about the picture only grew as he got to know the director. “One of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met,” he would say of Renoir. “Working with him opened my eyes to aspects of character that were subtler than those I was accustomed to.”15 His character was notably darker than anything he had played on-screen, a shell-shocked Coast Guard lieutenant now relegated to patrolling the misty Pacific coast on horseback. In one scene a friend at the base hesitantly informs him that the ship he was serving on has gone down, and the lieutenant is crushed. Not long afterward, on one of his lonely rides, he passes a wrecked ship, where he encounters a beautiful woman gathering firewood (Bennett). She brings him home to meet her husband (Charles Bickford), a famous painter now blind and embittered, and the lieutenant, consumed by lust for the woman, becomes an uneasy companion to the fractious couple.
In fact, Val Lewton had never really been interested in the project, and by the time principal photography commenced in late January 1946, he had been replaced by producer Jack Gross, who let Renoir do pretty much as he pleased. A month into the shoot, Charles Koerner — the head of production who had axed Pare Lorentz and Orson Welles — died suddenly of leukemia, which left Renoir even more unsupervised. He had never made a picture with so much improvisation on the set. “I wanted to try to tell a love story based purely on physical attraction, a story in which emotions played no part,” Renoir said.16 The open adultery of the source novel, None So Blind, already had been scrubbed away by the Production Code Administration, but there was something haunting about the lovers’ wordless attraction playing out right under the blind man’s nose.
Renoir also was intrigued by the story’s sense of solitude, something he felt was increasingly prized amid the chaos of modern life. “Solitude is the richer for the fact that it does not exist,” Renoir wrote. “The void is peopled with ghosts, and they are ghosts from our past. They are very strong, strong enough to shape the present in their image.”17 One scene showed the lieutenant, Scott, in his bed at the base, consumed by a nightmare. In a feverish montage, an Allied ship hits a mine and goes down, the image of a whirlpool pulls the eye in, bodies and ropes drop through the water, and Scott strides across the ocean floor in slow motion, stepping over the skeletons of his dead crewmates, on his way toward a lovely woman in a flowing gown. Before they can kiss, there’s an eruption of flame, an inferno that jolts Scott out of his dream.
Ryan — whose brother, father, and uncles all had preceded him to the grave — knew all about ghosts, and his strong streak of willful self-isolation made him an ideal collaborator for this kind of story. He would marvel at Renoir’s ability to “discover the true personality of the actor” and integrate it into a performance, a skill he would recognize in no other director but Max Reinhardt.18 Renoir found a neurotic quality in Ryan that had never been captured on-screen and would become the key element in his screen persona. Lying in bed, Scott confesses to his commanding officer that the nightmares have become chronic since he was released from the hospital. Ryan’s gaze shifts back and forth between two fixed points — the officer’s face and something awful a million miles away — as the tension gathers in his voice. The doctors have pronounced Scott healed. “But my head!” he exclaims in anguish, gesturing at it as if it were strange to his body.
The picture wrapped in late March, leaving Ryan free to tend to his expect ant wife. On Saturday, April 13, Jessica gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom they named after his grandfather, Timothy, in the Irish tradition. Ryan’s next picture, a mediocre western called Trail Street, didn’t start shooting for three months, so the couple had plenty of time to care for and enjoy their new child and each other. Now that Ryan was back from the military, he worked either six days a week or not at all, loafing around in his mismatched pajamas until noon and working out later in the day. Jessica usually started writing in the morning — her second mystery novel, Exit Harlequin, was scheduled for publication in January 1947 — and worked until mid-afternoon. Determined homebodies, she and Robert relaxed in each other’s company, smoking, drinking, reading, and talking into the night.
Joan Bennett, Jean Renoir, and Ryan rehearsing The Woman on the Beach (1947). “One of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met,” Ryan called Renoir. “Working with him opened my eyes to aspects of character that were subtler than those I was accustomed to.” Franklin Jarlett Collection
Trail Street starred Randolph Scott as western hero Bat Masterson; Ryan got second billing as the villain, and whiskered “Gabby” Hayes dispensed cornpone comedy as Scott’s sidekick. (Four-month-old Tim Ryan made his screen debut as a baby being held by a woman in the frontier town.) Director Ray Enright had spent twenty years in the business without making a notable picture; he was quite a comedown after Jean Renoir. At the same time, Ryan’s collaboration with Renoir was in trouble. Desirable Woman was test screened on August 2 in Santa Barbara, where it was laughed at and jeered by an audience full of students. Renoir would confess later that he was the first to get cold feet, and he offered to reedit the film. Five or six weeks later, he emerged with a version that was shown to two disinterested parties: screenwriter John Huston, who argued that the lieutenant’s war trauma should be eliminated entirely, and director Mark Robson, who argued that it was central to the story. Renoir listened to Robson and moved the lieutenant’s fiery nightmare to the beginning of the picture.*
By late November, when Ryan and Bennett were called in for reshoots, Renoir had lost confidence in his original conception, and the love relationship became more conventional. Several dialogue scenes that explained the characters’ motivations were excised, which gave the action a detached quality. This garbled, seventy-minute cut of the picture, retitled The Woman on the Beach, would flop at the box office eight months later and end Renoir’s association with RKO. By then Renoir had grown close to the Ryans — Jessica adored him and his wife, Dido — and the two couples would keep in touch long after the Renoirs returned to France. “Bob Ryan is a marvelous person,” Renoir would later attest. “Professionally he’s absolutely honest in everything he does.”19 Almost everything — Ryan admired Renoir too deeply ever to tell him he thought The Woman on the Beach was a failure.
THE MOVIE BUSINESS boomed in 1946 as servicemen rejoined their families, which may explain why Peter Rathvon, the new president of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, allowed most of the year to pass before finally choosing forty-one-year-old Dore Schary to replace the late Charles Koerner as head of production. Schary was a comer: born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, he had written plays in New York before arriving in Los Angeles to write for the screen and winning an Oscar for the MGM classic Boys Town (1938). Since then the tall, bespectacled young man had supervised B-movie production for Louis B. Mayer at MGM, and independent producer David O. Selznick had tapped Schary to head his new company Vanguard Pictures. Schary had great story sense, and he knew how to get the most out of a dollar. Selznick was generous enough to let RKO buy out Schary’s contract, and on January 1, 1947, Schary took charge of the studio’s production slate.
Two days later the United States experienced a dramatic political shift when the Eightieth Congress convened, its opening session carried for the first time on broadcast television. President Truman, battered by union struggles as he served out Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth presidential term, had been rebuked at the polls in November, when Republicans picked up fifty-five congressional seats and took control of the House of Representatives. Once the new Congress was sworn in, Republicans wasted no time in mounting a frontal assault on the Roosevelt legacy, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), created in 1938 to investigate subversion against the US government, announced that a top priority would be uncovering communist influence in the motion picture industry.
A liberal Democrat, Schary took little notice of this as he moved into position at RKO. His formula for success involved socially conscious films that could be made on relatively small budgets, and the first script he sent into production was a murder mystery adapted
