The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones
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The not-very-original plot involved a Tokyo businessman (J. Carrol Naish), whose son Taro (Tom Neal) returns from the United States with an engineering degree from Cornell, falls for a pretty secretary (Margo), and clashes with his father over her. Nearly all the Japanese characters were played by American actors in eye makeup; Neal is particularly unconvincing, bounding down a ship’s gangplank to announce in pure Americanese, “Gee, Dad, it’s good to see you!” Later Taro serves with the Imperial Army in an occupied province of North China, where he hardens himself against atrocity. Confronted by an American reporter (Gloria Holden) in his office, he watches from a window as soldiers throw a child into the air and — Dmytryk implies with a jump cut — catch it on a bayonet. “They’re not my men,” Taro replies. “It’s not my responsibility.”
Billed fourth in the credits, Ryan played Lefty O’Doyle, a bushy-headed American baseball coach in Tokyo, and of the few incidents or observations from Young’s book that found their way into the movie, many involved him. When Taro shows up at a game with his sweetheart, O’Doyle points out the flag display interrupting the game on the field. “Can you beat it?” he asks them. “Telling them that baseball isn’t just baseball anymore? They mustn’t come here to enjoy it just as a sport. They must come here to enjoy it as a military exercise.” Another scene, lifted directly from the book, takes place during a late-night poker game at a geisha house where O’Doyle, who’s had a few drinks too many, loses his temper over a mewling cat and fires his pistol into the darkness, scaring it away. Almost immediately a trio of police appear at the door to grill and browbeat him and his companions about the fired gun and the “arreged cat.”
The big fight scene, which began shooting one Saturday afternoon in mid-May and continued the following Monday, would wind up the movie’s oddest and best-remembered moment. O’Doyle is called upon to defend the honor of an American engineering executive who has clashed with Taro; defending Taro’s honor is a towering sumo wrestler, played — in eye makeup — by Austrian-American wrestling champ Mike Mazurki.* At thirty-six, Mazurki stood an inch taller than Ryan and was built like a brick wall. The ensuing fight is less a match than a melee, O’Doyle throwing roundhouse punches as the wrestler kicks, chops, and grapples with him. In the end the boxer triumphs, yet even this wacky contest has a sharp edge: for dishonoring Japan, the wrestler is later executed.
Ryan triumphs as the American boxer pitted against Japanese sumo wrestler Mike Mazurki in RKO’s propaganda item Behind the Rising Sun (1943). When Ryan joined the Marine Corps, his reputation from the picture preceded him. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
THREE DAYS BEFORE MIXING IT UP with Mazurki, Ryan was inducted into the US Army. His draft notice finally had arrived, and RKO had arranged for a deferment so he could finish Behind the Rising Sun and The Iron Major, which were shooting simultaneously. The latter film was RKO’s attempt to score with Pat O’Brien playing another legendary college football coach — in this case Frank Cavanaugh, whose long career was interrupted only by his meritorious service in France. O’Brien had lobbied for Ryan to play Timothy Donovan, a football hero under Cavanaugh who later became a priest and served alongside him as an army chaplain. Ryan ages unpersuasively from his early twenties to his sixties, with the usual graying temples, and brings the story to a close with a mawkish prayer promising his late friend Cavanaugh that the fight for freedom continues: “We thank you, Cav, and we salute you. God rest your gallant soul.”
Another deferment was granted so Ryan could appear in the low-budget Gangway for Tomorrow, an inspirational tale for the home front about five random folks riding in a carpool to their jobs at a defense plant. As they travel, flashbacks reveal stories from their past; Margo had a pretty good one, playing a French cabaret singer and resistance member who escapes from the Nazis, but Ryan’s was a hokey number about an auto racer who wipes out in the Indianapolis 500 and has to stay home while his two buddies join the Army Air Corps. Originally titled “An American Story,” the picture wore its Office of War Information credentials on its sleeve: in the final moments the workers arrive at the plant, lock arms, and head through the gates to the strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
By summer Bombardier had opened to tremendous box office, and preview screenings of The Sky’s the Limit and Behind the Rising Sun had brought Ryan overwhelmingly positive response cards from patrons. David Hempstead, producer of The Sky’s the Limit, was about to start an A picture with Ginger Rogers called Tender Comrade, and he urged her to consider Ryan for the male lead. Written by the talented Dalton Trumbo, Tender Comrade told the story of four women working in a Los Angeles airplane factory who decide to rent a house together; interspersed with this were flashbacks focusing on Rogers and her man, who’s preparing to go to war. For an unknown actor this would be quite an assignment — seventeen solitary love scenes with one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Rogers had caught a preview of The Sky’s the Limit at the invitation of her old dance partner Fred Astaire; she thought Ryan was too tall and too mean looking, but she agreed to let him read for the part. When Ryan showed up to audition, he found about a hundred other actors waiting. Yet as he and Rogers talked and played scenes together, she slipped Hempstead a note: I think this is the guy. Later, when Hempstead offered Ryan the job, he gave him the slip of paper, which Ryan kept to the end of his life.
Tender Comrade would be Eddie Dmytryk’s first A picture, and he spent a full month, from mid-August to mid-September, directing Ryan’s love scenes with Rogers. The first of them neatly demonstrated Ryan’s skill at expressing character through action: Jo (Rogers), alone one night in her studio apartment, hears a knock at her door and is overjoyed to discover it’s her husband, Chris (Ryan), home on furlough; as he steps into the room, he swings his overnight bag into the air and sends it sailing across the room onto her bed. Ryan plays straight man to Rogers in the forced comic scenes detailing their early relationship, but he comes into his own as the couple begin wrestling with the fact that he wants to enlist. “I’ve never felt so at-home in a role in my life,” Ryan told Photoplay. “Y’know, a lot of these scenes are retakes of things that have happened between Jessica and myself.”11
Ryan and Pat O’Brien in Marine Raiders. O’Brien mentored the younger actor at RKO, but they wound up on opposite sides when the House Un-American Activities Committee came to Hollywood. Franklin Jarlett Collection
Trumbo was one of Hollywood’s more politically outspoken writers — he had participated in the founding of the Screen Writers Guild, the movie industry’s bitterest labor battle of the mid-1930s — and with Tender Comrade he added a provocative subtext to the standard women’s picture. Jo (Rogers) can barely contain her heartache after Chris ships out; but while he’s gone, she comes up with the idea of pooling her rent money with three fellow riveters. They agree to a majority vote on all matters, and Jo proposes that they share their resources further: “Now the four of us here have two cars, two sets of tires wearing out. We could sell one car and use the other on a share-and-share alike basis.” Rogers, a determined anticommunist, had balked at Trumbo’s original line: “Share and share alike — that’s American.”
Ryan was scheduled