The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

Renoir, and Ryan rehearsing The Woman on the Beach (1947). “One of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met,” Ryan called Renoir. “Working with him opened my eyes to aspects of character that were subtler than those I was accustomed to.” Franklin Jarlett Collection

Trail Street starred Randolph Scott as western hero Bat Masterson; Ryan got second billing as the villain, and whiskered “Gabby” Hayes dispensed cornpone comedy as Scott’s sidekick. (Four-month-old Tim Ryan made his screen debut as a baby being held by a woman in the frontier town.) Director Ray Enright had spent twenty years in the business without making a notable picture; he was quite a comedown after Jean Renoir. At the same time, Ryan’s collaboration with Renoir was in trouble. Desirable Woman was test screened on August 2 in Santa Barbara, where it was laughed at and jeered by an audience full of students. Renoir would confess later that he was the first to get cold feet, and he offered to reedit the film. Five or six weeks later, he emerged with a version that was shown to two disinterested parties: screenwriter John Huston, who argued that the lieutenant’s war trauma should be eliminated entirely, and director Mark Robson, who argued that it was central to the story. Renoir listened to Robson and moved the lieutenant’s fiery nightmare to the beginning of the picture.*

      By late November, when Ryan and Bennett were called in for reshoots, Renoir had lost confidence in his original conception, and the love relationship became more conventional. Several dialogue scenes that explained the characters’ motivations were excised, which gave the action a detached quality. This garbled, seventy-minute cut of the picture, retitled The Woman on the Beach, would flop at the box office eight months later and end Renoir’s association with RKO. By then Renoir had grown close to the Ryans — Jessica adored him and his wife, Dido — and the two couples would keep in touch long after the Renoirs returned to France. “Bob Ryan is a marvelous person,” Renoir would later attest. “Professionally he’s absolutely honest in everything he does.”¹⁹ Almost everything — Ryan admired Renoir too deeply ever to tell him he thought The Woman on the Beach was a failure.

      THE MOVIE BUSINESS boomed in 1946 as servicemen rejoined their families, which may explain why Peter Rathvon, the new president of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, allowed most of the year to pass before finally choosing forty-one-year-old Dore Schary to replace the late Charles Koerner as head of production. Schary was a comer: born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, he had written plays in New York before arriving in Los Angeles to write for the screen and winning an Oscar for the MGM classic Boys Town (1938). Since then the tall, bespectacled young man had supervised B-movie production for Louis B. Mayer at MGM, and independent producer David O. Selznick had tapped Schary to head his new company Vanguard Pictures. Schary had great story sense, and he knew how to get the most out of a dollar. Selznick was generous enough to let RKO buy out Schary’s contract, and on January 1, 1947, Schary took charge of the studio’s production slate.

      Two days later the United States experienced a dramatic political shift when the Eightieth Congress convened, its opening session carried for the first time on broadcast television. President Truman, battered by union struggles as he served out Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth presidential term, had been rebuked at the polls in November, when Republicans picked up fifty-five congressional seats and took control of the House of Representatives. Once the new Congress was sworn in, Republicans wasted no time in mounting a frontal assault on the Roosevelt legacy, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), created in 1938 to investigate subversion against the US government, announced that a top priority would be uncovering communist influence in the motion picture industry.

      A liberal Democrat, Schary took little notice of this as he moved into position at RKO. His formula for success involved socially conscious films that could be made on relatively small budgets, and the first script he sent into production was a murder mystery adapted from The Brick Foxhole, the novel that had so intrigued Ryan when he read it in the Marines. Producer Adrian Scott, who had scored at RKO with the Dick Powell mysteries Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), had read The Brick Foxhole and was struck by the sequence in which soldiers beat a homosexual man to death. This would never get past the Production Code Administration, but what if the victim were a Jew instead? Scott hired screenwriter John Paxton to take a crack at the novel; their project, Cradle of Fear, would be the first Hollywood picture to deal openly with anti-Semitism in the United States.

      The script had gone nowhere with Charles Koerner in charge, and market research indicated that only 8 percent of moviegoers would go for such a picture (compared to 70 percent for Sister Kenny, the Rosalind Russell drama RKO was still trying to get made three years after the Marines had refused to let Ryan appear in it). Schary was a different story — he read Cradle of Fear one night and pulled the trigger on it the next day, naming Scott as producer and Eddie Dmytryk as director. The budget was around $500,000, but half of that would go for the stars Schary felt would be needed to sell such a controversial picture to the public. Scott and Dmytryk would have to get Cradle of Fear in the can with what remained, shooting for about twenty days on existing sets. Paxton would remember his excitement after Schary gave them the go-ahead, as “a little parade went off around the lot (the writer just tagged along) looking for sets that could be borrowed or adapted, or stolen. An unusual procedure with front office blessing.”²⁰

      “What’s-a-matter, Jewboy? You ’fraid we’ll drink up all your stinkin’ wonderful liquor?” Montgomery (Ryan) and Floyd (Steve Brodie) close in on their victim, Samuels (Sam Levene), in Crossfire. Franklin Jarlett Collection

      Ryan got along well with Schary, and when he learned the picture was in preproduction, he begged the new chief to let him play Montgomery. Schary must have been surprised: this wasn’t the sort of role that would lead to more love scenes with Ginger Rogers. Monty was repellent — ingratiating one moment, bullying the next, especially when he and his drunken pals are boozing it up with Samuels, who has met them at a bar and invited them back to his place. “Sammy, let me tell you something,” Monty slurs. “Not many civilians will take a soldier into their house like this for a quiet talk. Well, let me tell you something. A guy that’s afraid to take a soldier into his house, he stinks. And I mean, he stinks!” Things only get worse from there: when Samuels tries to get rid of them, Monty snaps, “What’s-a-matter, Jewboy? You ’fraid we’ll drink up all your stinkin’ wonderful liquor?” The word had never been uttered in a Hollywood picture.

      The role might well blow up in Ryan’s face. But he loved the script, valued the idea behind the picture, and knew he was the man to play Monty. “I thought such a part would make an actor — not break him,” he later wrote.²¹ He lobbied Dmytryk — who, by this time, had directed him in his first picture (Golden Gloves), his biggest hit (Behind the Rising Sun), and his first romance (Tender Comrade). Schary and Dmytryk acceded, billing Ryan third behind Robert Young as Finlay, the pipe-smoking police detective who investigates the crime, and Robert Mitchum as Keeley, a jaded sergeant who tries to save the confused young Private Mitchell from being framed by Monty. Schary also brought in some first-rate supporting players: Sam Levene as Samuels; sultry, blond Gloria Grahame (It’s a Wonderful Life) as a hooker who briefly adopts the private during his nocturnal wanderings; and, in the picture’s second-creepiest role, craggy Paul Kelly as a man who hangs around her apartment and keeps changing his story about their relationship.

      When the picture came out, Ryan would publish two stories under his own byline, in publications no less divergent than Movieland and the Daily Worker, that explained his rationale for taking the role. “Convictions are nice things to have,” he wrote in the Worker, “but when close friends tell you that you’re jeopardizing your career by taking a role you believe in — well, it makes you stop and think.” The picture was unlikely to convert any hardened anti-Semites, he conceded. “No one picture, no one book, no one speech could accomplish that. It’s the cumulative effect that counts.”²² In Movieland he argued that the picture’s subject was broader than anti-Semitism: “We all stand to lose if fascism comes.