High praise is due to Warner Archive for releasing Ryan’s Daughter in a four-disc combination 4K UHD Blu-ray and standard Blu-ray set by Warner Archive.

While it has become pretty much a standard release strategy for the studios to put out 4K UHD packages of major new films once they have completed their theatrical and streaming runs, it is still rare for them to reach back into their film libraries to do the same thing for old movies.

Warner Home Video has, in the recent past, released 4K UHD upgrades of such legendary films as Ben-Hur, The Wizard of Oz, and The Searchers, and will soon release Gone with the Wind in the format. Those films were almost guaranteed to sell in the improved format but other films from the MGM, Warner Bros., and RKO catalogues of classic films do not necessarily come with the same kind of guarantee.

Earlier this year, Warner Archive came out with a sparkling 4K UHD upgrade of 1958’s Auntie Mame and more recently with an equally remarkable one of 1947’s Out of the Past and will soon do the same for 1962’s The Music Man and 1965’s Doctor Zhivago. What is unique about 1970’s Ryan’s Daughter is that it is not an upgrade, it’s a first release on standard Blu-ray as well as 4K UHD Blu-ray in the U.S. A previous Spanish Blu-ray of the film left a lot to be desired. It was last released in the U.S. by Warner Home Video on DVD in 2006.

Ryan’s Daughter was not a hit in its original release. Savaged by the critics, the film’s failure kept director David Lean from making another film until 1984’s A Passage to India which would be his last film, albeit one that restored his reputation.

Although not a hit, Ryan’s Daughter was nevertheless nominated for 4 Oscars for Best Actress (Sarah Miles), Supporting Actor (John Mills), Cinematography, and Sound. It won 2 for Mills’ performance and Freddie Young’s breathtaking cinematography.

It had been nominated for 3 Golden Globes for Miles, Mills, and Mills’ fellow supporting actor, Trevor Howard. Mills won that one as well.

BAFTA gave the film 10 nominations including Best Film, Director, Actress (Miles), Supporting Actor (Mills), Supporting Actress (Evin Crowley), Film Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction,
Costume Design and Sound. Lean had also been nominated by the Directors Guild of America.

The film, which was takes place on the western coast of Ireland during the Great War (later known as World War I), it centers on the three-way love story of middle-aged schoolteacher Robert Mitchum, his young wife, the titled Ryan’s daughter (Sarah Miles) and a shell-shocked English major (Christopher Jones). Trevor Howard plays the tough but tender country priest, John Mills the village half-wit, and Leo McKern, pub owner Ryan.

It was a very unusual role for Mitchum, usually seen as the toughest guy around, not the cuckhold husband he plays here, but the actor is as brilliant as he was, the performance rivaling his great work in Out of the Past, The Night of the Hunter, Home from the Hill, and The Sundowners.

Trevor Howard, whose only Oscar nomination came for his uncouth coal-mining father in Sons and Lovers ten years earlier, easily rivaled if not surpassed that performance as the rough-and-tumble priest here. For many, his was the film’s definitive performance, although awards bodies of the day preferred John Mills as the sympathetic mute half-wit.

In retrospect, Ryan’s Daughter has come to be regarded as one of Lean’s greatest achievements, right up there with Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Summertime, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India.

1945’s Brief Encounter, a 1946 release in the U.S., was an unstated romantic film about a proper British wife (Celia Johnson) who has an unconsummated affair with a man (Trevor Howard) that she meets at a railway station. Oscar nominations went to Johnson, Lean and the film’s screenplay co-written by Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allen, and Ronald Neame.

1946’s Great Expectations, a 1947 release in the U.S., has long been considered the definitive film version of the Charles Dickens classic. Nominated for 5 Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay (Lean, Havelock-Allen and Neame), Black-and-White Cinematography and Art Direction, it won for the last two.

1955’s Summertime, the story of a middle-aged American spinster having the time of her life in Venice where the film was made on location, was Lean’s first color film. It was nominated for Oscars for Best Director and Actress (Katharine Hepburn). Lean won the New York Film Critics award for Best Director and Hepburn came in second for Best Actress behind Anna Magnni in The Rose Tattoo.

1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai is the classic story of a group of Japanese held British prisoners of war forced to build a bridge in Burma not knowing that a British led raid was on the way to destroy it. Nominated for 8 Oscars, it won 7 including Best Picture, Director, and Actor (Alec Guinness). Only Best Supporting Actor nominee Sessue Hayakawa as the Japanese commandant failed to win on his nomination.

1962’s Lawrence of Arabia is the mesmerizing story of T.E. Lawrence, the English officer who led factions of Arabs against the Turks during World War I. Nominated for 10 Oscars, it won 7 including Best Picture and Director. It made stars of Best Actor nominee Peter O’Toole as Lawrence and Best Supporting Actor nominee Omar Sharif as an Arab prince, neither of whom won.

1965’s Doctor Zhivago is the film version of Boris Pasternak’s classic novel about a Russian physician and poet and his romance with a woman who is not his wife. Nominated for 10 Oscars, it won 5 for Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design and Score. It starred Omar Sharif and Julie Christie who won the Oscar for Best Actress for the same year’s Darling. The cast also included Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, and Best Supporting Actor nominee Tom Courtenay.

1984’s A Passage to India, based on E.M. Foster’s novel of British colonialism clashing with native Indians in the early 1920s, was nominated for 11 Oscars including Best Picture and Director, and won 2 for Best Supporting Actress Peggy Ashcroft and Best Score.

Happy Viewing.