The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (367 page)

John Houseman called him “a disturbing mixture of anger and tenderness who had reached stardom by playing mostly brutal, neurotic roles that were at complete variance with his true nature.” That’s a strange remark, hard to read, for isn’t it the mix of anger and tenderness that comprises the neurosis of Ryan’s character in, say,
On Dangerous Ground
(51, Nicholas Ray, and produced by Houseman)?

He’s a Los Angeles cop in
On Dangerous Ground
, a man fit for the era of Chief Daryl Gates. The character, Jim Wilson, lives alone in a drab apartment. On the sideboard we see a crucifix and a statuette, a prize for boxing. Nick Ray was not one to ignore the real lives of his actors, and these two objects are very pointed: Ryan had attended a Jesuit high school before going on to Dartmouth where he was a champion boxer.

Wilson is not a corrupt cop so much as someone warped by the job. Ryan’s taut, unsmiling face, his slightly naggy voice, one degree whinier than you expect for such a figure, his stooped, almost ashamed tallness, and those harsh eyes are the clues to Wilson’s imminent crackup—and no one was as attentive to such confused images of strength and weakness as Ray. Wilson nearly attacks the wrong man as he goes after a suspect. When a pretty girl in a drugstore smiles at him, he flinches. “What’s with you?” she asks, and when he tells her, “Nothing’s with me,” it is the spirit of nihilism speaking. Wilson looks the perfect cop, but a partner says he’s tougher to work with all the time. And you notice Ryan’s way of standing, his coat like a shroud, his body tipped forward at the neck—the tall man always having to look down, but as if some burden weighed on his spine.

Pursuing a lead, Wilson goes to question Myrna, a noir slut. She shows him a bruise on her arm, and she says, “You’ll make me talk, you’ll squeeze it out of me with those big, strong arms, won’t you?” In a moment, Ray has built a suffocating sadomasochistic atmosphere, which is intensified when the image fades out.

Wilson is a sadist who feels self-pity about his weakness. A few scenes later, he prepares to beat up a suspect, with fearful lamentation: “I always make you punks talk! Why do you make me do it?” These are scenes that many lead actors today would not play; they’d know they should never let themselves look so far from good.

In the late forties and early fifties, Ryan had cornered such roles. Just think of Montgomery in
Crossfire
(47, Edward Dmytryk), a cop turned soldier, a stickler for order who wants to call people “sir,” yet a bully searching for weakness. There’s a low-angle shot of Ryan’s Monty near the end of
Crossfire
, as he judges the proposal meant to set him up, where his jaw fidgets in doubt and worry and then sets in the jut of superiority. You can call that great acting. But you can’t separate the filmmaking from the cold clay of Ryan’s face.

Crossfire
and
On Dangerous Ground
may have the most ambiguous glimpses of this Ryan. But the same man is there, shell-shocked, in Renoir’s
The Woman on the Beach
(47); magnificently menacing, a justified scourge and terror, as the limping victim of Van Heflin’s cowardice in
Act of Violence
(49)—the best film Fred Zinnemann ever made; so brilliantly adept at paranoia and aggrandizement as Smith Ohlrig in
Caught
(49)—whether or not he was being Howard Hughes, whether or not the sardonic Hughes coached him—that you want more of Ohlrig in that film, no matter that you and Max Ophüls will fall in love with James Mason’s gentle Dr. Quinada; loathsome and cynical as Earl, the seducer, in
Clash By Night
(52, Fritz Lang), a jerk who thinks he’s dying of loneliness; and flat-out terrifying as the handyman who comes to Ida Lupino’s house in
Beware, My Lovely
(52, Harry Horner).

For the actor, these opportunities were mixed blessings. Only two of the films mentioned—
On Dangerous Ground
and
Clash By Night
—had love stories: in the latter, Ryan is seen as unwholesome and sick; while
On Dangerous Ground
places love against a snowy landscape, a metaphor for Wilson’s breakdown and for the Ida Lupino character’s blindness. So the only real love story Ryan had was one in which he had a strange psychic shelter: the woman could not see him. There was more at RKO—Ray’s
Born to Be Bad
(50); the kindly psychiatrist in
The Boy with Green Hair
(48, Joseph Losey), and maybe his most celebrated early role, the forlorn boxer in Robert Wise’s
The Set-Up
(49). He is good in that film, yet oddly remote, too, as if he knew he was a noble stereotype in a dead end. Playing a simply good, tragic victim, Ryan seemed a touch shallow—did he need to make Stoker Thompson more vicious, closer to a raging bull?

Ryan was a contemporary of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and William Holden, and only six months younger than Errol Flynn. That pinpoints his failure to establish himself as a star or a romantic lead. No matter his uniqueness as an actor, Ryan did not easily convey normal emotional neediness on screen. Yet he was rarely cast as mere villains, and it is likely that he would have been disturbed to find himself so confined.

Even in
Bad Day at Black Rock
(54, John Sturges), with Borgnine and Marvin as unequivocal henchmen, Ryan’s boss of the Nevada whistlestop is more complex than the film has time for.
Black Rock
, despite color and Scope, is a kind of RKO remake. Elsewhere in the fifties, Ryan tried to be a chuckling scoundrel in
The Naked Spur
(53, Anthony Mann); he did wonders as the rich man left to die in the desert of
Inferno
(53, Roy Baker)—that is a modest venture, handicapped by 3D, but Ryan was in his element alone, struggling with the elements and talking to himself—in which the isolation is revealing; he was the leader of the gang in Fuller’s
House of Bamboo
(55), a mastermind of rare, nearly homosexual leanings for the men in his outfit; he could not really stand up to the warmth and easy energy of Gable in
The Tall Men
(55, Raoul Walsh). Maybe the best film Ryan ever made was Anthony Mann’s
Men in War
(57), yet as the hapless, unwarlike officer, he had not a great deal to do except oppose the uninhibited commitment of Aldo Ray’s sergeant. Still, by the time of
Men in War
, Ryan looked his forty-eight; the young hardness had gone from his face, to be replaced by fatigue and sadness.

Ryan’s darkness had at least two more moments, etched blacker by age. In Robert Wise’s
Odds Against Tomorrow
(59), he was a rancid, self-pitying racist again—Montgomery ten years older. Now he had a scene with Gloria Grahame, the clincher in the uncovering of Ryan’s sexy unsuitability for romance. There are not many meetings that so quickly catch the force of violence in sexual association. In so many films, Ryan scorned or sneered at women—that’s how he treats his wife, Myrna Loy, in
Lonelyhearts
(58, Vincent J. Donehue). Was that the character or the actor’s own misogyny?

Billy Budd
(62) is a parable for which Peter Ustinov chose Ryan to play Claggart, the master-at-arms so affronted by the grace and fineness of Budd that he drives Budd to murder him. There is a terrifying instant in which Billy’s good nature nearly softens Claggart, and Ryan turns on him—“You would charm me, too. Get away!”—in which Melville’s story gains a note of homosexual dread.
Billy Budd
may need to be sung; is it too elemental for photography? But Ryan’s Claggart is indelible. Who else could have played the part without insinuating some sinister charm or humor?

He was past his peak, with smaller parts in big pictures—like John the Baptist in
King of Kings
(61, Ray), and the deserter in
Custer of the West
(68, Robert Siodmak). His role as the martinet in
The Dirty Dozen
was even a humiliation: a fusspot, not one of the guys, the object of ridicule. He stood up to the mockery honorably; again, some actors of his rank would have declined the part. Then he was the loneliest figure in
The Wild Bunch
(69, Sam Peckinpah), Deke Thornton, the betrayer, the man who hates his new associates as he tries to destroy his old friends. Ryan was perfect, yet it seemed cruel to cast him.

From the outset, Ryan plays a watcher who is doomed to be a survivor. Was it Peckinpah’s respect for the actor, or did the director discover a sadness that helped enrich the role of Thornton? In the last part of the movie, Ryan’s character loses his hat. With brindle hair and melancholy mustache Thornton seems as dry and gray as chaparral.

He was not well. He had his own cancer, as well as the one that killed his wife. But he was resolute and skeptical enough, in 1973, to lend himself to
Executive Action
(David Miller), the first film about the Kennedy assassination. He plays the powerful, conservative leader of the plot, and he brought a pitiless, sepulchral grandeur to Dalton Trumbo’s best lines on death and insignificance.

Finally, for the American Film Theatre and John Frankenheimer, Ryan played Larry Slade in Eugene O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh
(73). He looked haggard and never more human: it was an uncanny farewell and the whole movie deserves revival. Ryan was dead before it played. In
Newsweek
, Paul Zimmerman wrote, “It is Robert Ryan, his face a wreck of smashed dreams, who provides the tragic dimension that makes this
Iceman
a moving, unforgettable experience. Ryan played his part in the shadow of his own death. He died this year, leaving behind a lifetime of roles too small for his talent.”

Mark Rydell
, b. New York, 1934
1967:
The Fox
. 1969:
The Reivers
. 1971:
The Cowboys
. 1973:
Cinderella Liberty
. 1976:
Harry and Walter Go to New York
. 1979:
The Rose
. 1981:
On Golden Pond
. 1984:
The River
. 1991:
For the Boys
. 1994:
Intersection
. 1996:
Crime of the Century
(TV). 2001:
James Dean
(TV). 2006:
Even Money
.

It is not really any more incongruous that the man who played Marty Augustine should have made
On Golden Pond
, than that Augustine should introduce the Coke bottle to his girlfriend’s face in
The Long Goodbye
(73, Robert Altman). After all, Augustine’s raison d’être is to be unpredictable—to be an actor, to be amazing. Rydell is so good in the small part (it
is
one of the most frightening scenes in film) that one wishes he had acted more. Instead, he has put together a career in the spirit of the hare in a cunning game of hare-and-hounds—leaving a trail but refusing to be identified.

He has made two more films for television in recent years:
Crime of the Century
, about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby; and a James Dean biopic that revolved around the remarkable performance by James Franco. In the same film, Rydell gave a good performance as Jack Warner—just as he had played Meyer Lansky in
Havana
(90, Sydney Pollack)—but tame stuff next to Augustine. He was good again as the agent in
Hollywood Ending
(02, Woody Allen).

Winona Ryder
(Winona Laura Horowitz), b. Winona, Minnesota, 1971
In 1994, pressed for space and surrounded by young actresses, I backed a hunch that Winona Ryder would outlast Nicole Kidman and some others. Well, Ryder holds her place, but Kidman has clearly outstripped her in both daring and accomplishment. And Ryder is now close to forty and the survivor of troubles.

She was trained at A.C.T. in San Francisco, and she lived some of her childhood in a northern California commune (she was very active in the search for the kidnapped Polly Klaas in Petaluma in 1993). She made her debut in
Lucas
(86, David Seltzer), and then appeared in
Square Dance
(87, Daniel Petrie);
1969
(88, Ernest Thompson);
Beetlejuice
(88, Tim Burton); as the teen wife to Jerry Lee Lewis in
Great Balls of Fire
(89, Jim McBride)—a touching, adroit performance; wonderful in
Heathers
(89, Michael Lehmann), a very testing, comic role;
Edward Scissorhands
(90, Burton);
Mermaids
(90, Richard Benjamin);
Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
(90, Jim Abraham); and
Night on Earth
(91, Jim Jarmusch).

Exhaustion meant she had to drop out of the role of the daughter in
The Godfather, Part III
. But she maintained her promise with two very challenging roles in flawed films: passionate in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(92, Francis Ford Coppola); sweetly cunning in
The Age of Innocence
(93, Martin Scorsese); and in
Reality Bites
(94, Ben Stiller). She may have lacked some of the technique required for period.

She was an ideal family member in
Little Women
(94, Gillian Armstrong);
How to Make an American Quilt
(95, Jocelyn Moorhouse);
Boys
(96, Stacy Cochran);
Looking for Richard
(96, Al Pacino); overshadowed by Sigourney Weaver in
Alien Resurrection
(97, Jean-Pierre Jeunet);
Celebrity
(98, Woody Allen); out-diva’d by Angelina Jolie in
Girl, Interrupted
(99, James Mangold);
Autumn in New York
(00, Joan Chen);
Lost Souls
(00, Janusz Kaminski);
Zoolander
(01, Stiller); doing the Stanwyck role in
Mr. Deeds
(02, Steven Brill);
Simone
(02, Andrew Niccol).

In December 2001, she was arrested for shoplifting from a Beverly Hills store to the extent of over $5,000. The trial led to a three-year probation sentence, and reports of depression. She was away for several years and her return involved marginal projects:
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
(04, Asia Argento);
A Scanner Darkly
(06, Richard Linklater);
The Ten
(07, David Wain); in a short,
Welcome
(07, Kirsten Dunst);
The Informers
(09, Gregor Jordan).