RKO with the Dick Powell mysteries Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), had read The Brick Foxhole and was struck by the sequence in which soldiers beat a homosexual man to death. This would never get past the Production Code Administration, but what if the victim were a Jew instead? Scott hired screenwriter John Paxton to take a crack at the novel; their project, Cradle of Fear, would be the first Hollywood picture to deal openly with anti-Semitism in the United States.
The script had gone nowhere with Charles Koerner in charge, and market research indicated that only 8 percent of moviegoers would go for such a picture (compared to 70 percent for Sister Kenny, the Rosalind Russell drama RKO was still trying to get made three years after the Marines had refused to let Ryan appear in it). Schary was a different story — he read Cradle of Fear one night and pulled the trigger on it the next day, naming Scott as producer and Eddie Dmytryk as director. The budget was around $500,000, but half of that would go for the stars Schary felt would be needed to sell such a controversial picture to the public. Scott and Dmytryk would have to get Cradle of Fear in the can with what remained, shooting for about twenty days on existing sets. Paxton would remember his excitement after Schary gave them the go-ahead, as “a little parade went off around the lot (the writer just tagged along) looking for sets that could be borrowed or adapted, or stolen. An unusual procedure with front office blessing.”20
“What’s-a-matter, Jewboy? You ’fraid we’ll drink up all your stinkin’ wonderful liquor?” Montgomery (Ryan) and Floyd (Steve Brodie) close in on their victim, Samuels (Sam Levene), in Crossfire. Franklin Jarlett Collection
Ryan got along well with Schary, and when he learned the picture was in preproduction, he begged the new chief to let him play Montgomery. Schary must have been surprised: this wasn’t the sort of role that would lead to more love scenes with Ginger Rogers. Monty was repellent — ingratiating one moment, bullying the next, especially when he and his drunken pals are boozing it up with Samuels, who has met them at a bar and invited them back to his place. “Sammy, let me tell you something,” Monty slurs. “Not many civilians will take a soldier into their house like this for a quiet talk. Well, let me tell you something. A guy that’s afraid to take a soldier into his house, he stinks. And I mean, he stinks!” Things only get worse from there: when Samuels tries to get rid of them, Monty snaps, “What’s-a-matter, Jewboy? You ’fraid we’ll drink up all your stinkin’ wonderful liquor?” The word had never been uttered in a Hollywood picture.
The role might well blow up in Ryan’s face. But he loved the script, valued the idea behind the picture, and knew he was the man to play Monty. “I thought such a part would make an actor — not break him,” he later wrote.21 He lobbied Dmytryk — who, by this time, had directed him in his first picture (Golden Gloves), his biggest hit (Behind the Rising Sun), and his first romance (Tender Comrade). Schary and Dmytryk acceded, billing Ryan third behind Robert Young as Finlay, the pipe-smoking police detective who investigates the crime, and Robert Mitchum as Keeley, a jaded sergeant who tries to save the confused young Private Mitchell from being framed by Monty. Schary also brought in some first-rate supporting players: Sam Levene as Samuels; sultry, blond Gloria Grahame (It’s a Wonderful Life) as a hooker who briefly adopts the private during his nocturnal wanderings; and, in the picture’s second-creepiest role, craggy Paul Kelly as a man who hangs around her apartment and keeps changing his story about their relationship.
When the picture came out, Ryan would publish two stories under his own byline, in publications no less divergent than Movieland and the Daily Worker, that explained his rationale for taking the role. “Convictions are nice things to have,” he wrote in the Worker, “but when close friends tell you that you’re jeopardizing your career by taking a role you believe in — well, it makes you stop and think.” The picture was unlikely to convert any hardened anti-Semites, he conceded. “No one picture, no one book, no one speech could accomplish that. It’s the cumulative effect that counts.”22 In Movieland he argued that the picture’s subject was broader than anti-Semitism: “We all stand to lose if fascism comes. Not just the Jews. The Irish, the Catholics — and I’m both of those — the Negroes, labor, the foreign born, everyone is done for whose color, or religion, occupation or political belief is distasteful to some new paperhanger-turned-Strong Man.”23
Once he had been cast, Ryan dove into the part. He studied back issues of Social Justice, a frequently anti-Semitic magazine edited by the Roman Catholic priest and populist demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Launched in 1936, it had serialized the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be a Jewish plan for global conquest, and published one article by Coughlin that borrowed passages from a speech by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, about the threat posed by communism, atheism, and the Jewish people. Ryan also paid a visit to Jean Renoir, who was still wrestling with The Woman on the Beach, and asked him about the fascist sympathizers he had known in France. Renoir spent the afternoon telling him stories, and Ryan came away convinced that the key to Montgomery was a deep-seated sense of inferiority.
If Schary wanted to test the limits of his authority at RKO, he succeeded; in early February, Rathvon sent him a memo expressing his doubts that Cradle of Fear would do anything to reduce racial intolerance. “Prejudiced Gentiles are not going to identify themselves with Monty and so feel ashamed of their prejudices,” wrote Rathvon, a smart and cultured man whom Schary respected. “Rather they may be resentful because they feel we have distorted the problem by using such an extreme example of race hatred.”24
On another front, Darryl F. Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century Fox, informed Schary that Fox had a picture about anti-Semitism on the boards, Gentleman’s Agreement, and suggested he cease and desist. “We exchanged a few notes,” Schary recalled, “then a phone call during which I was compelled to tell him he had not discovered anti-Semitism and that it would take far more than two pictures to eradicate it.”25 Determined to beat Gentleman’s Agreement out of the box, Schary stepped up production on Cradle of Fear; principal photography would begin Monday, March 3.
Scott and Dmytryk went over the script carefully, working out every shot in advance to save time on the set. Once the cameras began rolling, Dmytryk fell into a pattern of shooting for about six-and-a-half hours each day, then using the last couple of hours to rehearse the next day’s scenes; this gave the crew time to set up the first shot and enabled the players to come in the next morning ready to go. The sets looked cheap, so Dmytryk placed his key lighting low in the frame to throw lots of shadows; for a scene in which Monty bullies his accomplice, Floyd, the only light source was a table lamp, revealing some of the uglier lines in Ryan’s face. Dmytryk also chose his lenses to make Monty look increasingly crazed: at first his close-ups were shot with a fifty-millimeter lens, but this was reduced to forty, thirty-five, and ultimately twenty-five-millimeter. “When the 25mm lens was used, Ryan’s face was also greased with cocoa butter,” Dmytryk recalled. “The shiny skin, with every pore delineated, gave him a truly menacing appearance.”26
The real menace, though, lay in Ryan’s deft underplaying. Critics would stress the intelligence he brought to his heavy roles, but in the case of Monty, an ignorant blowhard, the defining characteristic was an animal cunning. In his first two speaking scenes, Monty is interrogated by Detective Finlay, and in both instances he hastens to defend his pal Mitchell, whose wallet has been found at the crime scene, even as he directs suspicion toward him and away from himself. In the second interrogation, with Sergeant Keeley looking on, Monty grows angry at Finlay’s questioning and barks at him, promising, “You won’t pin anything on Mitch, not in a hundred years!” Catching himself, he drops his gaze, glances back and forth at the two men, and apologizes, pleading, “It’s just that I’m worried sick about Mitch.”
This was Ryan’s first picture with Mitchum, whose roughneck
