VAULTS: Robert Ryan deserves centennial tribute

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By Gary Arnold

Grateful as I feel to Turner Classic Movies for its centennial tribute to Johnny Mercer this month, it's a bit surprising that the management has failed to make an additional place for actor Robert Ryan, born Nov. 11, 1909, in Chicago, where his family owned a contracting business.

Well-educated, Ryan graduated from Loyola Academy in his hometown and then Dartmouth College, where he achieved the remarkable athletic feat of remaining an undefeated intercollegiate heavyweight champion during four years of boxing competition.

On the screen, he became a commanding but potentially intimidating presence. His flair for portraying menaces might have justified a slogan along the lines of "raw-boned and bad to the bone." Something of a latecomer to the acting profession, Ryan abandoned playwrighting and journalistic aspirations after spending most of the 1930s as a vagabond with jobs from ship's stoker to ranch hand to salesman.

Toward the end of the decade, he enrolled in an acting workshop formed in Los Angeles by the exiled Viennese director Max Reinhardt. He began appearing in plays and attracting the attention of Hollywood talent scouts. Edward Dmytryk, destined to direct two of Ryan's breakthrough movies at RKO in the 1940s, "Tender Comrade" and "Crossfire," recalled testing him for a 1940 B-movie about boxing, "Golden Gloves." Ryan wasn't cast despite self-evident prowess as a fighter, but he made a strong impression.

"We decided he wasn't quite ready for us," Dmytryk wrote in his autobiography. "Later I wondered if we had been ready for him. … He was [6-foot-4], weighed 198 pounds, boxed beautifully, and hit like a mule. He did well. … Paramount signed [him] to a contract but let him go after six months. Eventually he came back." In the interim, Ryan was discovered by Clifford Odets and cast in the Broadway production of "Clash by Night."

Ryan's eventual emergence at RKO was delayed when he enlisted in the Marines in 1944. He spent much of the duration as a drill instructor at Camp Pendleton, where he happened to meet and befriend a future screenwriter and director, Richard Brooks, who would later cast him in a popular all-star Western, "The Professionals." An indelible role as a menacing man in uniform — Montgomery, a seething and homicidal anti-Semite — originated in a novel by Brooks, "The Brick Foxhole," that was transformed into the prestige crime thriller "Crossfire" in 1947.

This project brought Ryan his first and only Academy Award nomination, as supporting actor.

To the surprise of most admirers, Robert Ryan failed to acquire a long history with the Academy Awards. He remained conspicuously eligible in three movies of 1949: Fred Zinnemann's "Act of Violence," cast as another embittered soldier; Max Ophuls' "Caught," playing a despotic millionaire based on Howard Hughes; and Robert Wise's "The Set-Up," placed in the ring as a battered but gallant heavyweight.

Maybe there was too much Ryan to choose from that year. It was a bit of a shock when his malevolent Claggart in Peter Ustinov's film of "Billy Budd" failed to be nominated in 1962 — especially when Terence Stamp's Billy did make the finals.

Ultimately, Ryan's peers neglected to recognize his exceptional contribution to the powerful ensemble recruited by John Frankenheimer for a four-hour production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh," released as part of the short-lived American Film Theatre series.

The movie appeared after Ryan's death from lung cancer in 1973. Despite attracting prestige performers, the series was irrelevant to Oscar voters, probably because its productions were exhibited outside the conventional distribution system, shown only on a single Monday evening at selected theaters.

Brushing off "Iceman" looks foolish in retrospect. It remains a bewildering sort of missed opportunity. Posthumous nominations are rare, and perhaps should remain so, but Robert Ryan was a richly deserving candidate. Although frequently cast as bigots and human time bombs, he was a staunch Hollywood liberal. He had the professional credentials to merit a farewell salute. By all rights, he should also have commanded enough loyalty and affection to seal the deal.

As Larry Slade, the most poignant of disillusioned lost souls in "Iceman," he was reflecting not the malice that was one of his cinematic specialties but a surpassing sorrow and pity. John Frankenheimer wisely concluded the movie on Ryan's superbly creased and weary face, which seemed to encapsulate not only the collected pathos of the drunkards sheltering at Harry Hope's saloon in Lower Manhattan, but also the ravages of all mortality.

There were so many inspired actors in "The Iceman Cometh" that the supporting-actor category could have been filled almost twice over by its cast. Now most of them have joined the immortals: Fredric March, Tom Pedi, Moses Gunn, Sorrell Booke, Martyn Green, George Voskovec, Clifton James and, of course, Ryan and Lee Marvin, who portrayed that deadliest of salesmen, Hickey. He and Ryan had already crossed paths memorably in "Bad Day at Black Rock" and "The Professionals."

Kino International distributes the video edition of "The Iceman Cometh." There must be legions of moviegoers who have never encountered it. It's one of the three indispensable film versions of great American dramatic plays, along with Elia Kazan's adaptation of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and Sidney Lumet's uncut version of "Long Day's Journey into Night."

A retrospective of Ryan's centennial should begin with "Crossfire," which made him a distinctive asset to Hollywood. Career and emotional logic argue concluding with "The Iceman Cometh," a summation worthy of one of the American film industry's most accomplished and haunting character actors.