Ryan's Daughter

Released five years after Doctor Zhivago, this romantic epic from David Lean was not so much roasted by the critics as incinerated. The story of a dreamy girl, who marries a stolid village teacher and then has an affair with a shell-shocked British officer, began as a script of Flaubert's Madame Bovary that Robert Bolt had written for his wife, Sarah Miles. Set in a bleak Irish village in 1916, it co-stars a courageously cast Robert Mitchum as the teacher, a mountain of a man who presses dried flowers and can't take his shirt off without blushing. Trevor Howard plays a priest, John Mills a village idiot, Christopher Jones the Byronic soldier, Leo McKern a publican posing as a Republican and Barry Foster is Michael Collins in all but name. Stories about the year-long making of the picture have duly entered movie legend (read them all in Kevin Brownlow's biography of Lean); as an overblown romance it has no equal and now looks like a masterwork, thanks in no small part to Freddie Young's Oscar-winning images of the wild Dingle Peninsula.