The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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the same title, a favorite of Ryan’s at Dartmouth.
His first assignment that year was RKO’s antiwar parable The Boy with Green Hair, adapted from a short story by Betsy Beaton. Filmed in Technicolor, it starred eleven-year-old Dean Stockwell as a schoolboy who has been passed from relative to relative while his parents are overseas.* Eventually he lands in a bucolic small town with a kindly old Irish-American gent (Pat O’Brien) and begins to make a life for himself, but then he learns the truth about his parents — they were killed in London during the blitz — and the trauma turns his hair green overnight.
The project had originated with Adrian Scott, himself the adoptive father of a traumatized British war orphan; but after Scott was fired by RKO, Schary handed The Boy with Green Hair over to producer Stephen Ames and firsttime movie director Joseph Losey. A senior at Dartmouth when Ryan was a freshman, Losey had studied with Bertolt Brecht in Germany and in 1935 had traveled to the Soviet Union, where he staged Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty in Moscow. His latest theatrical project had been an acclaimed Broadway production of Brecht’s Galileo, performed in English for the first time and starring Charles Laughton.
Fresh from the rubble and hungry children of Frankfurt and Berlin, Ryan couldn’t have been more sympathetic to The Boy with Green Hair. His second-billed part consisted of only one extended scene with Stockwell, which took two days to shoot; even so, it would remain one of the picture’s best-liked sequences. At a police station one night, cops fire questions at Peter, the brooding and now bald-headed boy. Ryan plays Dr. Evans, a laid-back child psychologist who arrives with a brown-bag dinner and asks the cops to leave them alone. Children who grew up around the actor would remember his uncondescending manner toward them, and he incorporates it here to fine effect. Evans wordlessly changes the lighting in the room, taking an overhead spot off them, and asks Peter to move to a chair so he can have the bench for his dinner. “Chocolate malted milk,” he notes, frowning into the cup. “I’m sure I asked for strawberry.” They both know it’s a game, but Peter is starving; he takes the malted and digs into a hamburger, and his responses to the doctor’s questions trigger a series of flashbacks.
The Boy with Green Hair can be cloying and moralistic, but there are genuine moments of fear and anger as well. Peter, having learned of his parents’ death, is stocking shelves at a local grocery and overhears three women debating the Cold War. Losey follows his face, shooting him through cabinets and shelves as the women’s voices hover off-screen. “People say another war means the end of the world,” says one. “War will come, want it or not,” her friend replies. “The only question is when.” A third adds: “Just in time to get more youngsters like Peter.” This so frightens the boy that he drops a bottle of milk, which smashes on the floor. A low-angle shot shows the three ladies gathered above, grinning in amusement.
The central scene is a powerfully weird and stylized dream sequence in which Peter awakes in a forest clearing and encounters the very war orphans he and his classmates have been studying on posters in school. One girl has lost a leg; another holds an Asian infant. The oldest orphan explains to Peter that his green hair marks him as a messenger: “You must tell all the people — the Russians, Americans, Chinese, British, French, all the people all over the world — that there must not ever be another war.”
The Boy with Green Hair crystallized a public sentiment for world government that had been growing in the United States since the end of the war. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature and a founder of the United World Federalists, had framed the issue before any other journalist. His celebrated editorial “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” written the night after Hiroshima was destroyed, argued that the event marked “the violent death of one stage in mankind’s history and the beginning of another.” Now that man had the power to incinerate whole cities, he would have to evolve past the need for war, which would mean eradicating global inequality and establishing world government. To this end, Cousins wrote, modern man “will have to recognize the flat truth that the greatest obsolescence of all in the Atomic Age is national sovereignty.”47 By 1946 a Gallup poll found that 52 percent of Americans favored the liquidation of the US military in favor of an international peacekeeping force. Ryan was one of them, and he would get to know Cousins later that year when he joined the Federalists, a rapidly growing organization that advocated “world peace through world law.”
The week before Ryan shot his scene for The Boy with Green Hair, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the Oscar nominations for 1947. Crossfire was honored in five categories: best picture, best director, best screenplay, best supporting actress (Grahame), and best supporting actor (Ryan). But as more than one industry observer noted, this good fortune put RKO in a ticklish position, given that it had fired the picture’s producer and director. There was another twist as well: in every category except Ryan’s, Crossfire was competing with Gentleman’s Agreement, the Fox production Schary had beaten to the box office by four-and-a-half months. Released in December and carefully marketed with Crossfire as its model, Gentleman’s Agreement was still doing big business across the country and had topped the nominations race with a total of eight.
Jessica and Robert attend the 1948 Academy Awards ceremony. “We don’t ask actors home,” she would later write. “We haven’t, Robert or I, much to say to them privately.” Franklin Jarlett Collection
Though RKO had beaten Fox to the punch, Gentleman’s Agreement had effectively stolen Crossfire’s thunder as an exposé of anti-Semitism, to Ryan’s great irritation.48 Adapted from a novel by Laura Z. Hobson, it starred Gregory Peck as a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to write a magazine story. In some respects Gentleman’s Agreement was bolder than Crossfire; it confronted prejudice head-on instead of sneaking it into a murder mystery, and in contrast to the other film’s psychopathology, it revealed more casual and insidious forms of bigotry. It was also the kind of picture Academy voters could feel good about honoring: this was no crummy little crime story shot on borrowed sets, but a big, long prestige drama set in the penthouses and boardrooms of Manhattan, produced by the great Darryl F. Zanuck.
The other nominees for best supporting actor were Charles Bickford as the starchy butler in RKO’s The Farmer’s Daughter, Thomas Gomez as the warmhearted carny in Universal’s Ride the Pink Horse, Richard Widmark as the giggling killer in Fox’s Kiss of Death, and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle in Fox’s Miracle on 34th Street. Ryan relished the attention, though his chances of winning seemed fairly slim: he would be dividing the psycho vote with Widmark, and really, who was going to choose a Jew-hating murderer over Santa Claus?
Cheyney Ryan arrived on March 10, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, and ten days later Jessica had recovered sufficiently to accompany her husband to the Shrine Auditorium. As most had predicted, Gwenn won best supporting actor. Crossfire was shut out by Gentleman’s Agreement, which took best picture, best director (Elia Kazan), and best supporting actress (Celeste Holm). According to Dmytryk, the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals had conducted a vigorous campaign against Crossfire.49 The picture had made the year-end lists of all the major critics and collected honors ranging from an Edgar Allan Poe Award (for best mystery film) to a Cannes Film Festival award (for best social film). But in Hollywood, Crossfire was still a double-edged sword. A few months earlier, when MPPA president Eric Johnston had praised the picture in a speech, the legal counsel for the Hollywood Ten had puckishly invited him to serve as a character witness for Scott and Dmytryk. Johnston declined.
*In response to my Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI reported that its central records system contained no file for Ryan.
*Cinematographers still refer to this device as “the obie.”