The British romance movie Christopher Nolan called “pure cinema”

Christopher Nolan is one of the most respected filmmakers working today and has forged his own one-man genre. But he has also been a champion of classic cinema from the start of his career, defending theatrical releases despite pressure from Hollywood to release films onto streaming platforms, and sticking with film over digital cameras long after most directors jumped ship.

He has also been vocal about the movies that have influenced his work. In 2017, Nolan curated a season of films at the British Film Institute that helped shape his most recent release, Dunkirk. The line-up included such classics as Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire, Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, and Ridley Scott’s Alien, but he had especially high praise for David Lean’s 1970 film Ryan’s Daughter.

Nolan said that he appreciated the film for its “thrilling windswept beaches and crashing waves” and “the relationship of geographical spectacle to narrative and thematic drive… is extraordinary and inspiring.” For him, he said, Ryan’s Daughter is “pure cinema”.

At three hours and 20 minutes long, Lean’s film is epic in scale at every turn. Set soon after Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916, the film centres on Rosy (Sarah Miles), a young woman living in a small Irish village on the edge of the ocean. She falls in love with the local school master (Robert Mitchum), but soon feels unfulfilled in the marriage. Believing there is something more to life than the confines of her oppressive community, she begins a torrid affair with a British soldier (Christopher Jones) who has just been sent to Ireland on medical leave from the frontlines of World War I after sustaining a gunshot wound to his leg.

As Nolan described, Lean’s filmmaking is breathtakingly cinematic. He could easily have cut the film to a tight 90 minutes if a plot-driven narrative was the goal, but he uses the rugged coast of Ireland as a metaphor for the story, and he was committed to showing it to its fullest extent. Crashing waves, sunlight glistening on the water, electric green moss, and footprints in the sand are just a few of the images he lingers on at various points in the story.

When Rosy and the soldier sneak into the woods to be alone for the first time, Lean lingers on the sunlight moving through the canopy of the trees and the soft sound of wind in the leaves. When one of the characters is contemplating ending their life, Lean focuses the camera on the sunset and holds the shot until the sun slowly slips below the horizon. 

The fact that Nolan chose this film as one of his favourites is surprising given that he seems allergic to making a film with a female protagonist, especially a film that focuses on the sexual awakening of a female protagonist. But watching Dunkirk, the parallels are clearer.

The relentless windswept beaches in both movies have the same emotional weight, reflecting the scale of the narrative and the trials that the characters face. The environment also tells the story in lieu of dialogue. In one scene, Rosy’s husband is on the beach with his pupils and sees two pairs of footprints. One features an added streak in the sand after each step, marking it as belonging to the British soldier with the wounded leg. At this moment, he realises, without vocalising it or having it spelt out for the audience, that his wife is having an affair. 

Though Nolan mostly uses dialogue-free visual storytelling for action sequences, the fact that he is so openly in awe of Ryan’s Daughter provides a glimmer of hope that he might someday branch out into more character-driven movies with complex protagonists, though even he would struggle to meet the standard of cinema that Lean set in his film.

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