Ryan's Daughter

This film silenced David Lean for fourteen years. The reviews arrived fast and hard. At a gathering at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, Lean was put in front of the critics and cornered there, with Pauline Kael at the head of that table. He vowed never to make another film. He made one more: A Passage to India, fourteen years later. The film did well at the box office and the critics destroyed it. His working method was much discussed at the time too. For the storm sequence, in which an entire village goes into the sea to recover weapons for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he is said to have waited a full year for a storm violent enough. The story is set during the First World War in a village in the west of Ireland: a young woman married to her ageing schoolteacher begins an affair with a British officer, and the village responds. Who it is for: viewers who like vast landscape and slowly built period drama; the Irish coast is the film's strongest element. Who it is not for: impatient viewers. It runs three hours fifteen, and that scale against this subject was precisely the critics' objection.