The Amsterdam Kill (1977)

          A soulless thriller directed with palpable indifference by Robert Clouse, The Amsterdam Kill tells the uninteresting story of an ex-DEA agent who sorta-kinda teams up with a Chinese drug lord in order to dismantle a heroin cartel operating in Amsterdam and Hong Kong. Along the way, the duo’s exploits reveal corruption among law enforcement, so by the end of the whole mess, the antihero ex-DEA guy incarnates that hoariest of clichés, the Last Honorable Man in a Dishonorable World. The presence of venerable big-screen bruiser Robert Mitchum in the leading role would seem like reason enough to watch the picture, but the combination of Mitchum’s bored performance and a periodically incoherent storyline drains vitality from The Amsterdam Kill. Only the noisy intrusion of a violent action scene every few minutes keeps The Amsterdam Kill from seeming like an outright waste of film. Perhaps the best one could say is that the picture is agile and brisk but also hopelessly generic and pointless.

          Things get started when aging drug dealer Chung Wei (Keye Luke) decides to retire and sell information about his competitors to the DEA. His exact motivation for doing so is never satisfactorily explained. Rather than dealing directly with the agency, Wei contacts Larry Quinlan (Mitchum), a disgraced former agent. Quinlan selects Hong Kong-based DEA agent Howard Odums (Bradford Dillman) as his middleman. Also part of the mix is Amsterdam-based DEA agent Riley Knight (Leslie Nielsen). Each time Wei gives Quinlan a tip, Quinlan and his associates arrange a sting operation, but early maneuvers go badly, revealing a leak in the DEA’s operation. Eventually, circumstances throw Quinlan’s motivation into question, as well, particularly once he becomes obsessed with plugging the DEA leak. How is that his problem? Very little of what happens in The Amsterdam Kill makes sense, but a lot of it is colorful and manly. Hell, Mitchum even gets to use heavy construction equipment as a murder weapon during the finale.

The Amsterdam Kill: FUNKY

Matilda (1978)

The first 10 minutes of Matilda feel like a drug hallucination. First, aerial shots of New York City are paired with the dreary, melody-challenged ballad “When I’m With You I’m Feeling Good,” sung by the father-daughter duo of Pat and Debby Boone. Next, jocular Scotsman Billy Baker (Clive Revill) rides a bicycle to his pub beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, then addresses the camera and begins telling the story of the movie, which is depicted in flashback. Here goes: Billy arrives in Manhattan accompanied by Matilda—a gigantic kangaroo played by a man wearing a patently fake-looking kangaroo suit. When Matilda excitedly punches out a hot-dog vendor and causes a riot, police seize the animal. To address this situation, Billy buys a copy of Variety and answers an ad for bottom-feeding talent agent Bernie Bonnelli (Elliot Gould), who shares an office with his vituperative uncle, boxing manager Pinky Schwab (Lionel Stander). Because, naturally, the best ally when trying to save an animal from euthanasia is a talent agent. And so it goes for the remaining 90-something minutes of this astonishingly stupid crime/sports comedy, which was presumably made for young (or lobotomized) viewers. Photographed with the garish lights and hard shadows of a cheap horror flick, Matilda features several actors who should know better—Robert Mitchum shows up as a sportswriter—as well as many weak players who operate at the same level as the storytelling. (Here’s looking at you, Roy Clark from Hee-Haw.) The narrative piles idiocy upon idiocy, with Matilda becoming a sensation in the boxing world and also the center of a sting operation designed to capture mobsters. Meanwhile, everyone in the movie tries to pretend the Matilda costume isn’t as embarrassing as it is ridiculous. Slapstick bits sputter, verbal jokes thud, and the contrived rom-com banter between Gould and costar Karen Carlson is lifeless. All in all, it’s a wonder this film wasn’t picketed by the ASPCA—the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences.

Matilda: LAME

The Big Sleep (1978)

          Three years after playing Raymond Chandler’s famous detective Phillip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (1975), which was set in the 1940s, Robert Mitchum reprised the role in this film, which is set in the 1970s. Making the time-shift between movies even more awkward, The Big Sleep writer-director Michael Winner employs hokey devices straight out of Chandler’s Depression-era fiction, such as femme-fatale types and hardboiled interior monologue presented as voiceover. Yet in other respects, The Big Sleep is quite modern, thanks to ample amounts of gore and nudity. Therefore, it’s an old-fashioned movie filled with things that turn off most fans of old-fashioned movies.

          Moreover, Winner risked walking on hallowed cinematic ground with this project, since the first movie version of The Big Sleep—starring Humphrey Bogart and released in 1946—is considered a classic of the original film-noir cycle. Given this tricky context, it almost doesn’t even matter that Winner’s version of The Big Sleep is an adequate little mystery/thriller. In order to satisfy all concerned parties, the movie needed to be superlative, which it is not. Furthermore, Winner inexplicably changed the location from Los Angeles (as in the original Chandler novel) to London, and then populated the cast with a random mixture of Brits and Yanks. Since nothing inherently English happens, the jump across the pond is a head-scratcher from a conceptual standpoint.

          In any event, the convoluted story begins when Marlowe is invited to the home of a rich American, retired General Sternwood (James Stewart). Sternwood hires Marlowe to scare off a would-be blackmailer. Meanwhile, Marlowe receives seductive advances from Sternwood’s adult daughters, the cynical Charlotte (Sarah Miles) and the provocative Camilla (Candy Clark). As per the Chandler story, the seemingly simple job opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, eventually placing Marlowe in the midst of betrayals, double-crosses, and murders.

           Winner hits the sleazy elements of the narrative hard, as in scenes of Camilla posing nude for a pornographer and various incidents of people getting shot through the skull. The material is so grim and the story is so bewildering that The Big Sleep isn’t fun to watch, per se, even though it boasts abundant sex appeal thanks to Clark, Miles, and costars Joan Collins and Diana Quick. Concurrently, the men in the supporting cast provide gradations of menace, with Colin Blakely, Richard Boone, Edward Fox, and Oliver Reed playing villainous types. (Offering glimmers of gallantry are the characters portrayed by Harry Andrews and John Mills.) However, none of the film’s performances or technical contributions is extraordinary, so Mitchum dominates in the absence of anything more interesting. As in Farewell, My Lovely, Mitchum’s seen-it-all demeanor suits the Marlowe character perfectly.

The Big Sleep: FUNKY

Going Home (1971)

          While I admit that I’m a sucker for Robert Mitchum in nearly any context, and that my appreciation for the early work of Jan-Michael Vincent defies all reason, I’m confident that the praise I’m about to lavish on the little-seen drama Going Home legitimately reflects the film’s intensity, rather than just my predilection toward its stars. A grim chamber piece about a family suffering the lingering impacts of a decade-old tragedy, the movie asks the question of whether some sins are beyond forgiveness. Mitchum plays Harry Graham, a blue-collar guy recently paroled from prison after serving a long term for killing his wife in a drunken rage. Vincent plays his son, Jimmy, who was a child when the crime occurred; he’s now an angry adult who rightfully blames all his emotional difficulties on his father’s alcoholism and violence.
          When the story begins, Harry attempts a transition back into normal life by getting a job and a new relationship—with seen-it-all local dame Jenny Benson (Brenda Vaccaro). Harry also tries to reconnect with his son, whom he barely knows. Even though Mitchum was such an innately interesting presence that he commanded the screen whether he was making an effort or not, it’s a special pleasure to watch him in Going Home because he seems to form a real emotional connection with his character. The anguish he manifests at not being able to distance himself from past misdeeds feels palpable, as does the longing he displays for a father/son bond that’s fated to remain beyond his reach. Plus, there’s a tender quality to the romantic scenes between Mitchum and Vaccaro, because they portray adults who recognize that a union with baggage is better than no union at all. Vincent, who shares with Mitchum a tendency to deliver phoned-in performances, seems at or near the top of his game, perhaps elevated to a higher-than-usual degree of effort by the presence of a strong costar. He seethes believably throughout the picture.
          Director Herbert B. Leonard, who spent most of his Hollywood career as a TV producer, does surprisingly smooth work considering this was only his second feature. (It was also his last.) Together with cinematographer Fred Jackman, Leonard generates gritty texture while shooting the bowling alleys and parking lots and trailer parks of a small city that could be Anywhere, U.S.A. This realistic visual style meshes well with the naturalistic acting of the principal players. Wearing cheap clothes as they trudge through ordinary lives colored by extraordinary hardship, the characters in Going Home feel like people one might pass on the street and never give a second glance. Constructed as a slow burn toward an explosive climax, the script by Lawrence B. Marcus pushes Harry and Jimmy closer and closer toward their inevitable showdown, so it’s painful to watch these men miss every possible opportunity for reconciliation. And then, when the climax arrives, it’s indeed horrible—the means Jimmy finds to exact revenge upon his father reveals that savagery didn’t skip a generation. Some might find this picture hard to take because the final act is so rough, but for those willing to take the journey, Going Home offers the rewards of potent acting and resonant themes.

Going Home: GROOVY

The Yakuza (1974)

          Director Sydney Pollack took a lot of critical flack for shoehorning love stories into movies that couldn’t organically contain them, as if he wanted to sprinkle the fairy dust of his breakthrough hit The Way We Were (1973) onto every subsequent project. It’s a fair complaint, especially when one considers a Pollack film such as The Yakuza, which suffers from narrative bloat—the film’s romantic subplots are handled with intelligence and taste, but they’re borderline superfluous. That said, it seems ungallant to gripe about a director who endeavored to invest all of his pictures with as much grown-up human feeling as possible. So perhaps it’s best to regard The Yakuza as an embarrassment of riches: Nearly everything in the movie is interesting, even though Pollack regularly forgets what sort of film he’s trying to make.

          At its best, the picture is a tough gangster story with an exotic setting; at its worst, The Yakuza is a sensitive drama about a man in late life reconnecting with a lost love. So while action funs may find the touchy-feely stuff dull, and while viewers more interested in the heartfelt material may be turned off by the bloody bits, watching the disparate elements fight for dominance is fascinating.

          Based on an original script by Leonard Schrader, who lived in Japan for some time, and his celebrated brother, Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, The Yakuza went through the usual Pollack-supervised rewrite routine, getting a credited overhaul from A-lister Robert Towne (as well as, presumably, uncredited tinkering by others). The convoluted story revolves around Harry Kilmer (Robert Mitchum), an aging WWII vet asked to perform a favor for his old friend, George Tanner (Brian Keith). George has gotten into trouble with the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia), so he needs Harry, who knows Japanese culture, to smooth out relations. Harry travels to Japan with George’s hotheaded young associate, Dusty (Richard Jordan), and coordinates with a former Yakuza member, Ken Tanaka (Ken Takakura). Harry’s crew stumbles into a complicated war between American and Japanese criminals, and also between various Yakuza factions. Meanwhile, Harry reconnects with Eiko (Keiko Kishi), the Japanese woman he loved while he was stationed in Japan during WWII. Both obviously want to pick up where they left off, but their relationship is complicated by ancient traditions and surprising family ties.

          Describing the plot doesn’t do The Yakuza any favors, since the story doesn’t “work” in a conventional sense; the narrative is far too muddled and tonally inconsistent. Nonetheless, The Yakuza offers rewards for patient viewers. The performances are uniformly poignant, with Mitchum’s world-weariness setting the downbeat tone. Jordan and Keith complement him with macho brashness; Kishi and Takakura are quietly soulful; and Herb Edelman, playing an old friend of Harry’s, offers a sweet quality of peacenik anguish. James Shigeta is terrific, too, in a handful of scenes as Ken’s tightly wound brother. Melding his signature classicism with uniquely Japanese textures, such as highly formalized framing, Pollack and cinematographer Kôzô Okazaki fill the screen with artistry and color. Plus, the movie introduced America viewers to a bloody Yakuza ritual that will linger with you long after the movie ends—ouch!

The Yakuza: GROOVY

Midway (1976)

          This old-fashioned combat flick picks up where the great 1944 war drama Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo left off—Midway dramatizes one of the many retaliatory air strikes the U.S. and Japan exchanged following Japan’s initial 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. When the story begins, the U.S. Navy is struggling to replace ships destroyed at Pearl Harbor. When an intelligence officer (Hal Holbrook) intercepts communications suggesting the Japanese are planning to attack U.S. ships stationed at Midway Island—potentially a devastating repeat of Pearl Harbor—various officers spring into action preparing defensive maneuvers. Like 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, this picture cuts back and forth between American and Japanese strategy sessions. In addition to humanizing the enemy, this technique lets viewers see how luck and tactical errors have as much bearing on military success as heroism and leadership.

          For instance, some of the best scenes take place aboard a Japanese carrier, where Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (James Shigeta) wrangles with doubtful subordinates, resulting in indecisiveness. There’s some great stuff buried in Midway, but, unfortunately, lesser material is given the primary focus—the main storyline involves Captain Matt Garth (Charlton Heston), a strong-willed junior officer whose role in the battle is relatively inconsequential. The filmmakers waste gobs of time, for instance, on the melodramatic romance between Garth’s son and a Japanese-American civilian, which leads to trite discussions about race relations. Plus, once the bludgeoning air/sea battle gets underway, the movie introduces so many characters that text appears onscreen to identify new people.

          Even with these visual aids, however, it’s hard to track which ships are where, whose plane took off from which airstrip, and, for that matter, which side is winning. Still, before things get too hectic, Midway lets a handful of charismatic actors shine in showcase moments. Holbrook is a hoot as the excitable code breaker; Henry Fonda lends authority as the top U.S. admiral; Glenn Ford is effectively stoic as a soft-spoken naval commander; and Robert Mitchum plays an enjoyable cameo as a cranky admiral consigned to bed rest. (Cinema legend Toshiro Mifune essays a small role as Fonda’s Japanese counterpart, but his lines were dubbed into English by actor Paul Frees, the voice of Rocky & Bullwinkle villain Boris Badenov.) While these virtues aren’t enough to lift Midway out of mediocrity, any American war picture that resists the temptation to demonize the opposing side is inherently admirable.

Midway: FUNKY

The Wrath of God (1972)

          Not to be confused with the amazing German film Aguirre: The Wrath of God, which was also released in 1972, this American production is a routine action picture starring the venerable Robert Mitchum as a gun-toting con man wreaking havoc in South America during the 1920s. Notwithstanding Mitchum’s top billing, the lead character is actually portrayed by workaday Scottish actor Ken Hutchison. He plays Emmet, a ne’er-do-well European stranded in a dingy Latin American nation. Emmet reluctantly accepts a job from corpulent gringo crook Jennings (Victor Buono) to drive a truck filled with illegal liquor to the U.S. Along the way, Emmet meets an amiable priest named Father Van Horne (Mitchum). Next, Emmet gets into a hassle while preventing banditos from raping a native woman, Chela (Paula Pritchett). Unexpectedly, Van Horne comes to his new friend’s aid—by unleashing the machine gun hidden in his luggage. Yet somehow, the storyline gets even more random after that turn of events.

          A powerful military official, Colonel Santila (John Colicos), recruits Emmet, Jennings, and Van Horne for a suicide mission to depose Thomas De La Plata (Frank Langella), the crazed aristocrat controlling a small town, so the movie’s climax involves a violent showdown between the “heroes” and De La Plata’s ruthless gang. Featuring all of these disparate elements plus other incidental flourishes, like Rita Hayworth’s tiny role as De La Plata’s mother, The Wrath of God is diffuse in the extreme. Produced and directed by the proficient Ralph Nelson, the movie can’t decide on a consistent tone or a main character: The picture vacillates between black comedy and bloody action while the Emmet and Van Horne characters compete for prominence. Nonetheless, some of what happens is mildly exciting, and some of the actors deliver enjoyably florid performances. Buono’s sardonic volatility complements Langella’s over-the-top intensity, for instance, although Mitchum is Mitchum, to the degree that he sometimes seems as if he wandered in from another movie. Poor Hutchison gets lost in the shuffle, particularly since his character’s motivation seems to change with every scene. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Wrath of God: FUNKY

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

          Highly regarded as one of the most faithful adaptations of a Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely is an oddity among the films that comprised the noir boom of the mid-’70s. Unlike, say, Chinatown (1974), which placed a contemporary cast in a period milieu to achieve a postmodern effect, Farewell, My Lovely stars an actor who appeared in several classics of the original late ’40s noir cycle: Robert Mitchum. And while Mitchum’s advanced age creates some storytelling hiccups, like the idea that his character is sexual catnip for a young beauty, his deep association with the genre and the hangdog quality that made him a good fit for vintage noir are used to great effect; Mitchum lumbers around Farewell, My Lovely like he’s the same poor bastard he played in Out of the Past (1947) after another 30 years of rough road.

          In addition to its well-cast leading man, the picture boasts a smooth script by David Zelag Goodman. The screenplay retains Chandler’s pithiest observations (via Mitchum’s world-weary voiceover) and lets the story spiral off into all the right murky tangents without losing narrative coherence. Describing a Chandler plot in the abstract does nothing to capture the story’s appeal, but the broad strokes are that a muscle-bound crook named Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran) hires private dick Philip Marlowe (Mitchum) to track down his long-lost girlfriend. This draws Marlowe into a web of hoodlums, politicians, and whores, so before long Marlowe’s been beaten, shot at, shot up, and generally put through the wringer. Along the way, he commences a torrid romance with a powerful judge’s fag-hag trophy wife, Helen Grayle (Charlotte Rampling). The movie gets seedier as it progresses, with Marlowe serving as the audience’s tour guide through the underworld.

          Director Dick Richards gets preoccupied with aping the visual style of classic noir flicks (lotsa neon and venetian blinds), so the more amateurish actors in the cast don’t get the attention they need, and Richards is pretty inept handling the sequence of Marlowe getting hopped up on dope. Nonetheless, the story is compelling—in Chandler’s universe, bad situations always get worse—and the supporting cast is colorful. John Ireland stands out as Marlowe’s policeman pal, the stalwart Detective Nulty, and Sylvia Miles received an Oscar nomination for her grotesque turn as a boozy ex-showgirl. Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, and Anthony Zerbe show up at regular intervals, and there’s even a brief appearance by a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone. Farewell, My Lovely is uneven, but its virtues are plentiful.

Farewell, My Lovely: GROOVY

Breakthrough (1979)

          Watching Richard Burton’s physical decline had been a spectator sport since the mid-’60s, when the ravages of his alcoholism really started to become evident, so by the late ’70s it was mostly just depressing to watch the once-virile actor sleepwalk through lame movies looking like the ghost of his former self. In the World War II thriller Breakthrough, Burton looks especially desiccated, an effect only worsened by the enervated feel of the whole project. A quasi-sequel to the Sam Peckinpah war story Cross of Iron (1977), this picture eschews the moral ambiguity of Peckinpah’s picture for old-fashioned melodrama about a good German trying to help the Americans win the war.

          In 1944, after the Nazis have suffered insurmountable losses in Russia, a German general (Curt Jurgens) joins a cabal of officers planning to kill Hitler and then negotiate peace, so he asks freethinking soldier Rolf Steiner (Burton) to convey information about the plan to Allied officers. Steiner connects with a sympathetic American colonel (Robert Mitchum), who then involves his superior officer (Rod Steiger). However fate intervenes, as does an odious Nazi (Helmut Griem) unwilling to acknowledge that the war is already lost.

          Everyone in this movie looks bored and disconnected, so each actor gives an isolated performance that director Andrew V. McLaglen doesn’t even bother to unify with the other performances. Burton spits out lines quickly, like he can’t wait to walk off camera and drink; Mitchum delivers dialogue flatly, as if he’s simply repeating words that were fed to him before the camera rolled; and Steiger bludgeons his scenes with characteristic bulging-vein intensity. The only moments that have flair are the buddy-movie exchanges between the lead characters and their second-in-command guys (Burton has Klaus Lowitsch and Mitchum has Michael Parks).

          To say that Breakthrough gets off to a slow start is an understatement: The first half-hour of the movie is borderline unwatchable because nothing happens. Steiner doesn’t even get hip to the big plan until the picture is well underway, and then, when things are supposed to get exciting, somnambulistic acting and rote combat scenes add up to tedium.

          It’s amazing that just a year before shooting this turkey, Burton and McLaglen collaborated on the robust action picture The Wild Geese (1978), but apparently their efforts shouldn’t be judged entirely on the evidence of the existing version of Breakthrough. After being released in Europe in 1979, the picture went through several edits (and titles) before limping onto a few American screens in 1982. The currently available version runs a scant 95 minutes (the original was closer to two hours), and the only thing more ghastly than the print quality is the amateurish music score. Given the lifeless performances, however, it’s hard to imagine than any amount of post-production sweetening could have turned this misbegotten flick into something special.

Breakthrough: LAME

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972)

          Despite having been in movies since the heyday of the studio era, Robert Mitchum delivered several of his most interesting performances in the ’70s, probably because his don’t-give-a-damn acting style meshed comfortably with the naturalistic filmmaking methods that were in vogue at the time. One of the best examples of this synthesis between the right actor and the right moment is The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a soft-spoken crime picture about a sad-sack Boston hoodlum faced with the awful choice of going to prison for an interminable sentence or snitching on his lowlife friends.

          Utilizing the actor’s hangdog face and world-weary carriage to great effect, director Peter Yates employs Mitchum as the visual foundation for a rich portrait of going-nowhere criminality. Character actors Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, and Alex Rocco surround Mitchum with vivid performances laced with ambition, avarice, paranoia, and sociopathic violence; Boyle is particularly good as an operator working several self-serving angles at once. So even though the storyline meanders through beats that are familiar to fans of the crime genre, deeply textured acting gives the piece dimension and humanity.

          In one of the best scenes, Mitchum meets with a cocky gun dealer (Keats) in a coffee shop to discuss an illicit arms deal. Bruised by a lifetime of bad experiences, Mitchum brandishes his deformed mitt and explains that making a deal with the wrong guy in the past led to getting his hand broken, thus explaining his reluctance to accept Keats’ overconfidence at face value. Yates shoots the scene simply, with long lenses angled over the actors’ shoulders, creating a level of docudrama realism that’s emulated throughout the picture. As a testament to Yates’ focus on meticulous dramaturgy, the film’s quiet conversation scenes often have as much punch as its highly charged bank-robbery sequences. The action stuff works just fine, however, like the bits in which hoodlums use their favorite trick—holding a bank manager’s family hostage so he doesn’t get heroic ideas during a robbery.

          The Friends of Eddie Coyle has a subtle power that isn’t immediately evident on first viewing, since the plot isn’t clever and the payoff is more logically inevitable than inexorably tragic, but it’s hard to think of another crime film from the same period with as much artfully rendered nuance.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle: GROOVY

Ryan’s Daughter (1970)

          The only film that venerable director David Lean made in the ’70s, Ryan’s Daughter disappointed people who were expecting something similar to Lean’s previous successes, the blockbuster epics Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Although Ryan’s Daughter has echoes of both earlier films, Ryan’s Daughter neither coheres as organically nor achieves the same cumulative power as Lean’s ’60s smashes. Seen with fresh eyes, however, it’s an impressive but flawed film that deserved a better reception. Set in Ireland during World War I, the picture follows the emotional journey of Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles), a small-town girl who gets everything she ever wanted and then decides she wants more, with disastrous consequences.
          In the tiny village of Kirray, Rosy marries the much-older schoolteacher Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum), only to discover that marriage isn’t full of the magical romance she expected. Anguished, dissatisfied, and guilty, Rosy becomes even more confused when she meets Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), the new commandant of the British force occupying Kirray. A beautiful creature scarred with war wounds and tortured by PTSD, he’s a kindred spirit to Rosy in that neither of them feels synchronized with the rest of society, so they commence a torrid affair. Their indiscretion leads to trouble when Doryan confronts Tim O’Leary (Barry Foster), a charismatic revolutionary who enlists the aid of Kirray’s entire population for a gun-smuggling operation.
          The original screenplay by frequent Lean collaborator Robert Bolt spins an absorbing yarn, and while it’s tempting to lament that the movie is excessive at its full length of three and a half hours (including entrance, exit, and intermission music), nearly everything onscreen during those three and a half hours is artful and interesting. Lean’s methodical storytelling is wondrous, because he conveys subtle mental shifts through expert juxtapositions of images and sounds; for instance, the myriad nuances contained in the wedding-night scene with Charles and Rosy are excruciating and specific. Additionally, the Oscar-winning cinematography by Freddie Young is indescribably beautiful. Whether he’s shooting a delicately lit interior scene or a spectacular panorama of the wild Irish coast, Young fills the screen with such masterful interplays of light and texture that each shot is like a timeless painting. Even more impressively, Lean manages to make Mitchum, the quintessential macho movie star, believable as a soft-spoken pacifist.
          Having said all that, the picture has significant problems. Inexplicably, John Mills won an Oscar for his vigorous but cartoonish performance as Kirray’s village idiot, and composer Maurice Jarre opts for a distractingly arch style in several of the film’s musical themes. Worse, the characterization of Rosy’s father, Thomas Ryan (Leo McKern), is muddy at best; the second half of the story turns on one of Thomas’ actions, and his motivation is woefully unclear.
          Still, for every shortcoming, the picture has a virtue—while Thomas Ryan is poorly conceived, Kirray’s hard-driving minister, Father Collins (Trevor Howard), is a complex figure who evolves from stern to nurturing. Plus, Ryan’s Daughter has not one but two believable love stories: Rosy’s marriage to Charles is illustrated as effectively as her dalliance with Major Doryan. Ultimately, the fact that Ryan’s Daughter isn’t an unqualified masterpiece shouldn’t detract from the fact that it’s a compelling drama writ large.

Ryan’s Daughter: GROOVY