by J. R. Jones
While shooting in the streets of Tokyo, Fuller found the perfect location for Dawson’s violent end: a twenty-story building anchored by a department store that operated a children’s nursery on the roof. Carnival rides had been erected on one side, including a little carousel in the shape of Saturn; a gold half-sphere spun clockwise as a ring of seats turned counterclockwise. In the climactic sequence the bad guy is cornered high above ground, like Bogart in High Sierra (1942) or Cagney in White Heat (1949). Stack would recall his unease as he and Ryan filmed their showdown on the contraption, high above the street; the carousel was rusty and the gigantic CinemaScope camera unbalanced it. But the results were spectacular, a yawning vista of Tokyo behind them as Sandy Dawson is shot to death. A subsequent reverse angle shows Spanier stepping off the carousel and Dawson’s body draped over the edge of the ring as it continues its slow rotation.
RYAN’S STEADY WORK SCHEDULE always prevented him and Jessica from vacationing at length; they might pack up the kids for a quick trip to La Jolla, Santa Barbara, or the Ojai Valley, and the previous year they had all gone to New York while Ryan was performing Coriolanus. But in April, Jessica wrote to Dido and Jean Renoir to announce, “We are coming to France! It seems quite astonishing that we actually have definite plans to make such a trip but it is true — and all for vacation and no work.”35 She and Robert, along with the children and Williana Smith, would set off from New York in early July on the steamship Independence, arrive in Cannes eight days later, and spend the next six weeks “vagabonding” around France and Italy by auto before departing from Naples on September 4. Robert was about to leave for Durango, Mexico, to costar with Clark Gable in a big-budget western for Fox called The Tall Men, but after that he was free and clear.
Raoul Walsh, director of The Tall Men, was another grand old man of the movie business, his career stretching back to the Silent Era and encompassing such hard-charging talkies as The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, They Died with Their Boots On, and White Heat. He had made more than a hundred features, and The Tall Men was just another of them, with a weak script about antagonistic ranchers that was mainly an excuse to stage an epic cattle drive in CinemaScope. Jane Russell is Gable’s love interest, and their dialogue scenes are excruciating. Walsh was still working on the script as the cameras began rolling in mid-April, the first order of business being the big, expensive cattle-drive sequences that had brought them to Mexico (no US location offered a sufficient number of cattle).
First Tokyo, now dusty Durango. Hoping to pull people away from their TV sets, the big studios turned increasingly to dramatic location photography, which meant Ryan was spending more and more time away from the family. In Durango he shared a bungalow with costar Cameron Mitchell, whom he had known since the days of the Millpond Playhouse on Long Island; Russell was lodged in a nearby hacienda, and Gable and Walsh shared another. “I went through the location in a haze,” Ryan later said. “I’ve hardly any recollection of Durango — Gable and Jane and I would sit around getting swacked! I can’t even remember where I lived!”36
A generation after It Happened One Night (1934), Gable was a craggy fifty-four and humbly resigned to playing himself in picture after picture. Ryan found him to be an uncommonly gracious and decent guy; one time, when Ryan ran out of his brand of cigarettes, Gable got up early and drove into town to fetch him a few cartons. Walsh was great company too, and Ryan pumped him for stories about his hero Douglas Fairbanks, whom Walsh had directed in The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
These pleasant moments notwithstanding, The Tall Men was a tough shoot. According to Walsh, four hundred people in the cast and crew contracted dysentery. Then, after years of heavy drinking, Ryan came down with alcoholic hepatitis. Shipped back to Los Angeles for treatment, he learned he was also suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. The trip to France, which Jessica had so looked forward to, was canceled. “He didn’t go to the hospital, but he was in bed for quite a long time because of that,” Cheyney Ryan recalled. “I think [he] cut back on alcohol because he realized he was going to die.”37 Ryan’s doctors told him he couldn’t touch any booze for a year. “I damn near died when I heard that,” he told a reporter years later. “But I got through the first two weeks, and I never had the same urge again.”38 Eventually he would fall off the wagon, holding himself to a couple Löwenbräus every night. But in the immediate aftermath of his illness, at least, Ryan got a chance to look at the world sober for the first time in decades.
ten
The Gates of War
Recovering from his illness, Ryan had plenty of time to take stock of his career. Since parting ways with RKO, he had landed some nice deals, first with Paramount and then with Fox, that had given him starring roles in A pictures. Dore Schary came to him with good supporting roles at MGM. He had shared the screen with James Stewart, Spencer Tracy, and Clark Gable. Around town he was known as a consummate professional, quietly cooperative and reliably inspired. Yet somehow he always got shut out of the big parts. Early in 1954 he had eaten his guts out as Gregory Peck landed the role of Ahab in John Huston’s lavish adaptation of Moby Dick; Ryan still read the novel once a year, and watching the part slip away was like seeing the great white whale disappear into the blue waters.
His reclusiveness didn’t help. “I don’t want any identification between my personal life and my acting life,” he once said. “An actor’s private life should be very private. The public should see nothing but what they see on the screen.”1 Jessica had grown to loathe photo sessions. “Asking her to pick up a coffee pot and have her pour coffee while I grin over her shoulder for a photographer is murder.”2 Their home out in the Valley had pulled him away from the movie business, and getting so involved in the Oakwood School had sapped all his free time. All around him stars were making their way outside the studio system, cutting profit-participation deals or even forming their own production companies. Ryan didn’t want to produce or direct — that would mean even more time away from home — but there had to be a way of finding projects that were more engaging and ambitious.
An intriguing possibility emerged that fall when his friend Sidney Harmon landed a three-picture financing and distribution deal with United Artists for his independent production company, Security Pictures, Inc. The first picture, Variety reported, would be Men in War, set during the Korean conflict and based on Van Van Praag’s 1949 novel Combat. Soon after came news that Harmon and his partner, screenwriter Philip Yordan, would produce a screen adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s best-selling, notoriously salacious novel God’s Little Acre, with Anthony Mann directing. Ryan trusted Harmon from their many years in the trenches at Oakwood, and through him had gotten to know Yordan, a Chicago native and a voracious reader. “We used to socialize quite a bit,” remembered Yordan, “and by socialize I mean just come over [to] the house and sit down, and smoke and drink beer.”3 Quite naturally the three men had kicked around the idea of working together, and now they had financing.
Yordan would earn a reputation as a classic Hollywood hustler.* Originally an attorney and entrepreneur, he had come to Hollywood in the late ’30s and written such hard-boiled pictures as Dillinger, House of Strangers, and Detective Story. But he also served as a front for blacklisted writers, passing their work off as his own and giving them a percentage. Harmon had sent several people his way. “Sidney, in a sense, was my conscience,” recalled Yordan, who was so apolitical he claimed he never read a newspaper until he was fifty. “He says, ‘Phil, you’ve got so much money, you’ve got a play on Broadway, you’re making $5,000 a week, and these guys are starving to death. Give them some work, for chrissakes.’”4 Ben Maddow, who hadn’t written under his own name in Hollywood since 1952, remembered Yordan fronting for him on Men in War and several other scripts; Yordan offered him a 50 percent cut, though as Maddow noted, “I was never sure of what percentage it actually was.”5
Maddow watched in amazement one afternoon as Yordan tried to parlay a western script Maddow had written into a nove
l and a picture deal. As Maddow related to writer Patrick McGilligan, Yordan phoned Simon and Schuster and asked if they were interested in publishing a novel that Warner Bros. was adapting to the screen. Then he called Warners and asked if they were interested in adapting a novel that Simon and Schuster was publishing. To clinch the deal, Yordan contacted a “minor executive” at Warners and offered to retire the man’s $14,000 gambling debt if he would pimp the script to studio head Jack Warner, claiming he had picked it up by accident and been bowled over when he read it.6 Maddow was then dispatched to write the nonexistent novel, though the picture was never made; when he later saw the book in print in Europe, he said, Yordan had attached his own byline.
In December 1955, Ryan returned to work, playing Abraham Lincoln in a half-hour TV play called Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.* Lincoln spends most of this little fable laid up in bed, the human cost of the war weighing heavily on his mind. His friend and physician, Robert K. Stone (Charles Bickford of The Woman on the Beach) examines him, taking his pulse from his ankle as his feet stick out from the covers, and insists that he get at least twenty-four hours of rest. The extended scene between them is beautifully written and gently played; at one point Lincoln pages through Henry IV, part 2, and takes a solemn pass at one of Prince Hal’s soliloquies: “O polish’d perturbation! golden care! / That keep’st the ports of slumber open wide / To many a watchful night!” Unfortunately, this gives way to a sappy resolution in which the doctor cheers Abe by getting him a puppy.
The new year brought two more mediocre pictures whose sole consolation was top billing. The Proud Ones, another CinemaScope western for Fox, costarred Virginia Mayo and Jeffrey Hunter, with location work in Nogales, Arizona. Back from Eternity, a jungle survival drama, was being shot — thank God — at RKO Pathe Studios, with a $300,000 tropical set and sixty exotic birds. Ryan plays an alcoholic airline pilot who tries to save his passengers after their plane goes down somewhere in South America; among them are Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg and the tightly wound Rod Steiger. By this time Howard Hughes had severed his ties with RKO Radio Pictures, selling his share to General Tire and Rubber Company for a $6.5 million profit. His bizarre stewardship of RKO would be remembered as the most baroque episode in the era of the great movie moguls, an era that was now, clearly and irrevocably, coming to a close. When Harmon and Yordan approached Ryan with a profit-participation deal to star in their first picture, Men in War, he grabbed it.
RYAN HADN’T MADE A PICTURE about ground combat since he and Pat O’Brien starred in the trite Marine Raiders back in 1943. Men in War took a much darker view of its subject: the story of an army patrol stranded behind enemy lines in the early days of the Korean conflict, it had no romantic subplot, no flag-waving speeches, no moral compass. Since the end of World War II, Hollywood war movies had grown more adult, ambivalent, and even philosophical, but Men in War was downright existential, focused like a telescope on the wild terrain and the men’s desperate, improvised tactics against an encroaching but unseen enemy. “The battalion doesn’t exist,” the despairing Lieutenant Benson (Ryan) tells his loyal radioman, Sergeant Riordan (Phillip Pine). “The regiment doesn’t exist. Command headquarters doesn’t exist, the USA doesn’t exist. They don’t exist, Riordan. We’ll never see ’em again.” The picture ended with a bitter scene in which Benson, Riordan, and Sergeant Montana (Aldo Ray) toss a dead officer’s silver stars into the brush as they read off the names of all the men they’ve lost.
Sergeant Riordan (Phillip Pine) and Lieutenant Benson (Ryan) in Men in War (1957). “The battalion doesn’t exist,” Benson tells Riordan. “The regiment doesn’t exist.
Command headquarters doesn’t exist, the USA doesn’t exist…. We’ll never see ’em again.” Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
The entire story transpired out in the field, which made Tony Mann an inspired choice to direct: all he needed to create drama was good actors and a good location. Yordan had known Mann for years, and Ryan was eager to work with him again after The Naked Spur. According to Yordan, Mann read the 150-page script and cut it down to 82 pages, stripping out nearly all the dialogue. “Of course, I put all of the dialogue back in to get Aldo Ray and Robert Ryan to play it,” remembered Yordan. “I said to [Mann], ‘What am I going to do if you send them this script? They won’t show up!’”7
Fortunately, they did show up, to a hilly, overgrown area of Thousand Oaks, California, thirty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles in the Conejo Valley, where shooting began in July 1956. Harmon had rounded up a sharp supporting cast, including Vic Morrow, L. Q. Jones, Nehemiah Persoff, and James Edwards (who had played the black fighter Luther Hawkins in The Set-Up). Aside from the players, Mann had little at his disposal but a few old jeeps and some explosive charges, but that didn’t matter — his muses were the open sky, the billowing smoke, and the tall, bleached grass that seemed to stretch in every direction, enveloping the men and concealing the enemy.
This bare-bones approach lay at the opposite end of the spectrum from something such as Flying Leathernecks, with its fleet of fighter planes supplied by the Marine Corps, but shooting on the cheap bought the filmmakers some artistic freedom. Flying Leathernecks features a corny scene in which John Wayne struggles to write a condolence letter to the parents of a fallen marine under his command; its corollary in Men in War is a grim, wordless shot in which Lieutenant Benson cuts a dog tag off a dead G.I. and adds it to a thick stack he keeps on a key ring. The entire division has retreated under a tank assault from the North Koreans, who are advancing to Pusan, and Benson is responsible for leading his men to safety. He’s a good commander, cool-headed and resolute, but his mission is complicated when the patrol collides with Sergeant Montana (Ray), the chauffeur and self-appointed caretaker of a mute, shell-shocked colonel (Robert Keith). From Ryan’s perspective, nothing could have symbolized the military command structure better than a catatonic officer strapped into a jeep and staring blankly into space.
“Tell me the story of the foot soldier and I will tell you the story of all wars,” declares an opening title, signaling not only the picture’s antiwar leanings but also Mann’s minimalist approach. The men here are vividly human — scared, confused, fiercely devoted to one another — but there are no reminiscences about girlfriends back home or dreamy soliloquies outlining plans for the future. Forced to fill in the blanks, Ryan drew on his own life, adding a rare personal touch that would become the picture’s sole reminder of an outside world: when the lieutenant takes off his helmet, nestled inside is a snapshot of Jessica, Tim, Cheyney, and Lisa. Ryan didn’t often lose track of himself in a character, but during Men in War he began to feel he was Benson. “With each day I felt dirtier, grimier, lousier and more forsaken,” he told one reporter. “It became more and more difficult to sleep in my clean bed at night. I found it finally, impossible. I had to sleep on the floor.”8
Shooting close to home was a blessing; Ryan could commute to the location, and there were frequent visits from Jessica, the kids, and the Harmon family. Tim and Andy Harmon, good friends at Oakwood, latched onto a copy of the screenplay and wrote their own digested version of Men in War, which they rehearsed with Cheyney and some of their classmates and performed for their fathers. Back then the empty lot just west of Oakwood on Moorpark Street was a sandy wash with overgrown bushes and dried-out drainage canals that were perfect for playing war. “Tim and Andy were always writing a movie,” recalled Toya Harrison, daughter of Chuck Haas. “Tim was always the star, and the girls in the class, me included, we were always the nurses…. Tim and Andy were fantastic at persuading us all that these movies were gonna be made and we had to rehearse them…. I remember Tim as being a very gentle soul, really quiet-spoken. A lot like Bob, really.”9
That summer the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson to run again for president. He faced an even tougher race than he had in 1952: the Korean conflict had ended, the economy was booming, and polls showed widespread support for President Eisenhower. Stevenson
staked out courageous positions supporting a nuclear test ban, an issue dear to Ryan’s heart, and proposing an end to the military draft. In the final weeks of the race Ryan flew out to Washington to appear at a $100-a-plate Stevenson dinner, which was being carried by closed-circuit TV to thirty-three other locations around the country. Henry Fonda, Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Lauren Bacall were among his costars; sorely missed was Humphrey Bogart, who was battling cancer and had only months to live. Ryan got to introduce President Truman, who lambasted Eisenhower and Nixon and promised, “The day of liberation for the city of Washington is close at hand.”10 Stevenson carried only seven states on election day, but he would always be a hero to the Ryans. “Till the day they died they had a picture of Adlai Stevenson over the mantelpiece,” Cheyney recalled.11
Robert and Tim Ryan during location shooting for Men in War (1957). That summer Tim and his brother, Cheyney, got their hands on a script and staged scenes with their playmates on the grounds of the Oakwood School. Robert Ryan Family
After Men in War wrapped, Ryan didn’t work for the rest of the year. By this time Universal, Paramount, and Fox all had tried him out as a leading man, with decent but unspectacular financial returns, and Nicholas Schenck had finally canned Dore Schary as president of MGM, leaving Ryan without a connection at that studio. He was forty-six and looked it, in a business whose hottest new star was twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley. Hollywood legends such as Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant were still playing romantic leads well into their 50s, but Ryan was hardly in that league; the more lined his face, the more menacing he looked. The Dartmouth alumni magazine reported in December that he was trying for the lead in a Jack Dempsey biopic, though nothing came of this.12 He could have gotten more television gigs, but that was a step down from pictures.