wages packed the movie palaces in search of solace, inspiration, or just relief from their worries. The studios cooperated eagerly with the Office of War Information to rally moviegoers to the war effort, and of the seven features Ryan would make over the next sixteen months, every one addressed the war in some way.
Even as he cranked out these patriotic pictures, Ryan waited for his own draft notice to arrive. After Pearl Harbor the draft age had been widened to include all men from twenty to forty-four years old; he was thirty-two, but Congress and public opinion favored drafting single men over husbands and fathers. In February 1942 the director of selective service, Lewis B. Hershey, had ruled that movies were “an activity essential in certain instances to the national health, and in other instances to war production” and had granted deferments for essential “actors, directors, writers, producers, camera men, sound engineers and other technicians.”5 The outcry in Congress and around the country was immediate, and within forty-eight hours the board of the Screen Actors Guild had voted to oppose the order, arguing that “actors and everyone else in the motion picture industry should be subject to the same rules for the draft as the rest of the country.”6 Hershey soon reversed the policy, but California draft boards were generally cooperative toward the big studios.
Bombardier had been in development for two years already and took as its inspiration not a play or novel but a piece of military hardware, the top secret Norden bombsight, which used a mechanical computer to calculate precision bombing at high altitudes. Pat O’Brien starred as an air force major preaching the virtues of the new contraption, and Randolph Scott was his friendly antagonist, a captain who favors traditional dive-bombing attacks. Ryan was cast as a jaunty young cadet at the new aerial bombardment training school (one scene has him reciting for O’Brien a pledge similar to that taken by real-life bombardiers, that he will “protect the secrecy of the American bombsight, if need be with my life itself,” as strings swell and O’Brien looks on in misty-eyed sanctification).
Most of the movie was shot on Kirtland Army Air Base in New Mexico, whose bombardier training program was the model for the one in the movie. RKO vetted the script with the Office of War Information in exchange for access to planes and other resources; one fascinating scene in Bombardier shows Ryan’s cadet practicing atop a bomb trainer, a twelve-foot frame on wheels that simulates bombing trajectories as it rolls toward a small, motorized metal box representing the target. In return the army got a wholesome, rousing picture that reasoned away any qualms one might have had about raining death from above. One cadet is torn by letters from his mother, who belongs to a peace organization and fears for his soul. “Peace isn’t as cheap a bargain, Paul, as the price those people put on it,” his commander explains. “Those people lock themselves up in a dream world. You see, there are millions of other mothers that are looking to you.”
Ryan put in five weeks on the shoot, though the cast was large and he didn’t get much time in the foreground. At one point he bursts into a funeral service for a young trainee to announce in close-up, “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!” During the climax, as Scott and Ryan fly a nighttime scouting mission over Japan in advance of the squadron, their plane is hit; instead of bailing out with the others, Ryan stays behind to dismantle the bombsight with a pistol (actual military protocol) and dies in a giant fireball when the plane crashes. The absurd ending has Scott, captured behind enemy lines, escaping from the Japanese to drive a flaming truck around the munitions plant for the benefit of O’Brien’s squadron above. With its fiery payoff, Bombardier validated Charles Koerner’s new production strategy when it opened the following spring: budgeted at $907,000, it grossed $2.1 million.
More so than the bit parts at Paramount, Ryan’s roles at RKO gave him a chance to learn the craft of screen acting, which favored subtlety of expression and demanded incredible mental focus. “On the stage you can coast along,” he explained to a journalist years later.
You don’t have to concentrate so intensely on small details as you do in a movie.… Let’s say in this scene, you’re talking to me and I’m supposed to be taking a sip from this cup while I listen to you…. on the stage, it doesn’t make any difference when the cup goes back into the saucer because nobody can hear it. But in a movie scene, while I’m listening to your lines and thinking of the line I have to say next, I must also remember to time the return of the cup to the saucer so that it won’t get there until after you finish the last word from your speech, and not a split-second before you finish. If the cup hits the saucer while you’re still talking, the clack it makes on the soundtrack will clash with your last words and ruin the scene. A half-hour later we have to do the same scene over again for a close-up or from a different camera angle and it has to be done exactly the same as we did it before.7
But even more than acting experience, Ryan took away from Bombardier a long, warm friendship with Pat O’Brien, who liked the young man’s professionalism and soon began lobbying to have him in his pictures. They shared some striking similarities, including a birthday (O’Brien was exactly ten years older), a Catholic upbringing in the Midwest (he had attended Marquette Academy and Marquette University in Milwaukee), and a love of Chicago (he had met his wife, Eloise, while appearing in a show at the Selwyn Theater in 1927). O’Brien had been summoned from the New York stage to Hollywood by Howard Hughes, who cast him as Hildy Johnson in the movie version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page (1931). O’Brien soon moved to Warner Bros. and became a professional Irishman, costarring no fewer than eight times with his pal James Cagney, before memorably embodying the title Norwegian in Knute Rockne, All American (1940).
That hit allowed him to end a long, frustrating relationship with Warners and eventually sign with RKO. “I loved that RKO lot, as did most who worked there,” O’Brien later wrote. “It exuded more friendliness and warm camaraderie than any studio in which I ever worked.”8 In addition to Cagney, O’Brien was tight with Frank McHugh, a pudgy comic actor who had been with them at Warners, and Spencer Tracy, an old classmate at Marquette Academy. Ryan got to meet them all, though he was never social enough to be considered part of this “Irish mafia.” When Ryan asked O’Brien if his natural reticence would hurt him in the movie business, O’Brien pointed to Cagney, who was equally private but remained one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. “That was all I needed to know,” Ryan recalled. “I became a Cagney.”9
Ryan’s next assignment brought him into close quarters with another big talent. The Sky’s the Limit, which began shooting in February 1943, starred Fred Astaire as a heroic Flying Tiger who goes AWOL during a publicity tour of the United States and falls for news photographer Joan Leslie; chasing after him are his two pilot buddies, played by Ryan and Richard Davies. Ryan’s character, Reggie Felton, is a snide comedian: riding in a parade, he prepares to poke Davies in the eyes Three Stooges–style but then remembers where he is and flashes the crowd a “V for Victory” sign. He spends most of his screen time needling Astaire, and in one memorable scene, set in an army canteen, blackmails him into doing a “swami dance” atop their table. Choreographed by Astaire, the dance took several days to film, during which Ryan sat in a chair looking up at the great performer. Ryan even scored some waltz lessons from Astaire when the scene called for him to share a dance with Leslie.
Behind the Rising Sun, which began shooting in late April, was the darkest and most interesting of Ryan’s wartime releases, an anti-Japanese propaganda picture of some journalistic substance but even more racial hysteria. Its source material was a 1941 book by James R. Young, an American journalist who had spent thirteen years working for the influential Japan Advertiser before his reporting from occupied China, published in a variety of Japanese papers, got him arrested in Tokyo and held by police for sixty-one days. Behind the Rising Sun offered a variety of insights into Japanese culture and a ringing indictment of the Imperial Army’s misadventure on the continent. Young’s sympathy and affection for the people of Japan was evident throughout, yet Doubleday Doran had packaged the book with a cover drawing of a slit-eyed, hideously grinning man, a fan in one hand and a revolver in the other.
After
