Kerry locals made hay literally and figuratively during the shooting of Hollywood epic Ryan's Daughter. But despite the scenery, all was not well on location, writes Kevin Sweeney
Kate Ashe couldn't help gawping when a Rolls-Royce pulled up in front of her Dingle pub one blustery November morning in 1968. The three strangers who sauntered in looking for breakfast said they were scouting locations for a Hollywood movie. They talked about the big stars on the way and a village set being constructed from scratch near Dunquin, out on the tip of the peninsula.
"I didn't believe them," Ashe recalled nearly 40 years later. "You get used to pub talk in our business. Three or four days later everybody in the town was talking about it!"
The film, of course, was Ryan's Daughter, David Lean's elephantine production that defied the elements and plastered west Kerry on big screens in Super Panavision 70 ("$14 million worth of bad weather magnificently shot by Freddie Young," dismissed one critic). Ashe's recollections are among those collected in Troubled Epic: On Location with Ryan's Daughter, a new book by Michael Tanner.
Ryan's Daughter was Lean's idea of an intimate romantic tragedy, essentially Madame Bovary transported by screenwriter Robert Bolt to Ireland of 1916. A high-spirited young woman (played by Sarah Miles, aka Mrs Bolt) marries a much-older widowed schoolteacher (macho Robert Mitchum, audaciously cast as a wimp), then incurs the wrath of the villagers when she embarks on a torrid affair with a shell-shocked English army major (American Christopher Jones, a late '60s Brad Pitt-type heart-throb who was so bad here that he gave up acting). Among the other pseudo-yokels billed above the title were stalwarts of British cinema Trevor Howard and John Mills, cast as the village priest and idiot, respectively.
Tanner writes with humour and authority about Lean's obsessions, including filming the perfect storm, and the stars' shenanigans and mishaps during the endless shoot. (There's a whole chapter alone on Mitchum's legendary samplings of booze, brawls, broads and pot.) He provides an anorak's guide to locations, and charts the impact on the impoverished plain people of west Kerry: the year-long production pumped as much as £3 million into Dingle.
"The whole community was left with money," Tanner quotes one Dingle businessman. Before the film, "few houses round here had bathrooms, and carpets on floors were non-existent. Our sales of linoleum and carpets soared. Buildings and renovations rose a thousand-fold."
Lean was well-known for his gruelling location shoots, so naturally he convinced MGM to spend £200,000 constructing a realistic rural village on the flanks of Croaghmarhin Mountain. Twenty UK film craftsmen and as many as 200 locals were employed to build Kirrary, using 800 tons of granite hauled up the hill. The church was made of fibreglass and the pub included a working coal-house and stables behind it.
Lean wanted a place that had a "real smell of the outside, built of stone so that it had a history". And, as the film's British producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, explained, tongue not necessarily in cheek, "We could never have used an actual village because you can't tell an Irishman to move his goats out of the way or hold his wake somewhere else!"
The production's headquarters was set up in Dingle, miles away. As the payroll swelled to 250, every bit of spare space in the town was rented, leased or bought out. Telephone lines were strung, sewer pipes laid. All 48 rooms in the Skellig Hotel were booked out for six months; Dingle's abandoned railway station was turned into a prop workshop. Shoppers at the Dingle supermarket were suddenly able to buy such exotic items as garlic and spices.
The money rolled in. The owner of a Dingle hardware store, previously going broke from giving out credit, suddenly had all the business he could handle and was reimbursed once a week by Lean's production accountant. Labourers were paid an astronomical £45 a week and an extra £9 for Sundays - "brand new banknotes straight from the bank", recalled the wife of one. With that kind of dosh, who cared if the weather was dumping bucket loads of hail, sleet, snow and rain on you while you worked?
Travellers from Tralee were hired as extras. A coal lorry driver was given the fantastically cushy job of ferrying Sarah Miles to and from the set. The children in Mitchum's classroom, drawn from national schools in Dunquin and Feohanagh, were paid £2 a day and £3 on Sunday. (Lean was remote but Mitchum was like a father figure. He gave the children autographed Frisbees at the end of filming.) Even farmers got in on the act, being paid a mad £2 per load of stones.
For those on the payroll, the food was plentiful, and it was all good. "Five-gallon drums full of rashers and sausages," recalled one worker, "and you could take all you wanted! It was my first sight of a bun-burger! And beef curry!"
As the production wound down in December 1969, the Kerryman newspaper reported that "it was the end of the rainbow that filled many pots of gold. All in all, the area prospered greatly . . . Young men bought cars and leather jackets; young girls were now chaperoned openly to the pubs and dancehalls, and enlightening breezes of modernity blew the cobwebs of antiquity cleanly away from the lichen walls of west Kerry."
For the rest of the world, Ryan's Daughter put Dingle on the map. Within weeks of its premiere in late 1970, American tourists were on the way. This fuelled the huge boom in Dingle's hotel, restaurant and B&B trade.
Perhaps surprisingly, few of the peninsula's residents recalled especially liking the movie itself when they saw it at Dingle's Phoenix Cinema or at the Adelphi in Dublin. "You wouldn't take much notice of it, really," suggested one. "The scenery was nice - but we see it every day!"
Troubled Epic is published by The Collins Press
Michael Viney is on leave