The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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could finish Behind the Rising Sun and The Iron Major, which were shooting simultaneously. The latter film was RKO’s attempt to score with Pat O’Brien playing another legendary college football coach — in this case Frank Cavanaugh, whose long career was interrupted only by his meritorious service in France. O’Brien had lobbied for Ryan to play Timothy Donovan, a football hero under Cavanaugh who later became a priest and served alongside him as an army chaplain. Ryan ages unpersuasively from his early twenties to his sixties, with the usual graying temples, and brings the story to a close with a mawkish prayer promising his late friend Cavanaugh that the fight for freedom continues: “We thank you, Cav, and we salute you. God rest your gallant soul.”
Another deferment was granted so Ryan could appear in the low-budget Gangway for Tomorrow, an inspirational tale for the home front about five random folks riding in a carpool to their jobs at a defense plant. As they travel, flashbacks reveal stories from their past; Margo had a pretty good one, playing a French cabaret singer and resistance member who escapes from the Nazis, but Ryan’s was a hokey number about an auto racer who wipes out in the Indianapolis 500 and has to stay home while his two buddies join the Army Air Corps. Originally titled “An American Story,” the picture wore its Office of War Information credentials on its sleeve: in the final moments the workers arrive at the plant, lock arms, and head through the gates to the strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
By summer Bombardier had opened to tremendous box office, and preview screenings of The Sky’s the Limit and Behind the Rising Sun had brought Ryan overwhelmingly positive response cards from patrons. David Hempstead, producer of The Sky’s the Limit, was about to start an A picture with Ginger Rogers called Tender Comrade, and he urged her to consider Ryan for the male lead. Written by the talented Dalton Trumbo, Tender Comrade told the story of four women working in a Los Angeles airplane factory who decide to rent a house together; interspersed with this were flashbacks focusing on Rogers and her man, who’s preparing to go to war. For an unknown actor this would be quite an assignment — seventeen solitary love scenes with one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Rogers had caught a preview of The Sky’s the Limit at the invitation of her old dance partner Fred Astaire; she thought Ryan was too tall and too mean looking, but she agreed to let him read for the part. When Ryan showed up to audition, he found about a hundred other actors waiting. Yet as he and Rogers talked and played scenes together, she slipped Hempstead a note: I think this is the guy. Later, when Hempstead offered Ryan the job, he gave him the slip of paper, which Ryan kept to the end of his life.
Tender Comrade would be Eddie Dmytryk’s first A picture, and he spent a full month, from mid-August to mid-September, directing Ryan’s love scenes with Rogers. The first of them neatly demonstrated Ryan’s skill at expressing character through action: Jo (Rogers), alone one night in her studio apartment, hears a knock at her door and is overjoyed to discover it’s her husband, Chris (Ryan), home on furlough; as he steps into the room, he swings his overnight bag into the air and sends it sailing across the room onto her bed. Ryan plays straight man to Rogers in the forced comic scenes detailing their early relationship, but he comes into his own as the couple begin wrestling with the fact that he wants to enlist. “I’ve never felt so at-home in a role in my life,” Ryan told Photoplay. “Y’know, a lot of these scenes are retakes of things that have happened between Jessica and myself.”11
Ryan and Pat O’Brien in Marine Raiders. O’Brien mentored the younger actor at RKO, but they wound up on opposite sides when the House Un-American Activities Committee came to Hollywood. Franklin Jarlett Collection
Trumbo was one of Hollywood’s more politically outspoken writers — he had participated in the founding of the Screen Writers Guild, the movie industry’s bitterest labor battle of the mid-1930s — and with Tender Comrade he added a provocative subtext to the standard women’s picture. Jo (Rogers) can barely contain her heartache after Chris ships out; but while he’s gone, she comes up with the idea of pooling her rent money with three fellow riveters. They agree to a majority vote on all matters, and Jo proposes that they share their resources further: “Now the four of us here have two cars, two sets of tires wearing out. We could sell one car and use the other on a share-and-share alike basis.” Rogers, a determined anticommunist, had balked at Trumbo’s original line: “Share and share alike — that’s American.”
Ryan was scheduled to report for duty on October 20, but as the date approached, RKO offered him yet another script. Pat O’Brien wanted Ryan to costar with him in a war picture called Marine Raiders, about the Marines’ new amphibious commando units. The script was lousy, with tedious love scenes and chest-thumping heroics. In one jungle scene Ryan’s impetuous captain finds a fellow marine who has been killed and desecrated by the Japanese; enraged, he goes charging into the enemy’s position spraying machine gun fire.
To play something like this at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, where Marine Raiders would be shot as less fortunate men actually shipped out for the Pacific, must have filled Ryan with the sort of manly shame he had felt as a male model. Stars the stature of James Stewart and Robert Montgomery had enlisted and taken combat assignments; even Pat O’Brien put himself in harm’s way entertaining troops in northern Africa and Southeast Asia. As part of the deal struck by RKO, Ryan asked to be discharged from the army so that he could enlist in the Marines, which would mean a greater chance of seeing combat. The Marines, in turn, would give him a deferment until January 1, 1944, so that he could make the picture.
Marine Raiders didn’t wrap until late January, however, and by that time the Marines had granted Ryan a second deferment through February 15. Shortly before the picture was completed, the commanding general at Camp Elliott in San Diego wrote to Marine Corps Commandant Alexander Vandergrift to request a third deferment through April 15, so that Ryan could appear opposite Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny, a biopic of the Australian nurse who had developed a radical new treatment for polio. Vandergrift would have none of this, and Ryan was ordered to report for duty on the fifteenth as previously agreed. RKO was offering him a “duration contract,” which meant that he would be welcomed back to the studio upon his discharge from the service. Behind the Rising Sun had been released in August and, partly on the strength of Ryan’s much-talked-about fight scene, turned a jaw-dropping $1.5 million profit.
In a movie magazine piece that appeared under her byline, Jessica recalled “the dreary building in downtown Los Angeles” where she dropped Robert off for his Marine Corps induction. “It was that ungodly hour of the morning, at which time all good men seem to have to go to the aid of their country.”12 They said their good-byes, she drove away weeping, and Ryan finally joined the war.
*Though still working his way up in bit roles, Mazurki would play heavies in movies and TV for another fifty years, most memorably in Murder, My Sweet (1944).
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You Know the Kind
If Ryan had any hope of remaining unnoticed in the ranks, they were diminished when he learned from a fellow recruit at the LA induction center that a letter from the Marine Corps — which Ryan had never gotten — listed toiletries and other items they should bring with them. A private on duty offered to pick up some things for him, and Ryan got off the bus in San Diego carrying his belongings in a brown paper bag. A Marine Corps photographer was there to meet him, snapping pictures as he turned in his travel orders, got fitted for fatigues, sat for a regulation army haircut, went through a classification interview, and picked up his gear from the quartermaster’s depot. After that he was on his own and wondering how he would be received. When he had been at the base earlier, shooting Marine Raiders, an officer had told him that movie boys were liable to get roughed up in the Corps, but Ryan didn’t have any trouble. He mentioned this to a bunkmate; the man replied, “Most of these guys saw you bat that Jap around in Behind the Rising Sun.”1
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