The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

showed the couple heading out from their car, Jessica scowling as she carries a rifle at her waist, the barrel pointed to her side.³

      After Crossfire, Ryan strapped on his six-guns again for Return of the Bad Men, another B western with Randolph Scott and “Gabby” Hayes. He couldn’t wait to finish with this tired oater and move on to Berlin Express, an espionage thriller scheduled to begin shooting overseas in July. Dore Schary had been mightily impressed by the documentary authenticity of Roberto Rossellini’s Italian postwar drama Open City (1945), and he wanted Berlin Express to be the first drama filmed inside Germany since the fall of the Third Reich. (Director Billy Wilder would be arriving at the same time to shoot A Foreign Affair for Paramount.) Berlin Express centered on an international group of passengers riding a US military train from Paris to Berlin, and like Crossfire, it would mix genre entertainment with liberal politics, stressing the imperative of world peace.

      Ryan would be gone for more than two months, flying from New York to London and then traveling with cast and crew to Paris, Frankfurt, and Berlin. He was excited about the picture and eager to get a firsthand look at the ravages of war. General George Marshall had just delivered a commencement address at Harvard in which he stressed the danger of allowing the European economy to deteriorate any further; he called for a massive economic aid plan to rehabilitate the victors and the vanquished alike. Berlin Express would carry Ryan right into the heart of this debate. He finished Return of the Bad Men in mid-July 1947, and yet another photographer arrived, this time at the house in Silverlake, to shoot him packing his bags and bidding Jessica and Tim farewell on his way to the LA airport.⁴ Jessica was afraid of airplanes and begged him to take a train east, but Ryan never passed up a chance to fly.

The producer, thirty-seven-year-old Bert Granet, was shouldering quite an operation. Military permits were required at each point of travel through occupied Germany, which meant that twenty-seven cast and crew members had to be screened by the FBI* and then cleared by the army and State Department.⁵ Cinematic resources in Europe were so scarce that nearly all camera and lighting equipment had to be brought over, along with one hundred thousand feet of film that required cool, safe storage in nations where any kind of storage space was prized. Because local film laboratories were so dodgy, all footage had to be shipped back to the United States for processing, so none of the completed scenes could be viewed until the expedition returned to Hollywood.⁶ Lodging and automobiles were in short supply (there was only one camera truck available in all of Paris); even simple items such as nails, lumber, and rope had to be bought on the black market.

      A native Parisian, director Jacques Tourneur had come to Hollywood in the 1930s and distinguished himself at RKO with subtle, low-budget chillers such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). He had just completed his masterpiece, the wistful film noir Out of the Past. Unfortunately, Berlin Express didn’t have much of a script; inspired by a Life magazine story, it would be a rather awkward marriage of journalism and Hitchcock-style suspense, its harsh scenes of a ravaged Germany punctuating an increasingly far-fetched tale in which a German diplomat critical to the reunification effort is kidnapped by right-wing terrorists. The four heroes pulling together to foil this plot were obvious stand-ins for the occupying powers: Ryan is an American agricultural expert, Roman Toporow a Russian military officer, Robert Coote a British veteran of Dunkirk, and actress Merle Oberon the French secretary of the kidnapped politician.

Decades later Granet left behind in his papers an account of the personal chaos inspired by Oberon during the trip. The delicate British beauty had outmaneuvered him already by getting Schary to name her husband, Lucien Ballard, as cinematographer; the couple would be rooming together. The company was lodged at the Hôtel George V, just off the Champs-Élysées, but Oberon, in a standard movie-star power play, insisted that she and Ballard stay at the palatial Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme. Ballard, an Oklahoman of part-Cherokee descent, was tall, athletic, cultured, and handsome; he had won Oberon’s heart by inventing a small spotlight that attached to the camera and helped minimize her facial scars from a 1937 car accident.*

      “By the time we settled in Paris, Merle had developed a deep passion for Robert Ryan,” wrote Granet. “He was tough looking but at heart he was a happily married pussycat. He was not even fair game for someone of Merle’s sexual talents. She would tease him then cool it.”⁷ Born in Bombay to a Welsh father and an Indian mother, Oberon had spent her adult life concealing the mixed parentage that would have ended her career as an actress in Britain and the United States. For six years she had been married to the great British producer Alexander Korda, who cast her opposite Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939), but in 1945 she had left Korda for Ballard. She obsessed over her beauty and exulted in her status, spoiling herself with clothing and gems. Oberon was high-strung and wildly romantic — among her previous lovers were Leslie Howard, David Niven, George Brent, and the heroic RAF pilot Richard Hillary.

      During the company’s stay in Paris, wrote Granet, Oberon urged him and his wife, Charlotte, to throw a dinner party in their suite and invite Ryan. That evening she arrived hours late, dressed to the nines in a black evening gown and accompanied by a dapper Englishman; later she confessed to Charlotte that she was trying to make Ryan jealous. “By the time we were shooting in Frankfurt, she had successfully bedded Ryan,” Granet reported. “Since Lucien … was constantly on location, all he could do was develop suspicions. Merle successfully made him believe that it was Charles Korvin who was making a pass at her.”⁸

      Ryan with Merle Oberon in Berlin Express (1948). Their affair unfolded amid the chaos and deprivation of postwar France and Germany. Film Noir Foundation

      Korvin, a Hungarian actor playing one of the villains, had already shot two pictures with Oberon, and the two despised each other. More than thirty years later, after her death, Korvin told celebrity biographers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley that Oberon deserted Ballard on more than one occasion to spend the night with Ryan, first on the cross-country train from Paris and then in Frankfurt (where the crew lodged at hotels in the center of town and the cast was billeted at a castle in Bad Nauheim, thirty-five kilometers north of the city). “I know that she slept with Ryan both in Hollywood and in Europe and I thought it unfair and cruel of her,” Korvin remembered. “I objected to the affair and so did everyone else on the picture.”⁹

      Political argument only added to the tension. When Ryan asked his fellow cast members how they felt about General Marshall’s vision for postwar Europe, the idea of economic aid for Germany got a cool reception. Coote and Oberon had endured the London blitz. Korvin and Paul Lukas, both Hungarian, had been personally touched by the Holocaust, and Toporow, who was Polish, loathed the Germans and the Russians alike. “How can you let 80 million people starve?” Ryan would ask.¹⁰ Invariably they dismissed him as naïve or softhearted; mass starvation, said one, would be no less than the German people deserved.

      Their resolve began to melt away as they got a look at Frankfurt: entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, middle-class people reduced to beggars. More than fifty-five hundred had been killed in the bombardment, and the medieval city center, the Römer, had been completely destroyed. In Berlin Express, Ryan and Oberon venture into the neighborhood and discover a maze of shoulder-high rubble, like a bizarre sculpture garden. Another scene shows Ryan staring grimly out a bus window as people walk the streets with suitcases full of belongings for sale; in the train station he tosses away a cigarette and two shabby men race like pigeons to scoop it up. The children they encountered on location were “emaciated, shocked and sick,” Ryan later wrote, with “old faces and rickety bodies.”¹¹ By the end of the first week, he remembered, no one talked anymore about the justice of letting people starve.

      From Frankfurt the company flew to Berlin, where principal photography began on Saturday, August 2. This time the company stayed in Zehlendorf, about fifteen miles from downtown, near the US occupation forces headquarters, and cast members