Ryan on location with director Pare Lorentz for the ill-fated Name, Age and Occupation. Their RKO colleague Edward Dmytryk called Lorentz “a fine critic, a top maker of documentaries, but completely lost in straight drama. After 90 days of shooting, he was 87 days behind schedule.” Robert Ryan Family

      In late June, RKO halted production of Name, Age and Occupation and asked Lorentz for a financial accounting.³ He must have seen the writing on the wall when Koerner announced his production plans for 1942–43: $12 million was budgeted for only forty-five features, and in contrast to the literary projects favored by his predecessor, RKO would be aiming for good, solid box office by making patriotic movies for the home front. Name, Age and Occupation, with its Depression setting and heavy themes, hardly filled that bill, and after screening rushes, RKO executives killed the project.

      They liked Ryan, however, and signed him to a $600-a-week contract; under Schaefer the movie division had developed a shortage of leading men, exacerbated now by the many actors enlisting in the armed forces. “Without the talent shortage I would very likely have still been grubbing around New York for 40 a week jobs where I more or less belonged at my stage of the game,” Ryan confessed in a letter to a friend.⁴ He and Jessica moved their belongings back to Los Angeles and rented a house in Silverlake, which they shared with Ryan’s fifty-nine-year-old mother, Mabel. By October he had his first assignment from RKO, a picture about the US Army Air Forces called Bombardier. With this new job, the couple decided the time had come for children. Before long Jessica was pregnant, but she miscarried early the next year, another sad bond for two partners who had each lost a sibling in childhood.

      With Clash by Night and now Name, Age and Occupation, Ryan had been involved with two prestigious dramas that crashed and burned yet elevated him professionally. Two years after his pink slip from Paramount, he was back in Hollywood earning nearly five times as much from RKO. Boom times had returned to Hollywood with the US military mobilization against Germany and Japan: as defense plants hummed in the nation’s industrial centers, workers with good wages packed the movie palaces in search of solace, inspiration, or just relief from their worries. The studios cooperated eagerly with the Office of War Information to rally moviegoers to the war effort, and of the seven features Ryan would make over the next sixteen months, every one addressed the war in some way.

      Even as he cranked out these patriotic pictures, Ryan waited for his own draft notice to arrive. After Pearl Harbor the draft age had been widened to include all men from twenty to forty-four years old; he was thirty-two, but Congress and public opinion favored drafting single men over husbands and fathers. In February 1942 the director of selective service, Lewis B. Hershey, had ruled that movies were “an activity essential in certain instances to the national health, and in other instances to war production” and had granted deferments for essential “actors, directors, writers, producers, camera men, sound engineers and other technicians.”⁵ The outcry in Congress and around the country was immediate, and within forty-eight hours the board of the Screen Actors Guild had voted to oppose the order, arguing that “actors and everyone else in the motion picture industry should be subject to the same rules for the draft as the rest of the country.”⁶ Hershey soon reversed the policy, but California draft boards were generally cooperative toward the big studios.

      Bombardier had been in development for two years already and took as its inspiration not a play or novel but a piece of military hardware, the top secret Norden bombsight, which used a mechanical computer to calculate precision bombing at high altitudes. Pat O’Brien starred as an air force major preaching the virtues of the new contraption, and Randolph Scott was his friendly antagonist, a captain who favors traditional dive-bombing attacks. Ryan was cast as a jaunty young cadet at the new aerial bombardment training school (one scene has him reciting for O’Brien a pledge similar to that taken by real-life bombardiers, that he will “protect the secrecy of the American bombsight, if need be with my life itself,” as strings swell and O’Brien looks on in misty-eyed sanctification).

      Most of the movie was shot on Kirtland Army Air Base in New Mexico, whose bombardier training program was the model for the one in the movie. RKO vetted the script with the Office of War Information in exchange for access to planes and other resources; one fascinating scene in Bombardier shows Ryan’s cadet practicing atop a bomb trainer, a twelve-foot frame on wheels that simulates bombing trajectories as it rolls toward a small, motorized metal box representing the target. In return the army got a wholesome, rousing picture that reasoned away any qualms one might have had about raining death from above. One cadet is torn by letters from his mother, who belongs to a peace organization and fears for his soul. “Peace isn’t as cheap a bargain, Paul, as the price those people put on it,” his commander explains. “Those people lock themselves up in a dream world. You see, there are millions of other mothers that are looking to you.”

      Ryan put in five weeks on the shoot, though the cast was large and he didn’t get much time in the foreground. At one point he bursts into a funeral service for a young trainee to announce in close-up, “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!” During the climax, as Scott and Ryan fly a nighttime scouting mission over Japan in advance of the squadron, their plane is hit;