for Crossfire. When the Queen Mary docked on Tuesday, September 9, the first thing he did was to call Jessica in Los Angeles. She put Tim on the phone to hear his father’s voice, and she must have informed Ryan, if she hadn’t already, that she was expecting another child.
WHILE RYAN WAS IN EUROPE, Crossfire had exploded. The picture opened in late July at the Rivoli, a 2,092-seat movie palace on Broadway, and broke box office records in its first week. “One of the most startling pictures ever to come out of Hollywood,” wrote the New York Morning Telegraph. “A film to be praised, praised again, and seen by all,” wrote the New York Post. “An important, stirring film,” declared the Daily Mirror. “Robert Ryan gives one of the performances of the year.”17 The picture had transformed his reputation overnight: critics and colleagues who had regarded him as a confident but unspectacular leading man now recognized him as an exciting, first-class character actor. There was talk of an Oscar nomination. “I came back to the sort of reception reserved by the New York press for people who had done something,” he later recalled. “Everybody wanted an interview; photographers were everywhere.”18
Ryan made a rare personal appearance at the Rivoli, where Crossfire was in its eighth week. “It was the first time I had seen the picture with an audience, and I was elated at the reaction,” he said. Afterward, when he was introduced to the crowd and walked onstage, the room suddenly quieted. Monty was the black, unfathomable heart of the picture; moviegoers who reacted to the anti-Semitism in Crossfire inevitably zeroed in on Ryan as the embodiment of all that fear and hatred. “I’m really not that kind of a guy,” he said, bringing down the house.19
By fall Crossfire had gone into general release and was performing well across the country, racking up impressive numbers not only in the more liberal metropolitan centers but in many small towns and in such conservative communities as Memphis, Omaha, and Oklahoma City. The RKO sales force played down the picture’s anti-Semitic angle, stressing the mystery element and Ryan’s costar Robert Mitchum, whose popularity was on the rise. There were pockets of resistance — “We never have had any racial troubles in this town and I don’t want to put anything before the people that might put ideas into their heads,” declared one theater owner — but RKO pursued a sharply effective strategy of establishing the picture in one cluster of towns and then expanding it to the next.20
Given the taboo-smashing nature of the story, some conflict was inevitable. The US Navy found the idea of an American soldier murdering a Jewish civilian so inflammatory that it banned Crossfire, refusing to screen it for troops at bases foreign or domestic. The army allowed it to be shown to soldiers at home but nixed any screenings overseas, arguing it might be seen by foreigners on the bases and reflect poorly on the United States. The Motion Picture Export Association, which cleared movies for the international market, turned down Crossfire, citing the same concerns. And though most leaders of the American Jewish community hailed the picture — in Chicago, the Anti-Defamation League had launched a vigorous campaign encouraging local lodges to sponsor private screenings for civic leaders — some argued that Crossfire might harden anti-Semitic feelings and even provoke bigots to violence.
This opinion emerged most strongly in the American Jewish Committee’s monthly magazine Commentary. Editor Eliot Cohen noted the malign magnetism of Ryan’s hypnotic performance: “You’re drawn to him. He’s big, he catches your eye. His personality overshadows the others. A plain, husky fellow, not much education, visibly troubled, up against a world too smart for him, fighting shrewdly, stupidly, blindly against the ‘others’ who hem him in — before his crime, after his crime. (For the millions near enough like him to identify with him, will Montgomery be the simple bully and villain the producer intended, assuming that was his intention? The chances are just as good that he will be taken as a kind of hero-victim — the movie equivalent of the Hemingway-Faulkner-Farrell male, hounded and struck down by a world he never made.)”21
Ryan was less concerned with anti-Semites or the Jews they hated than with the much larger middle ground of Gentiles who were innocent but ignorant. “What I hope for is that the mass of Americans — those who have never come directly, first-hand, against intolerance — will think about those who daily are exposed to it, and will reflect on their actions to those groups in a new light,” he wrote in the Daily Worker. “Most Americans aren’t intolerant, but neither are they concerned with those who are. Pictures like this will help show how senseless, how ignorant, how detrimental to fundamental American principles … any kind of bigotry is. When people fully realize that, they will stop the careless thinking and the even more careless talk.”22
One thing Ryan had understood better than the friends who had discouraged him from playing Monty: a controversial role can help an actor’s career. Ray Milland had won an Oscar playing a raging alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945). Yet, as Ryan pointed out in yet another first-person piece about Crossfire, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage had never been filmed because no movie star wanted to play a coward.* “The controversial role, like no other, can meet the needs of the actor who feels the void of not achieving professional stature,” he wrote, inadvertently revealing the career frustration that had driven his choice. “It gives one the feeling of accomplishment, of acting with a purpose.”23 When he reflected on the risk taken by Dore Schary, Adrian Scott, Eddie Dmytryk, and John Paxton, who had dreamed up the picture, his own gamble paled in comparison.
Ryan looked forward to more such projects, but the political winds were shifting. That fall Schary was approached by two investigators from the House Un-American Activities Committee — “rather gray-looking gentlemen,” he wrote.24 The committee was moving forward with its hearings into communist infiltration of the movie industry, and they wanted to know if he might have any relevant information about Ryan. Schary pointed out that Ryan was a former marine, a credential he felt spoke for itself. They asked him about Scott and Dmytryk, the producer and director of Crossfire. They requested screenings of Crossfire and The Farmer’s Daughter, a Loretta Young comedy that RKO had released in March, and afterward they declared both pictures to be “pro-Communist.”25
Schary later wrote that he gave the investigators nothing and expressed his lack of regard for the committee. On September 22, Schary, Scott, and Dmytryk all received subpoenas to testify in Washington. Forty other Hollywood professionals were summoned as well, ranging from such right-wingers as Adolphe Menjou, Ayn Rand, Leo McCarey, and Walt Disney to such left-wingers as Charles Chaplin, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, and Bertolt Brecht. The Red-baiting Hollywood Reporter labeled nineteen of the forty-three — including Scott and Dmytryk — as “unfriendly” witnesses on the basis of their previous public statements about the committee. The hearings would convene a month later.
Ryan always would attribute his narrow escape from the blacklist to his war record and his Irish-Catholic heritage (the committee’s equation of communists and Jews was well known). He had just been investigated by the FBI and cleared for travel in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The fact was that Scott and Dmytryk had been Communist Party members, whereas Ryan (for all his willingness to publish in the Worker) was a solid Democrat who could always be counted on to inject a note of ward-heeling realism into the unmoored radicalism of friends and colleagues. During this period, Jessica would write, he had “his first brush with the doubletalk, the rigid doctrinaire attitudes, the attitude of take over or destroy, of some people involved who were or had been truly Communist-minded. At the same time he would not nudge one inch from the position of defending their right to believe as they did.”26 Ryan quickly threw in with the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), an organization formed by his screenwriter pal Philip Dunne, as well as John Huston and director William Wyler, to protest the hearings.
Wyler hosted an overflow meeting of the new group at his Beverly Hills home in early October. Outside, FBI agents took down license plate numbers,27
