Word: bolte
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...spared, puts the finger on Rosy Ryan, whose every aspiration apes the upper classes, and who moreover has been sleeping with the enemy. So they go to her home, strip her naked, cut off her hair, and slash her face (though not permanently, since she is played by Robert Bolt's wife). The film's next-to-last sequence has Rosy, husband Mitchum, and priest walk down a deserted street to the hisses and jeers of the safely invisible inhabitants of Kilgarry. This is the deliberate climax to Lean's treatment of revolution and class...
...dominant emotion you will feel on leaving the theatre, straight or stoned-outrage at having let four hours of your precious inalienable life be filched away by doddering sentimentalists. It's scarcely believable that Irish scenery so gorgeously lit could be rendered so sickening by the likes of Robert Bolt, who collaborated (for once the right word) very closely with Lean on the screenplay. But it's true: even for its own corrupt purposes Ryan's Daughter, besides being badly cast and directed, is constructed worse than almost any picture you could name...
...makes it hopelessly confusing. Not only on a personal plane, although the characters alternate between vapidity and impossibility, but on the historical plane to which Lean pretends. Lean, that is, declared he would only make pictures (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago) which dealt with revolution. So let's take Bolt-Lean's treatment of the Irish Revolution, which follows the shambles of Ryan's Daughter's first two hours...
...would be childish, though, to insist that Lean's purpose was to blow smokescreens into the eyes of the masses by misrepresenting revolution. Bolt and Lean wrote it that way because they see it that way. It does seem odd to let a film about a popular Irish revolution be made by two rich upper-class English show-business entrepreneurs. But as long as people like them are the ones making movies, it's their view of things that movies will reflect, to the almost complete exclusion of other consciousnesses and realities...
Sarah Miles not only endorses the new romanticism; she is part of it in the overblown Ryan's Daughter, a love story set in troubled Ireland, that was written by her husband, Robert Bolt. "The critics are panning the movie," she admits, "but people desperately want it because they're pouring into the box office. I think people are weary of all the sex stuff. They want a story, which they're not getting at the moment. I believe in the film because I'm a romantic to the end. I believe in morality; I believe in right and wrong...