession; Noreen Curran, Paul O’Shea and Nora Murphy did likewise with photographs, while Deirdre Walsh provided shots from the picture library at The Kerryman. Tom Fitzgerald dug into his personal archive for copies of Ryan’s Daughter call sheets and scripts. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the late Kathleen Murphy, Dingle’s redoubtable librarian during the writing of this book, who courteously fielded my constant stream of enquiries and inconvenient pleas to translate some Irish sentence into English and made available the library’s file of Ryan’s Daughter photographs. Lastly, Rene Theron, the postmaster at Kommetjie, and the peerless Robbyn Ramsay were a tremendous help in compiling South Africa’s contribution to the making of Ryan’s Daughter.

Among secondary sources, two monographs exist on the subject of Ryan’s Daughter. Each had limited use. Micheál de Mórdha’s book of 1993 (Coisceim) because it is written in Irish and Aubrey Dillon Malone’s of 1996 (GLI Limited) because it is no more than a slender handbook (albeit a pleasant one) numbering a mere sixty pages. The following were also consulted:

Leo McKern: Just Resting

(Methuen 1983)

John Mills: Up in the Clouds, Gentleman Please

(Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1980)

Sarah Miles: Serves Me Right

(Macmillan 1994)

Terrence Pettigrew: Trevor Howard: A Personal Biography

(Peter Owen 2001)

Mike Tomkies: The Robert Mitchum Story

(W.H. Allen 1972)

Kevin Brownlow: David Lean: A Biography

(Richard Cohen Books 1996)

Sandra Lean and Barry Chattington: Lean: An Intimate Portrait

(Andre Deutsch 2001)

Main film locations; Ireland; Dingle Peninsula.

PART 1

A Troublesome Daughter

The magnificent vista of Barrow Strand that frames the first on-screen meeting of Rosy Ryan and Charles Shaughnessy.

1 ROSY’S STORY

Sarah Miles and her on-screen father, Leo McKern.

The film is set in the fictional location of Kirrary, an impoverished village on the barren west coast of Ireland.1

The year is 1916; the First World War is at its height and Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom. The action takes place after the Easter Rising in Dublin has been put down by the British army with considerable damage and much loss of life; the rebellion’s leaders are executed. Feelings are running high.2

The story revolves around six principal characters: one woman and five men, each of whom, in his own way, loves her.

ROSY RYAN (Sarah Miles): A dreamer, an only child (seemingly) deserted by her mother and spoilt rotten by her father with the likes of expensive parasols and ponies. Her head is filled with romantic notions, fuelled by the penny-dreadful romances she reads; her immediate plan of advancement is to set her cap at the village schoolmaster and, despite the obvious differences in their ages, they marry. She expects more from life than Kirrary can offer and more from love than her new husband can offer. She is, truly, an adolescent in an adult’s body.

CHARLES SHAUGHNESSY (Robert Mitchum): The middle-aged village schoolmaster. A meek widower of three years who is first flattered and then snared by his former star pupil but he prefers Beethoven and flower-pressing to the passions of the flesh. A man easily dismissed by most of the villagers but one with more backbone than all of them put together.

MAJOR RANDOLPH DORYAN (Christopher Jones): A shell-shocked veteran of the trenches decorated with the Victoria Cross, he is given command of Kirrary’s small garrison (keeping a close watch for any signs of pro-German or Irish Nationalist activity) while he recuperates. Married and from a well-to-do family (he carries snapshots of both), he is virtually monosyllabic as he waits a return to certain death at the Front; he appears to be on the verge of madness. (NB: Doryan’s Christian name is never mentioned during the film.)

FATHER HUGH COLLINS (Trevor Howard): A big man with wire-brush white hair and habitual stubble. A formidable father to his flock, a wise but unbending disciplinarian, he is essentially benevolent in spirit and more feared than either the army or the Royal Irish Constabulary: ‘That priest down there has eyes in the back of his head!’

MICHAEL (John Mills): The mute, misshapen village ‘idiot’, marked by wooden features and a wooden body (‘not the answer to a maiden’s prayer’), to whom Father Hugh acts the good shepherd. Constantly the bemused target of village ridicule, he holds a torch for Rosy, whom he once used to carry to school on his back. His animal-like eyes and ears miss nothing that goes on in and around Kirrary and he becomes the engine of Rosy’s destruction.

TOM RYAN (Leo McKern): The village publican, a vainglorious braggart who espouses a fierce Irish Nationalism but is, in fact, also a paid informer for the British (‘big mouth, open hand and deep pockets … the police slip him a fiver now and again’). There is no sign of his wife (whether deceased or departed, we are not told) but he dotes on his only daughter, his ‘princess’, whom he showers with presents but, it seems, gives little in the way of genuine paternal love.

There is one more powerful element in the mix, namely THE VILLAGERS: the entire community seems to act as one. Their terminally bored and sour-faced demeanour is epitomised by the McCardles (Marie Kean and Archie O’Sullivan), who run the village store, and Rosy’s contemporary, Moureen (Evin Crowley), the kind of no-airs-and-graces village girl Rosy ought to be, in their estimation. They only burst into life (bordering on manic frenzy) when tormenting Michael, lampooning the Shaughnessys or aiding and abetting the rebels. They are revealed in all their glory during the climactic sequence that sees Rosy mistakenly identified as an informer and the Shaughnessys whistled out of Kirrary.

There are basically three acts to the story.

The first act centres upon the courting and eventual marriage of the Shaughnessys.

Kirrary is a village fossilised in tedium. Rosy Ryan does little with her time other than ‘mooning about the beach’ and immersing herself in works of romantic escapism such as The King’s Mistress (by Raoul de Barry). Father Hugh warns her that ‘Doing nothing’s a dangerous occupation!’ The same sentiment applies to the villagers, whom Collins berates with ‘Devil take me if the lot of you’s not possessed and damned!’ when he rescues Michael from their cruel mobbing and puts an end to their impromptu game of football with his lobstersupper.

Rosy goes to meet her old schoolteacher, Charles Shaughnessy, upon his return from a conference of village schoolteachers in Dublin. As they walk along the beach it is clear from the conversation that she has had a teenage girl’s crush on him since her own schooldays (which he obviously, if unwittingly, fanned) and is now determined to follow in his footsteps – both metaphorically and quite literally; she retraces his footprints in the sand after he leaves her to make a detour to the grave of his recently deceased wife.

The fictional Kirrary and the Blaskets beyond.

While Shaughnessy calls in at Tom Ryan’s pub to be quizzed about what evidence he had seen of the recent Easter Rising in Dublin, Rosy waits for him in the schoolhouse. She tells him of her love. A faltering conversation ensues in which he suggests she is ‘mistaking a penny mirror for the sun … Byron, Beethoven and Captain Blood – I’m not one of those fellas myself’; it ends with Rosy saying ‘You don’t want me then?’ Shaughnessy takes her in his arms.

The essential sub-plot involving the landing of German arms bound for Irish ‘rebels’ that leads to Rosy’s ultimate downfall is introduced with the appearance of Commandant Tim O’Leary (Barry Foster) and a comrade who, posing as tinkers, are in the course of conducting a reconnaissance for an arms-landing.3

O’Leary is forced to kill a constable who recognises him. Nor does he fool Father Hugh; ‘If those two are tinkers I’m the bishop of Cork!’ he mutters when they meet on the beach O’Leary has selected. But Tom Ryan, despite characteristic braggadocio in showing O’Leary a photograph of the two of them at a parade of Volunteers in Phoenix Park, still fails to recognise ‘Red Tim himself’, one of Ireland’s most-wanted men. Realising Ryan’s blabbermouth tendencies at once, O’Leary declares prophetically: ‘Talk! This whole cursed country will capsize with talk!’

Mitchum and Miles: a marriage made in heaven?

Miles and Jones: a working relationship made in hell?

The marriage of Rosy and Charles concludes the first act. The villagers treat the wedding as a kind of pagan celebration, drinking and dancing themselves into mindless oblivion. Yet even at their happiest moment in the story, Rosy and Charles are outcasts: they can’t even clap in time with the music.

Rosy’s longed-for sexual awakening proves a grave disappointment to her. Although Charles sweeps her up into his arms and carries her upstairs to the wedding bed, his performance thereafter scores high on duty but low on passion. Later on, the sight of his naked chest glistening with sweat after an afternoon’s physical toil in the garden is enough to enflame her but he only feels uncomfortable. Their married domesticity centres on her embroidering and him pressing wild flowers. She is soon confiding to Father Hugh that she wants more from married life than this.

‘What more are you wanting now?’ he asks. ‘How can I know? I don’t even know what more there is!’ The seeds of her tragic undoing have been set. ‘Don’t nurse your wishes,’ says the priest, after he has slapped Rosy for harbouring them. ‘You can’t help having them but don’t nurse them or sure to God you’ll get what you’re wishing for.’

The second act – and acceleration – of the story is triggered by the arrival of Major Randolph Doryan to assume command of the small British garrison. ‘Duties more like police work, really. The publican’s a source of information,’ the departing commander, Captain Smith (Gerald Sim), informs him. ‘Why not bring the wife over,’ he adds, helpfully. ‘There’s no crumpet! It’s married or virgin here!’

At their first meeting in Tom Ryan’s pub, Doryan and Rosy end up in a passionate embrace after she comforts him following a bad attack of the shakes. No words are exchanged. Animal passion – and, possibly, a smidgeon of sympathy on Rosy’s part – is their sole motivation. This is the form of love Rosy craves and the two soon consummate their lust amid a carpet of bluebells in a woodland glade at the conclusion of an afternoon ride (she dressed in the scarlet blouse of a scarlet woman and he in his heroic dress uniform). Although she clearly feels for Doryan’s distress, it is the sexual frisson he provides that underscores the attraction; rarely are the lovers heard uttering more than a few words to each other.

Michael, however, is never far away. In addition to his harmless love for Rosy, he takes a shine to Doryan on account of the officer having a gammy leg like his own. It is Michael who discovers evidence of the lovers’ trysts and pretty soon the whole village realises what is going on under their very noses. ‘The way I see it,’ says Mrs McCardle to Mrs Kenyon, loud enough for Rosy to hear, ‘there’s loose women, there’s whores – and then there’s British soldiers’ whores!’

Father Hugh calls the bored villagers to order after they have been tormenting Michael by playing football with his lobster supper.

Two ‘greats’ of the British cinema, Trevor Howard and, beneath the gargoyle make-up, John Mills.

Doryan enters the pub and a date with destiny.

Domestic boredom strikes chez Shaughnessy.

The lovers pick a path through the bluebells.

The villagers seize every opportunity to goad the Shaughnessys so that Charles begins to suspect Rosy’s infidelity. While on a nature outing to the beach with the schoolchildren, he imagines he sees the lovers walking arm-in-arm toward him, radiantly happy. He chooses to blame himself, however, and hopes the affair will ‘burn itself out’; Rosy is so swept-up in this amour fou that she dismisses all Father Hugh’s best entreaties to call a halt to the affair before it inevitably results in irrevocable damage.

The concluding act of the story begins the night Tom Ryan is visited by O’Leary and his men: the arms shipment is expected that night. Ryan shelters them, and arranges some help to bring the shipment ashore. However, when his personal moment of truth arrives, he reverts to type and betrays the rebels by disobeying his orders to cut the telephone wire and he alerts the garrison instead.

O’Leary (in the chair) and his men wait upstairs in Ryan’s pub for the arms shipment to arrive; the mysterious ‘activist’ O’Keeffe, whose part was virtually eliminated from the finished cut, is the moustachioed figure in glasses seated to O’Leary’s right.

Loading the arms in the artificial storm created at Coumeenole.

O’Leary is apprehended by Doryan’s men, thanks to the informer.

A huge storm hurls itself at the coastline around Kirrary, causing the rafts carrying the arms and ammunition to be swept onto dangerous rocks, known as ‘The Slabs’. The entire village – minus the despised cuckold Charles and his equally loathed ‘collaborator’ wife (who only arrive when everything is done and dusted) – is roused by Father Hugh to salvage as much of the shipment as possible. Before O’Leary and his henchmen can escape, they are waylaid and apprehended by a detachment of Doryan’s troops.4

At the head of his troops Doryan is in his element and gives some idea of how he became the decorated war hero. When the villagers collude in O’Leary’s escape, Doryan brings him down with the rifle shot of an expert marksman – before succumbing to another very public bout of the shakes. Rosy’s attempt to console Doryan in front of both her husband and the village seals her fate and concludes the story’s second act.

The story now moves rapidly toward its inevitable denouement. That night, Rosy leaves the marital bed and Charles watches her rush up the hill at the back of the schoolhouse to meet the waiting Doryan. Finally forced to accept his wife’s adultery, he also leaves the house and wanders down to the shore in his nightshirt. He is eventually found and brought home by Father Hugh, but he accepts his marriage is over, and tells Rosy so.

Rosy’s liaison with Doryan convinces the village that Rosy must be the informer in their midst who betrayed O’Leary. As she and Charles discuss the future of their marriage, the villagers arrive at the schoolhouse to exact vigilante justice. ‘You’ve been tried and found guilty,’ declares McCardle. ‘You’re the informer!’

Rosy is mobbed, stripped and ritually shorn of her long tresses by Mrs McCardle and Moureen, while her husband is pinned to the ground, powerless to intervene. Only the arrival of Father Hugh disperses the mob. The real Judas, Tom Ryan, hangs his cowardly head in shame and runs away, unable to stomach his daughter’s humiliation or his inability to intercede and face a worse fate. He would have been shot.

With the affair obviously over and with only a return to the trenches in prospect, Doryan puts an end to his unhappy existence by blowing himself up with dynamite from the shipment that was recovered and hoarded by Michael. ‘I think he was a man who suffered,’ the ever-decent and charitable Shaughnessy tells Father Hugh.

The story ends with the Shaughnessys agreeing to part and to leave Kirrary, but together, in a display of unity against the bigotry shown by the villagers. ‘They wanted it to be you,’ Charles tells his wife. ‘Truth was, they envy you, always have. They’ve always had a rare contempt for me, too. I tell you, I’m not for letting any of that lot know we’ve busted up!’

Mob justice at the schoolhouse.

Rosy pauses briefly to take leave of her father. ‘When you married him, I thought you could have done a lot better,’ he says of his daughter’s husband. ‘Now I’m not so sure they come much better.’

The Shaughnessys’ final walk down the village street is marked by yet another communal ritual: they are whistled out of Kirrary by the villagers. Father Hugh and Michael see them off on the bus for Dublin; after avoiding any physical contact with Michael throughout the film, Rosy now kisses him on the cheek, having finally come to terms with the meaning of humility. Neither Father Hugh nor the Shaughnessys know for certain – like the rest of us – whether or not their marriage will survive.

‘I think you have it in your mind that you and Rosy ought to part,’ Father Hugh says to Charles as he shuts the door of the bus. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe you ought. But I doubt it. That’s my parting gift to you – that doubt!’5

NOTES:

1. No reference is ever made to the name of the village. There is no close-up of the plaque on the southern gable of the schoolhouse which proclaims ‘Kirrary National School, 1893’, though we do catch a glimpse of ‘Kirrary’ written on the cover of Charles Shaughnessy’s album of pressed flowers. Nor is anything said to locate Kirrary on the Dingle Peninsula other than a casual mention of ‘lunching at Barrow’ and ‘it’s nice at Brandon’.

2. Although a matter of supreme indifference to the story per se, its chronology is somewhat wobbly and yields a splendid example of how reality is often suspended in the world of film. The Easter Rising took place between 24–29 April 1916 and the damage inflicted upon Dublin is referred to when Shaughnessy is quizzed in the pub by Father Hugh and Tom Ryan on his return from the city: ‘It did look terrible smashed about.’ Shaughnessy’s conference for ‘village schoolteachers’ could only have convened during a school holiday, presumably the selfsame Easter break, but he is unable to confirm the precise fate of the rebel leaders: ‘I think they’ll hang them, Father.’ The fact that fourteen leaders were executed (by firing squad, not hanging) between 3–12 May in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol is unknown to him would appear to date the commencement of the story as the beginning of May. Yet, in a subsequent scene, it is a frosty morning when O’Leary kills the policeman, a fact Lean’s props men took great pains to replicate. The Irish weather is a tricky beast – as Lean would discover to his cost! – but frosts are not one of its May phenomena. Then, there is the small matter of the bluebells. The mass of bluebells signalling the onset of Rosy’s and Doryan’s affair also suggests the month of May, but since their initial tryst occurs much further along in the story we must now be in the May of another year. However, this cannot even claim to be the following year of 1917. The corporal reveals that Doryan received his wounds at the second Battle of the Marne, which was fought in July 1918 – so, just to complicate the issue, by the time of his arrival in Kirrary all that season’s bluebells would be dead. So, that would push the bluebell wood scene into the summer of 1919. This cannot be the intention though because the war would be over. Finally, the climactic storm is redolent of autumn or winter, so the action – literally – might stretch through 3½ years, from April 1916 until well into the autumn of 1919.

The Shaughnessys are seen on their way.

3. There was no IRA – Irish Republican Army – in 1916, only the secret society called the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The closest equivalent were the Irish Volunteers; the term IRA did not begin to be used until 1918. The script refers to O’Leary and his men as ‘activists’.

4. The arms landing mirrors that of Good Friday 21 April 1916, when a German trawler, the Aud, and its consignment of arms bound for the Irish Volunteers was intercepted by the British off Banna Strand in west Kerry before it could be unloaded; the Irish leader who had arranged the shipment, Sir Roger Casement, was quickly captured once he came ashore from a German submarine. Casement was later hanged for treason on 3 August 1916 in Pentonville Prison in London.

5. Screenplay writer Robert Bolt had wanted a bleaker ending, with both Doryan and Shaughnessy dead but, knowing Lean would be in disagreement, he kept his views to himself. Privately, he thought the audience might be disappointed by the film ‘failing to deliver in the last quarter what we had promised in the first three’. MGM’s executive story editor, Russell Thatcher, suggested an alternative end for Doryan: he happens upon O’Leary (presumably having escaped his captors) and is content to die thwarting his further escape: ‘In short, still commit suicide, but with more of a purpose.’

A pair of Oscar winners: Lean (right) and Freddie Young.

2 ROSY’S CONCEPTION

Robert Bolt, in later years.

Rosy Ryan was a love child conceived by Robert Bolt. She was a gift to his actress wife Sarah Miles who, rather disenchanted with the movie world, had not made a film since 1966. During this period she had given birth to a child of her own. ‘You’re a great actress,’ he told her, as he handed over his latest screenplay, ‘you deserve a great part.’

‘Rosy’s story is about the universal attempt of youth to get something for nothing,’ Bolt said of his creation, ‘and the realisation that something has to be paid for anything. Which makes an adult of an adolescent.’

Bolt’s initial screenplay was an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s scandalous mid-nineteenth century novel Madame Bovary.1 Originally published in serial form (1856–57) in the Revue de Paris, it is the saga of an unfulfilled young bride (Emma Rouault), her dull country doctor husband (Charles Bovary) and her two lovers (the spineless Leon Dupuis and the caddish Rodolphe Boulanger, ‘hard of heart and shrewd of head, with much experience and understanding of women’) who are thrown together in the suffocating confines of a small market town in Normandy called Yonville.

Emma is consumed by sensual-romantic longings. Love, she believes, must come suddenly with, as one critic wrote: ‘thunder and lightning, a hurricane from on high that swoops down into your life and turns it topsy-turvy, snatches away your will-power like a leaf, hurls you heart and soul into the abyss’. Yet she proves unlucky in love. She and Charles have a baby daughter, Berthe, but, disappointed by her husband, she takes a lover and is deserted by him; she takes a second lover and is deserted by him also; she falls hopelessly into debt, her cry for help spurned by both lovers; finally, emotionally and financially destroyed, she kills herself by swallowing arsenic.