The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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whose color, or religion, occupation or political belief is distasteful to some new paperhanger-turned-Strong Man.”23
Once he had been cast, Ryan dove into the part. He studied back issues of Social Justice, a frequently anti-Semitic magazine edited by the Roman Catholic priest and populist demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Launched in 1936, it had serialized the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be a Jewish plan for global conquest, and published one article by Coughlin that borrowed passages from a speech by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, about the threat posed by communism, atheism, and the Jewish people. Ryan also paid a visit to Jean Renoir, who was still wrestling with The Woman on the Beach, and asked him about the fascist sympathizers he had known in France. Renoir spent the afternoon telling him stories, and Ryan came away convinced that the key to Montgomery was a deep-seated sense of inferiority.
If Schary wanted to test the limits of his authority at RKO, he succeeded; in early February, Rathvon sent him a memo expressing his doubts that Cradle of Fear would do anything to reduce racial intolerance. “Prejudiced Gentiles are not going to identify themselves with Monty and so feel ashamed of their prejudices,” wrote Rathvon, a smart and cultured man whom Schary respected. “Rather they may be resentful because they feel we have distorted the problem by using such an extreme example of race hatred.”24
On another front, Darryl F. Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century Fox, informed Schary that Fox had a picture about anti-Semitism on the boards, Gentleman’s Agreement, and suggested he cease and desist. “We exchanged a few notes,” Schary recalled, “then a phone call during which I was compelled to tell him he had not discovered anti-Semitism and that it would take far more than two pictures to eradicate it.”25 Determined to beat Gentleman’s Agreement out of the box, Schary stepped up production on Cradle of Fear; principal photography would begin Monday, March 3.
Scott and Dmytryk went over the script carefully, working out every shot in advance to save time on the set. Once the cameras began rolling, Dmytryk fell into a pattern of shooting for about six-and-a-half hours each day, then using the last couple of hours to rehearse the next day’s scenes; this gave the crew time to set up the first shot and enabled the players to come in the next morning ready to go. The sets looked cheap, so Dmytryk placed his key lighting low in the frame to throw lots of shadows; for a scene in which Monty bullies his accomplice, Floyd, the only light source was a table lamp, revealing some of the uglier lines in Ryan’s face. Dmytryk also chose his lenses to make Monty look increasingly crazed: at first his close-ups were shot with a fifty-millimeter lens, but this was reduced to forty, thirty-five, and ultimately twenty-five-millimeter. “When the 25mm lens was used, Ryan’s face was also greased with cocoa butter,” Dmytryk recalled. “The shiny skin, with every pore delineated, gave him a truly menacing appearance.”26
The real menace, though, lay in Ryan’s deft underplaying. Critics would stress the intelligence he brought to his heavy roles, but in the case of Monty, an ignorant blowhard, the defining characteristic was an animal cunning. In his first two speaking scenes, Monty is interrogated by Detective Finlay, and in both instances he hastens to defend his pal Mitchell, whose wallet has been found at the crime scene, even as he directs suspicion toward him and away from himself. In the second interrogation, with Sergeant Keeley looking on, Monty grows angry at Finlay’s questioning and barks at him, promising, “You won’t pin anything on Mitch, not in a hundred years!” Catching himself, he drops his gaze, glances back and forth at the two men, and apologizes, pleading, “It’s just that I’m worried sick about Mitch.”
This was Ryan’s first picture with Mitchum, whose roughneck adventures during the Depression (boxing, riding the rails, doing time on a chain gang) were even more dramatic than his. The men liked and respected each other, but their upbringings set them apart; Mitchum had grown up poor and dropped out of high school, and his politics were more conservative. Ryan might have held forth on the dangers of fascism, but according to Dmytryk, when a reporter on the set asked Mitchum why he was making the picture, the actor replied, “Because I hate cops.”27 In fact, he was annoyed at having been lured back from a Florida vacation by Scott with the promise of a great part, only to learn it was no such thing (Scott confessed that they needed him for his box office clout). Mitchum must have realized at some point that Ryan was walking away with the picture.
The only real complication to emerge during production was how to get rid of Monty after the detective has tricked him into exposing himself. Screenwriter John Paxton wanted to add a scene in which Monty goes to trial, but Schary scotched this idea. Schary later claimed that the picture’s original ending had MPs cornering Monty and shooting him down “like a rat,” which might have increased the audience’s sympathy for him.28 Instead Monty breaks away from the cops and runs out into the street; from a second-floor window, the detective orders him to halt and then calmly dispatches him with a single bullet in the back. Paxton was appalled when he saw this, but he had no say in the matter. Schary also changed the release title to Crossfire, which had no relevance to the story but sounded great.
Principal photography wrapped on Saturday, March 29, after only twenty-four shooting days. The project had come together so quickly that there was no time for the sort of front-office meddling that might have watered down the story. A few weeks later Ryan attended a rough-cut screening with Scott, Dmytryk, and a handful of RKO executives. None of the other cast members was there, but he was eager to get a look at his performance. Watching the story unfold, Ryan knew he had nailed the character. About fifteen minutes into the picture, the detective interrogates Monty, asking him about the victim. “I’ve seen a lot of guys like him,” Monty explains, conspiratorially. “Guys that played it safe during the war? Scrounged around keepin’ themselves in civvies? Got swell apartments, swell dames? You know the kind…. Some of them are named Samuels, some of them got funnier names.” Later, as Monty smacks Floyd around, his rage boils over: “I don’t like Jews! And I don’t like nobody who likes Jews!”
After the screening was over and the lights came up, the room was silent. Finally, one of the RKO suits spoke up: “It’s a brave thing you’ve done, Ryan. You’re gambling with your career, of course.” Another piped up: “Really courageous.”29 Taken aback, Ryan walked out of the screening room, crossed the lot, picked up his car, and headed home. Given what he had seen in the Marines, talk of bravery embarrassed him. But the executives’ remarks were the first reaction he had received outside of the cast and crew, and their subtext was obvious: if the public turned against Ryan, RKO would simply cut him loose.
*The film would ultimately be released as Till the End of Time (1946), starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Edward Dmytryk.
*A definitive genesis of the movie can be found in Janet Bergstrom’s “Oneiric Cinema: The Woman on the Beach,” Film History 11 (1)(1999): 114–125.
five
We Will Succeed, You Will Not
Jessica Ryan hated guns: she had no intention of letting her lovely Tim play with toy guns, learning to fantasize about combat and killing. Robert, a capable marksman in the Marines, didn’t feel that strongly, but he had no fondness for firearms either. “He went hunting once with his father and shot something,” his son Cheyney remembered. “He said he’d never do it again.”1
Regardless, the RKO publicists liked nothing better than to send Ryan on a hunting expedition. The previous November he had driven up to Oregon with actor Lex Barker to be photographed hunting geese, and that spring Jessica swallowed her pride and accompanied him on a jaunt out to the desert with a photographer for Photoplay and actress Jane Greer, who had just starred in Out of the Past for RKO. Jessica posed at the wheel of a jeep and stood by as Robert held up a dead jackrabbit for Greer’s inspection; the resulting story claimed that she and Greer each had bagged a rabbit as well.2 This was followed by another trip to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley to hunt pheasants