August 7 |10 Movies
Robert Ryan appeared in some 90 films and TV projects during his 33-year career. But before his death at 63 of lung cancer in 1973, Ryan admitted he only liked four or five of them. Top on his list was the haunting 1949 boxing film The Set-Up, which is one of 14 Ryan films airing during his Summer Under the Stars celebration on August 7.
For those who only know Ryan for his terrifying villain roles such as his Oscar-nominated turn as a bigoted Marine who murders a Jewish war veteran in 1947’s Crossfire, his low-key moving performance as an aging boxer, is something of a revelation. But if you look at Ryan’s oeuvre, he portrayed just as many good guys as he played bad ones. “I’ve played a wider range of roles than most people have seen, apparently,” he once noted. “That most people have the impression that I’ve played is heavies and villains leads me to believe they never saw most of my pictures”
J.R Jones wrote in a 2009 Chicago Reader study on the actor that “On-screen, Robert Ryan was a man with secrets…By the time he died of cancer in 1973 he played everything from romantic leads to western heavies, from Jay Gatsby to John the Baptist. But the persona that lingers is that of a strong, intelligent man guarding some storm of emotion-fear, guilt, helpless rage. Even in broad daylight he seemed cloaked in shadow.”
The Set-Up was considered the greatest, most influential boxing film until Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull was released. And yes, The Set-Up was an inspiration for Scorsese. The Set-Up was adapted by former sportswriter Art Cohn from a poem by Joseph Moncure March.
Set in real-time, the title sequence of finds Ryan’s Stoker Thompson being knocked out. And we next see him in some dirt water town where he’s about to fight a much younger man. His wife (Audrey Totter) wants him to hang up his gloves, but Stoker still has a pipe dream that he can get his chance at the title. “I’m just one punch away,” he tells his wife. Unbeknowst to him, his sleazy manager (George Tobias) has sold him out to a local hood for $150 to lose his bout. But he refuses to tell Stoker because the boxer has lost so many bouts, how he could win?
Ryan is a knockout in the film which reveals the sordid side of the sport, where the crowd cries for the boxers to kill their opponents as they bet on who will fall first. Stoker is a boxer, but he’s different than most pugilists. He wears a suit and tie to the arena while carrying his boxing gear neatly in a case. He loves his wife and is heartbroken when she tells him she’s not going to the bout because she can’t bear watching him struggle. He’s kind and affable to his fellow boxers. And when he learns during the match that he has been set-up, Stoker refuses to throw the match, knowing full well what will happen to him if he wins.
The handsome, 6’4” tall actor was also a boxer at Dartmouth College, so he brings his ring experience to the in-your-face boxing sequences. Former boxer Johnny Indrisano choreographed the boxing sequences which were shot with three cameras including one hand-held.
The Set-Up won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival. One for cinematography as well as the FIPRESCI Prize for director Robert Wise.
Unfortunately, this dark drama was overshadowed in 1949 by Champion, directed by Mark Robson, which made a star out of Kirk Douglas, who received his first Oscar nomination as a ruthless boxer.
Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 Act of Violence, which also airs on August 7, examines the effects of World War II on veterans long before PTSD was acknowledged and discussed. (Ryan was a Marine Corps drill instructor from January 1944 to November 1945.)
Ryan’s Joe Parkson is a wounded World War II veteran who doesn’t let his dead leg (the sound design of his dragging leg will make your skin crawl) stop him from killing his former friend Frank Enley (Van Heflin). Frank is a war hero who runs a successful construction business, is married to a pretty and much younger wife (Janet Leigh) and a father. But his well-ordered life comes crashing down when Joe arrives in town hell bent on killing him.
Joe’s dogged determination to murder Frank is chilling thanks to Ryan’s wired performance. Of course, Joe is initially the antagonist of the story, while Frank is the protagonist. But then the tables are turned as we find out the truth regarding Frank’s “heroism.” While imprisoned at a German POW camp, he informed the Nazis that Joe and a group of fellow prisons were about to escape in a tunnel they had dug. When the Nazis shot the escapees, a wounded Joe saved himself by pretending he was dead. And what did Frank get for betraying his fellow prisoners? He believed the Nazis when they said they wouldn’t go hard on the escapees and received not 30 pieces of silver, but a meal with decent food.
The New York Times described Ryan’s performance as “infernally taut.” But he also imbues Joe with a great deal of pathos and eventually, sympathy. Zinnemann was nominated for the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Though the Chicago-born and bred Ryan was an intensely private person, one thing is certain -he was nothing like most of the characters he played on the big screen, especially not the heavies. His daughter Lisa told the Chicago Reader in 2009 that he was “incredibly shy, although-I guess this is what actors can do-he could just turn on when the situation called for that. But basically he was very quiet, introverted guy. You wonder, looking at some of the parts he played in movies, what it was in him that was able to access those really dark, scary characters.”
His second son Cheyney admitted he wasn’t “an easy guy to be close to. And also, my father drank. My mother drank too-they both drank a lot. So, I think there was a fair amount of moodiness around sometimes.”
Eldest son Walker (formerly Tim) believed “he had a lot of demons. He certainly talked about his depressions as he got older. And he came from a generation where, if you were a man, you just stuffed all that stuff.”
He was married to writer Jessica Cadwalader in 1939 until her death in 1972. And in 1951, they were among several parents who opened the progressive Oakwood School quite literally in their back yard in North Hollywood.
Ryan was one of the founders of the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, backed the American Civil Liberties Union and worked with the American Friends Service Committee. Despite being politically involved in liberal causes, Ryan wasn’t called before HUAC. “Looking back, I suspect my Irish name, my being a Catholic and ex-Marine sort of softened the blow.”
Ryan, who was well-respected by directors, worked with some of the best including Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch in 1969), John Frankenheimer (The Iceman Cometh in 1973), Jean Renoir (The Woman on the Beach in 1947) and Richard Brooks (The Professionals in 1966).
TCM is featuring two of his best films: Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951) and Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953).
Adapted by A.I. Bezzerides from a Gerald Butler novel, On Dangerous Ground explores the use of dangerous force by police officers. Ryan’s NYPD detective Jim Wilson uncoils like a poisonous python on suspects, whom he describes as “human garbage.” After being unable to heed the warnings of his boss (Ed Begley) to avoid violence, Jim is sent upstate to help with the manhunt for the killer of a young girl. The girl’s frantic father (Ward Bond) is acting like the judge and jury and vows to kill him before he can be arrested. Though Jim feels a kinship to Bond’s vengeful father, he finds himself softening when he meets Mary (Ida Lupino), the blind sister of the killer (director Ray’s nephew Sumner Williams), who begs Jim to find her brother before Ward does.
Ryan captures all the nuances of this complex, contradictory character as we watch him transform from a detective who lets his fists interrogate perps to a man who is not only tamed by love but sees the goodness in people. Ryan credited Ray’s directing style for his performance. “I hate filmmakers who want long discussions with actors over a scene. An actor who doesn’t know what a scene he’s going to play is all about is in the wrong profession. Nick had, I think, great respect for me. Right from the start of our collaboration, he only offered me a very few suggestions.”
Ryan is mean and evil through and through in Mann’s superlative Western The Naked Spur, one of the eight films star Jimmy Stewart made with the filmmaker and the third of five Westerns they collaborated. In this Technicolor psychological sagebrush saga, Stewart plays Howard Kemp, an angry, lonely Civil War vet turned bounty hunter. Ryan plays Ben Vandergroat, the outlaw he’s searching for who is accompanied by the young Lina (Janet Leigh). Vandergroat has no conscious, he's practically feral. He will do anything and hurt anyone including Lina to escape Howard’s clutches.
The most surprising film in the lineup is 1969’s Captain Nemo and the Underwater City. Though definitely a Saturday kiddies’ matinee movie, Ryan imbues Jules Verne’s iconic character with intelligence as well as mystery and malevolence.
According to TCM.com, “it is preferable to view Ryan’s performance less as a fleshing out of Jules Verne’s immortal character than a case study of how the actor’s long and distinguished career informed a fantasy archetype with palpably human emotions.”
The press thought the lauded actor was “slumming” making Captain Nemo. He disagreed. “It’s important to continue working in films to keep your image warm,” he said. “You can have six million dollars but if you insist on turning down bad pictures, people are going to say, ‘Whatever happened to Robert Ryan?’”
