The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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plane crashes. The absurd ending has Scott, captured behind enemy lines, escaping from the Japanese to drive a flaming truck around the munitions plant for the benefit of O’Brien’s squadron above. With its fiery payoff, Bombardier validated Charles Koerner’s new production strategy when it opened the following spring: budgeted at $907,000, it grossed $2.1 million.
More so than the bit parts at Paramount, Ryan’s roles at RKO gave him a chance to learn the craft of screen acting, which favored subtlety of expression and demanded incredible mental focus. “On the stage you can coast along,” he explained to a journalist years later.
You don’t have to concentrate so intensely on small details as you do in a movie.… Let’s say in this scene, you’re talking to me and I’m supposed to be taking a sip from this cup while I listen to you…. on the stage, it doesn’t make any difference when the cup goes back into the saucer because nobody can hear it. But in a movie scene, while I’m listening to your lines and thinking of the line I have to say next, I must also remember to time the return of the cup to the saucer so that it won’t get there until after you finish the last word from your speech, and not a split-second before you finish. If the cup hits the saucer while you’re still talking, the clack it makes on the soundtrack will clash with your last words and ruin the scene. A half-hour later we have to do the same scene over again for a close-up or from a different camera angle and it has to be done exactly the same as we did it before.7
But even more than acting experience, Ryan took away from Bombardier a long, warm friendship with Pat O’Brien, who liked the young man’s professionalism and soon began lobbying to have him in his pictures. They shared some striking similarities, including a birthday (O’Brien was exactly ten years older), a Catholic upbringing in the Midwest (he had attended Marquette Academy and Marquette University in Milwaukee), and a love of Chicago (he had met his wife, Eloise, while appearing in a show at the Selwyn Theater in 1927). O’Brien had been summoned from the New York stage to Hollywood by Howard Hughes, who cast him as Hildy Johnson in the movie version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page (1931). O’Brien soon moved to Warner Bros. and became a professional Irishman, costarring no fewer than eight times with his pal James Cagney, before memorably embodying the title Norwegian in Knute Rockne, All American (1940).
That hit allowed him to end a long, frustrating relationship with Warners and eventually sign with RKO. “I loved that RKO lot, as did most who worked there,” O’Brien later wrote. “It exuded more friendliness and warm camaraderie than any studio in which I ever worked.”8 In addition to Cagney, O’Brien was tight with Frank McHugh, a pudgy comic actor who had been with them at Warners, and Spencer Tracy, an old classmate at Marquette Academy. Ryan got to meet them all, though he was never social enough to be considered part of this “Irish mafia.” When Ryan asked O’Brien if his natural reticence would hurt him in the movie business, O’Brien pointed to Cagney, who was equally private but remained one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. “That was all I needed to know,” Ryan recalled. “I became a Cagney.”9
Ryan’s next assignment brought him into close quarters with another big talent. The Sky’s the Limit, which began shooting in February 1943, starred Fred Astaire as a heroic Flying Tiger who goes AWOL during a publicity tour of the United States and falls for news photographer Joan Leslie; chasing after him are his two pilot buddies, played by Ryan and Richard Davies. Ryan’s character, Reggie Felton, is a snide comedian: riding in a parade, he prepares to poke Davies in the eyes Three Stooges–style but then remembers where he is and flashes the crowd a “V for Victory” sign. He spends most of his screen time needling Astaire, and in one memorable scene, set in an army canteen, blackmails him into doing a “swami dance” atop their table. Choreographed by Astaire, the dance took several days to film, during which Ryan sat in a chair looking up at the great performer. Ryan even scored some waltz lessons from Astaire when the scene called for him to share a dance with Leslie.
Behind the Rising Sun, which began shooting in late April, was the darkest and most interesting of Ryan’s wartime releases, an anti-Japanese propaganda picture of some journalistic substance but even more racial hysteria. Its source material was a 1941 book by James R. Young, an American journalist who had spent thirteen years working for the influential Japan Advertiser before his reporting from occupied China, published in a variety of Japanese papers, got him arrested in Tokyo and held by police for sixty-one days. Behind the Rising Sun offered a variety of insights into Japanese culture and a ringing indictment of the Imperial Army’s misadventure on the continent. Young’s sympathy and affection for the people of Japan was evident throughout, yet Doubleday Doran had packaged the book with a cover drawing of a slit-eyed, hideously grinning man, a fan in one hand and a revolver in the other.
After directing Ryan in Golden Gloves over at Paramount, Eddie Dmytryk had landed at RKO and, with screenwriter Emmet Lavery, had assembled an anti-German propaganda piece called Hitler’s Children, about the Hitler Youth movement. For Behind the Rising Sun the two men banged out a script that bore little resemblance to the book, but incorporated various incendiary news stories from prewar Japan. “On a not very original plot, we strung ten or twelve incidents calculated to increase the flow of patriotic juices,” Dmytryk recalled.10 One of them involved a fighting match between an American boxer and a Japanese sumo wrestler, and Dmytryk had just the guy to play the boxer.
The not-very-original plot involved a Tokyo businessman (J. Carrol Naish), whose son Taro (Tom Neal) returns from the United States with an engineering degree from Cornell, falls for a pretty secretary (Margo), and clashes with his father over her. Nearly all the Japanese characters were played by American actors in eye makeup; Neal is particularly unconvincing, bounding down a ship’s gangplank to announce in pure Americanese, “Gee, Dad, it’s good to see you!” Later Taro serves with the Imperial Army in an occupied province of North China, where he hardens himself against atrocity. Confronted by an American reporter (Gloria Holden) in his office, he watches from a window as soldiers throw a child into the air and — Dmytryk implies with a jump cut — catch it on a bayonet. “They’re not my men,” Taro replies. “It’s not my responsibility.”
Billed fourth in the credits, Ryan played Lefty O’Doyle, a bushy-headed American baseball coach in Tokyo, and of the few incidents or observations from Young’s book that found their way into the movie, many involved him. When Taro shows up at a game with his sweetheart, O’Doyle points out the flag display interrupting the game on the field. “Can you beat it?” he asks them. “Telling them that baseball isn’t just baseball anymore? They mustn’t come here to enjoy it just as a sport. They must come here to enjoy it as a military exercise.” Another scene, lifted directly from the book, takes place during a late-night poker game at a geisha house where O’Doyle, who’s had a few drinks too many, loses his temper over a mewling cat and fires his pistol into the darkness, scaring it away. Almost immediately a trio of police appear at the door to grill and browbeat him and his companions about the fired gun and the “arreged cat.”
The big fight scene, which began shooting one Saturday afternoon in mid-May and continued the following Monday, would wind up the movie’s oddest and best-remembered moment. O’Doyle is called upon to defend the honor of an American engineering executive who has clashed with Taro; defending Taro’s honor is a towering sumo wrestler, played — in eye makeup — by Austrian-American wrestling champ Mike Mazurki.* At thirty-six, Mazurki stood an inch taller than Ryan and was built like a brick wall. The ensuing fight is less a match than a melee, O’Doyle throwing roundhouse punches as the wrestler kicks, chops, and grapples with him. In the end the boxer triumphs, yet even this wacky contest has a sharp edge: for dishonoring Japan, the wrestler is later executed.
Ryan triumphs as the American boxer pitted against Japanese sumo wrestler Mike Mazurki in RKO’s propaganda item Behind the Rising Sun (1943). When Ryan joined the Marine Corps, his reputation from the picture preceded him. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
THREE DAYS BEFORE MIXING IT UP with