3 Movies | February 24th
With his rugged looks and hardened demeanor, Robert Ryan found particular success throughout his career in film noir, war movies and westerns. His palpable sensitivity, and ability to project deep, anguished emotions, consistently lent his performances gripping complexity—especially when he was supplied with a first-rate script and director.
That was certainly the case with each of the three superb westerns showcased in this tribute. The Naked Spur (1953) was Ryan’s seventh western (if one includes an early uncredited bit role) and the first film he made after RKO altered his contract to mandate just one RKO film a year; otherwise, he was now free to work elsewhere. Producer Dore Schary, who had cast Ryan years earlier in Crossfire (1947) and was now the president of MGM, enticed Ryan to take a juicy role in The Naked Spur, supporting James Stewart and Janet Leigh. It would wind up as one of Ryan’s favorite films of his entire career.
Stewart plays Howard Kemp, a Civil War veteran who returns home to find that he has lost his land. To get his property back, he becomes a bounty hunter and enters the Colorado territory in pursuit of wily, murderous and philosophizing outlaw Ben Vandergroat (Ryan), who is accompanied by the young, beautiful Lina Patch (Janet Leigh). Rounding out the five-person cast are Millard Mitchell as a grizzled prospector and Ralph Meeker as a dishonorably discharged cavalry officer.
As the group travels across mountainous terrain, Vandergroat attempts to break down loyalties and drive wedges between almost every combination of characters, so that he can create a window for escape. (“Money splits better two ways than three,” he suggests to the prospector at one point.) The constantly shifting alliances and blurry moral lines make The Naked Spur one of the most intense of the psychological westerns then in vogue. The lines blur satisfyingly between good and bad: Ryan brings great charisma, style and humor to Vandergroat, making him a highly likable villain, while Stewart brings obsession, hatred and singlemindedness to his role as Howard Kemp, making him a morally questionable hero.
The Naked Spur was the third of five westerns, and one of eight films overall, made by Stewart in collaboration with director Anthony Mann. (Stewart made more movies with Mann than with any other director.) The film was important to Stewart’s continuing development and maturity as an actor. In the Mann westerns, he explored the dark side of his persona—obsession, violence, moral ambiguity—as never before. After the westerns, Stewart would take those disturbing emotional currents to their ultimate level, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
Filmed in Technicolor in the ruggedly scenic San Juan Mountains near Durango, Colorado, The Naked Spur is a stunning example of Mann’s ability to tell a story with pictures. Few directors were as talented at using the landscape for emotional and psychological impact on the audience. It’s not just man vs. man, it’s man vs. nature, and Mann makes us feel how nature can be as ruthless and unforgiving as it is beautiful.
That dynamic plays an even greater role in Day of the Outlaw (1959), where mother nature winds up as the chief antagonist in a story brimming with villains. Ryan plays a rancher who lives on the outskirts of a tiny Wyoming town and is angry that his cattle drives are being impeded by a neighbor’s new barbed-wire fence. He also is bitter over a failed romantic relationship with the neighbor’s wife (Tina Louise, appearing with Ryan for a second time after God’s Little Acre [1958]). With Ryan’s rage reaching a boiling point and the entire community on edge, a gang of ruthless outlaws led by Burl Ives suddenly arrives and takes the town hostage. Now Ryan, an experienced man of the west and former gunslinger, becomes everyone’s best hope of staying alive. Ryan’s intense performance is gripping for its layers of frightening anger mixed with sympathetic loss and loneliness.
Day of the Outlaw is driven by tension from the first scene to the last, with director Andre De Toth putting across the feeling that many characters could snap and explode into violence at any moment. When there are bursts of violence, they are consistently shocking. De Toth later recounted what attracted him to this story: “Is it worse being the jailer instead of the prisoner? Is it worse being incarcerated by white snow in white silence, or by the blankness of black silence? With that frame of mind, I wanted to explore the bizarre situation of a group of outlaws on a getaway, terrorizing a small western village, and then, by a quirk of nature, becoming equally the prisoners of a white silence in the middle of nowhere.”
That “white silence” refers to the incredible amount of snow that increasingly fills the frame. Set in the dead of winter and shot in black-and-white, Day of the Outlaw is one of the starkest and most beautiful “snowy” westerns ever made. Knowing how to survive in the cold landscape becomes a key dividing line between the characters who will succeed and those who will not. In the film’s extraordinary, drawn-out ending, the knee-deep snow seems to have the last word on all the conflicts. It also had the upper hand on the real-life Robert Ryan, who caught pneumonia and was sidelined for a week.
The production filmed near Bend, Oregon in November and December 1958. The town was completely constructed for the movie several months in advance so that the buildings would become naturally weathered by rain and snow. But when De Toth learned that the workers had neglected to follow his compass headings for the layouts of the streets and the houses—which he had carefully selected in order to see untouched snow in the background of certain camera angles and to take advantage of the limited sun from certain directions—he had them rebuild from scratch, using a special blend of paint to make the structures looked instantly aged. Producers Sidney Harmon and Philip Yordan were alarmed by this expense, but De Toth said that Ryan fully supported his position. “Shooting it as it was built,” De Toth reasoned, “would’ve added additional weeks to the shooting.”
If the ratcheting up of violence from The Naked Spur to Day of the Outlaw was significant, the jump to The Wild Bunch (1969) was a game-changer. Sam Peckinpah’s shocking and bloody (for the time) revisionist western was groundbreaking not only for the amount of intense violence it incorporated but for the way it studied and dissected it down to the smallest detail. In its review, the Los Angeles Times called the film “the most graphically violent western ever made and one of the most violent movies of any kind.” Drawn-out, slow-motion deaths with bullets ripping through bodies were essentially new, unsettling and cinematically exciting. (Bonnie and Clyde [1967], with its own slow-motion deaths, had set the stage for Peckinpah to go even further here.) To create the opening and closing violent set pieces, Peckinpah used up to six cameras running at different speeds while choreographing hundreds of extras, thousands of gunshots and innumerable squibs, or pouches of fake blood hidden on actors and designed to explode at specific moments.
But there is more to The Wild Bunch than violence. The seminal “end of the west” western, the movie deconstructs and blows up many of the tropes and attitudes that comprised the “traditional” Hollywood westerns of previous decades. It is set during the Mexican Revolution, with World War One on the near horizon, and centers on a gang of aged outlaws led by Pike Bishop (William Holden) who are confronted by changing times—as well as by Pike’s former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is now leading a posse in pursuit of the bunch. Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O’Brien, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin round out the tough supporting cast.
To Peckinpah, the outlaws, while ruthless killers and thieves, are nobler than the bounty hunters chasing them. They live by a moral code. As Bishop tells his gang, “When you side with a man, you stay with him!” As was so often the case, Robert Ryan plays an outsider, tormented by guilt and loss, but also hardened and resilient. His mournful take on the character—which channels a mournful attitude toward the old western myth itself—will stick with you.
