The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

Berlin was still a boneyard of gray, jagged, hollowed-out buildings, block after block, mile after mile. Unter den Linden, once the capital city’s most majestic boulevard, was bare now, its namesake linden trees destroyed or chopped down for firewood. The great Reichstag was an empty shell, the lush Hotel Adlon bombed out and boarded up. Out for a stroll one night, Ryan fell into a bomb crater.

      The poverty on the streets was overwhelming: Germans clustered around the locations, pleading for work as grips or extras. One well-known theater actor offered to work for a pair of pants, then came back the next day and said he wanted food for his family instead. Granet gave him both, and a check. “It is hard to visualize a world where the standard of currency is simply the cigarette,” he wrote.¹² Chocolate bars were equally prized, and Ryan used them to pay the woman who ironed his shirts. “There seemed to be very little bitterness on the part of the Germans who worked with us,” Ryan wrote. “A grip, hoisting a heavy prop one day, laughed and said, ‘There goes my 1,500 calories.’”¹³

      Apart from soldiers and government staffers, most of the other Americans in Berlin were journalists, who congregated at the press club and treated the movie people with smirking condescension. “As our visit wore on, the frost melted,” Ryan would write. “Fortunately there were no jokers in our company. Nobody tried to dress up like Hitler and make a speech from the famous balcony. Nobody got drunk or was carted off to jail.”¹⁴ The Russians were suspicious when cast and crew arrived to shoot in the Soviet sector, though Ryan saw no evidence of the military might he had expected, “no streets bristling with machine guns, no bayonets — as a matter of fact, almost no Russians.”¹⁵ Their chilly reception contrasted sharply with the picture’s final scene, in which the American and the Russian mend their ongoing political quarrel with a brotherly wave outside the Brandenberg Gate.

      The last week in Berlin the company enjoyed a picnic on the Rhine River, courtesy of the US Army, and a party at the press club, attended by reporters and military people. There followed another nine days of photography in Frankfurt and four more in Paris. According to Granet, Ballard and Korvin came to blows during one train trip. When the company arrived in London, Oberon refused to fly back to New York and persuaded Granet to send her, Ballard, and Ryan on the Queen Mary out of Southampton. News photographers snapped photos of Ryan, grinning angrily and fiddling with his hat, as he escorted Oberon through Waterloo Station.

      Decades later, when the affair had become a distant memory, Ryan would share with Harold Kennedy, his theatrical colleague and drinking buddy, a curious anecdote about his Atlantic crossing with a beautiful costar and her cameraman husband. As Ryan framed it, the woman had been making passes at him throughout the journey and cornered him late one night as he was taking the air on deck; getting no response to her come-ons, she pounced, knocked him down, and refused to let him up. Suddenly her husband “materialized on the deck, lifted her up, reached down and took hold of Bob’s shoulder, assisted him to his feet, and then, after apologizing to him profusely, blackened both of the lady’s eyes.”¹⁶

      Ryan had an Irishman’s way with a story — he wasn’t the sort of man to stand by while someone was hitting a woman — but then Granet also reported rumors of noisy fights between Ballard and Oberon on the voyage home, and said that she returned to Hollywood with broken teeth. Ryan was staying on in New York for a few days to do promotional work for Crossfire. When the Queen Mary docked on Tuesday, September 9, the first thing he did was to call Jessica in Los Angeles. She put Tim on the phone to hear his father’s voice, and she must have informed Ryan, if she hadn’t already, that she was expecting another child.

      WHILE RYAN WAS IN EUROPE, Crossfire had exploded. The picture opened in late July at the Rivoli, a 2,092-seat movie palace on Broadway, and broke box office records in its first week. “One of the most startling pictures ever to come out of Hollywood,” wrote the New York Morning Telegraph. “A film to be praised, praised again, and seen by all,” wrote the New York Post. “An important, stirring film,” declared the Daily Mirror. “Robert Ryan gives one of the performances of the year.”¹⁷ The picture had transformed his reputation overnight: critics and colleagues who had regarded him as a confident but unspectacular leading man now recognized him as an exciting, first-class character actor. There was talk of an Oscar nomination. “I came back to the sort of reception reserved by the New York press for people who had done something,” he later recalled. “Everybody wanted an interview; photographers were everywhere.”¹⁸

      Ryan made a rare personal appearance at the Rivoli, where Crossfire was in its eighth week. “It was the first time I had seen the picture with an audience, and I was elated at the reaction,” he said. Afterward, when he was introduced to the crowd and walked onstage, the room suddenly quieted. Monty was the black, unfathomable heart of the picture; moviegoers who reacted to the anti-Semitism in Crossfire inevitably zeroed in on Ryan as the embodiment of all that fear and hatred. “I’m really not that kind of a guy,” he said, bringing down the house.¹⁹

      By fall Crossfire had gone into general release and was performing well across the country, racking up impressive numbers not only in the more liberal metropolitan centers but in many small towns and in such conservative communities as Memphis, Omaha, and Oklahoma City. The RKO sales force played down the picture’s anti-Semitic angle, stressing the mystery element and Ryan’s costar Robert Mitchum, whose popularity was on the rise. There were pockets of resistance — “We never have had any racial troubles in this town and I don’t want to put anything before the people that might put ideas into their heads,” declared one theater owner — but RKO pursued a sharply effective strategy of establishing the picture in one cluster of towns and then expanding it to the next.²⁰

      Given the taboo-smashing nature of the story, some conflict was inevitable. The US Navy found the idea of an American soldier murdering a Jewish civilian so inflammatory that it banned Crossfire, refusing to screen it for troops at bases foreign or domestic. The army allowed it to be shown to soldiers at home but nixed any screenings overseas, arguing it might be seen by foreigners on the bases and reflect poorly on the United States. The Motion Picture Export Association, which cleared movies for the international market, turned down Crossfire, citing the same concerns. And though most leaders of the American Jewish community hailed the picture — in Chicago, the Anti-Defamation League had launched a vigorous campaign encouraging local lodges to sponsor private screenings for civic leaders — some argued that Crossfire might harden anti-Semitic feelings and even provoke bigots to violence.

      This opinion emerged most strongly in the American Jewish Committee’s monthly magazine Commentary. Editor Eliot Cohen noted the malign magnetism of Ryan’s hypnotic performance: “You’re drawn to him. He’s big, he catches your eye. His personality overshadows the others. A plain, husky fellow, not much education, visibly troubled, up against a world too smart for him, fighting shrewdly, stupidly, blindly against the ‘others’ who hem him in — before his crime, after his crime. (For the millions near enough like him to identify with him, will Montgomery be the simple bully and villain the producer intended, assuming that was his intention? The chances are just as good that he will be taken as a kind of hero-victim — the movie equivalent of the Hemingway-Faulkner-Farrell male, hounded and struck down by a world he never made.)”²¹

      Ryan was less concerned with anti-Semites or the Jews they hated than with the much larger middle ground of Gentiles who were innocent but ignorant. “What I hope for is that the mass of Americans — those who have never come directly, first-hand, against intolerance — will think about those who daily are exposed to it, and will reflect on their actions to those groups in a new light,” he wrote in the Daily Worker. “Most Americans aren’t intolerant, but neither are they concerned with those who are. Pictures like this will help show how senseless, how ignorant, how detrimental to fundamental American principles … any kind of bigotry is. When people fully realize that, they will stop the careless thinking and the even more careless talk.”²²

One thing Ryan had understood better than the friends who had discouraged him from playing Monty: a controversial role can help an actor’s career. Ray Milland had won an Oscar playing a raging alcoholic in The Lost Weekend