gang) were even more dramatic than his. The men liked and respected each other, but their upbringings set them apart; Mitchum had grown up poor and dropped out of high school, and his politics were more conservative. Ryan might have held forth on the dangers of fascism, but according to Dmytryk, when a reporter on the set asked Mitchum why he was making the picture, the actor replied, “Because I hate cops.”27 In fact, he was annoyed at having been lured back from a Florida vacation by Scott with the promise of a great part, only to learn it was no such thing (Scott confessed that they needed him for his box office clout). Mitchum must have realized at some point that Ryan was walking away with the picture.
The only real complication to emerge during production was how to get rid of Monty after the detective has tricked him into exposing himself. Screenwriter John Paxton wanted to add a scene in which Monty goes to trial, but Schary scotched this idea. Schary later claimed that the picture’s original ending had MPs cornering Monty and shooting him down “like a rat,” which might have increased the audience’s sympathy for him.28 Instead Monty breaks away from the cops and runs out into the street; from a second-floor window, the detective orders him to halt and then calmly dispatches him with a single bullet in the back. Paxton was appalled when he saw this, but he had no say in the matter. Schary also changed the release title to Crossfire, which had no relevance to the story but sounded great.
Principal photography wrapped on Saturday, March 29, after only twenty-four shooting days. The project had come together so quickly that there was no time for the sort of front-office meddling that might have watered down the story. A few weeks later Ryan attended a rough-cut screening with Scott, Dmytryk, and a handful of RKO executives. None of the other cast members was there, but he was eager to get a look at his performance. Watching the story unfold, Ryan knew he had nailed the character. About fifteen minutes into the picture, the detective interrogates Monty, asking him about the victim. “I’ve seen a lot of guys like him,” Monty explains, conspiratorially. “Guys that played it safe during the war? Scrounged around keepin’ themselves in civvies? Got swell apartments, swell dames? You know the kind…. Some of them are named Samuels, some of them got funnier names.” Later, as Monty smacks Floyd around, his rage boils over: “I don’t like Jews! And I don’t like nobody who likes Jews!”
After the screening was over and the lights came up, the room was silent. Finally, one of the RKO suits spoke up: “It’s a brave thing you’ve done, Ryan. You’re gambling with your career, of course.” Another piped up: “Really courageous.”29 Taken aback, Ryan walked out of the screening room, crossed the lot, picked up his car, and headed home. Given what he had seen in the Marines, talk of bravery embarrassed him. But the executives’ remarks were the first reaction he had received outside of the cast and crew, and their subtext was obvious: if the public turned against Ryan, RKO would simply cut him loose.
*The film would ultimately be released as Till the End of Time (1946), starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Edward Dmytryk.
*A definitive genesis of the movie can be found in Janet Bergstrom’s “Oneiric Cinema: The Woman on the Beach,” Film History 11 (1)(1999): 114–125.
five
We Will Succeed, You Will Not
Jessica Ryan hated guns: she had no intention of letting her lovely Tim play with toy guns, learning to fantasize about combat and killing. Robert, a capable marksman in the Marines, didn’t feel that strongly, but he had no fondness for firearms either. “He went hunting once with his father and shot something,” his son Cheyney remembered. “He said he’d never do it again.”1
Regardless, the RKO publicists liked nothing better than to send Ryan on a hunting expedition. The previous November he had driven up to Oregon with actor Lex Barker to be photographed hunting geese, and that spring Jessica swallowed her pride and accompanied him on a jaunt out to the desert with a photographer for Photoplay and actress Jane Greer, who had just starred in Out of the Past for RKO. Jessica posed at the wheel of a jeep and stood by as Robert held up a dead jackrabbit for Greer’s inspection; the resulting story claimed that she and Greer each had bagged a rabbit as well.2 This was followed by another trip to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley to hunt pheasants for a four-page pictorial in Screen Guide; one photo showed the couple heading out from their car, Jessica scowling as she carries a rifle at her waist, the barrel pointed to her side.3
After Crossfire, Ryan strapped on his six-guns again for Return of the Bad Men, another B western with Randolph Scott and “Gabby” Hayes. He couldn’t wait to finish with this tired oater and move on to Berlin Express, an espionage thriller scheduled to begin shooting overseas in July. Dore Schary had been mightily impressed by the documentary authenticity of Roberto Rossellini’s Italian postwar drama Open City (1945), and he wanted Berlin Express to be the first drama filmed inside Germany since the fall of the Third Reich. (Director Billy Wilder would be arriving at the same time to shoot A Foreign Affair for Paramount.) Berlin Express centered on an international group of passengers riding a US military train from Paris to Berlin, and like Crossfire, it would mix genre entertainment with liberal politics, stressing the imperative of world peace.
Ryan would be gone for more than two months, flying from New York to London and then traveling with cast and crew to Paris, Frankfurt, and Berlin. He was excited about the picture and eager to get a firsthand look at the ravages of war. General George Marshall had just delivered a commencement address at Harvard in which he stressed the danger of allowing the European economy to deteriorate any further; he called for a massive economic aid plan to rehabilitate the victors and the vanquished alike. Berlin Express would carry Ryan right into the heart of this debate. He finished Return of the Bad Men in mid-July 1947, and yet another photographer arrived, this time at the house in Silverlake, to shoot him packing his bags and bidding Jessica and Tim farewell on his way to the LA airport.4 Jessica was afraid of airplanes and begged him to take a train east, but Ryan never passed up a chance to fly.
The producer, thirty-seven-year-old Bert Granet, was shouldering quite an operation. Military permits were required at each point of travel through occupied Germany, which meant that twenty-seven cast and crew members had to be screened by the FBI* and then cleared by the army and State Department.5 Cinematic resources in Europe were so scarce that nearly all camera and lighting equipment had to be brought over, along with one hundred thousand feet of film that required cool, safe storage in nations where any kind of storage space was prized. Because local film laboratories were so dodgy, all footage had to be shipped back to the United States for processing, so none of the completed scenes could be viewed until the expedition returned to Hollywood.6 Lodging and automobiles were in short supply (there was only one camera truck available in all of Paris); even simple items such as nails, lumber, and rope had to be bought on the black market.
A native Parisian, director Jacques Tourneur had come to Hollywood in the 1930s and distinguished himself at RKO with subtle, low-budget chillers such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). He had just completed his masterpiece, the wistful film noir Out of the Past. Unfortunately, Berlin Express didn’t have much of a script; inspired by a Life magazine story, it would be a rather awkward marriage of journalism and Hitchcock-style suspense, its harsh scenes of a ravaged Germany punctuating an increasingly far-fetched tale in which a German diplomat critical to the reunification effort is kidnapped by right-wing terrorists. The four heroes pulling together to foil this plot were obvious stand-ins for the occupying powers: Ryan is an American agricultural expert, Roman Toporow a Russian military officer, Robert Coote a British veteran of Dunkirk, and actress Merle Oberon the French secretary of the kidnapped politician.
