“The only question is when.” A third adds: “Just in time to get more youngsters like Peter.” This so frightens the boy that he drops a bottle of milk, which smashes on the floor. A low-angle shot shows the three ladies gathered above, grinning in amusement.
The central scene is a powerfully weird and stylized dream sequence in which Peter awakes in a forest clearing and encounters the very war orphans he and his classmates have been studying on posters in school. One girl has lost a leg; another holds an Asian infant. The oldest orphan explains to Peter that his green hair marks him as a messenger: “You must tell all the people — the Russians, Americans, Chinese, British, French, all the people all over the world — that there must not ever be another war.”
The Boy with Green Hair crystallized a public sentiment for world government that had been growing in the United States since the end of the war. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature and a founder of the United World Federalists, had framed the issue before any other journalist. His celebrated editorial “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” written the night after Hiroshima was destroyed, argued that the event marked “the violent death of one stage in mankind’s history and the beginning of another.” Now that man had the power to incinerate whole cities, he would have to evolve past the need for war, which would mean eradicating global inequality and establishing world government. To this end, Cousins wrote, modern man “will have to recognize the flat truth that the greatest obsolescence of all in the Atomic Age is national sovereignty.”47 By 1946 a Gallup poll found that 52 percent of Americans favored the liquidation of the US military in favor of an international peacekeeping force. Ryan was one of them, and he would get to know Cousins later that year when he joined the Federalists, a rapidly growing organization that advocated “world peace through world law.”
The week before Ryan shot his scene for The Boy with Green Hair, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the Oscar nominations for 1947. Crossfire was honored in five categories: best picture, best director, best screenplay, best supporting actress (Grahame), and best supporting actor (Ryan). But as more than one industry observer noted, this good fortune put RKO in a ticklish position, given that it had fired the picture’s producer and director. There was another twist as well: in every category except Ryan’s, Crossfire was competing with Gentleman’s Agreement, the Fox production Schary had beaten to the box office by four-and-a-half months. Released in December and carefully marketed with Crossfire as its model, Gentleman’s Agreement was still doing big business across the country and had topped the nominations race with a total of eight.
Jessica and Robert attend the 1948 Academy Awards ceremony. “We don’t ask actors home,” she would later write. “We haven’t, Robert or I, much to say to them privately.” Franklin Jarlett Collection
Though RKO had beaten Fox to the punch, Gentleman’s Agreement had effectively stolen Crossfire’s thunder as an exposé of anti-Semitism, to Ryan’s great irritation.48 Adapted from a novel by Laura Z. Hobson, it starred Gregory Peck as a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to write a magazine story. In some respects Gentleman’s Agreement was bolder than Crossfire; it confronted prejudice head-on instead of sneaking it into a murder mystery, and in contrast to the other film’s psychopathology, it revealed more casual and insidious forms of bigotry. It was also the kind of picture Academy voters could feel good about honoring: this was no crummy little crime story shot on borrowed sets, but a big, long prestige drama set in the penthouses and boardrooms of Manhattan, produced by the great Darryl F. Zanuck.
The other nominees for best supporting actor were Charles Bickford as the starchy butler in RKO’s The Farmer’s Daughter, Thomas Gomez as the warmhearted carny in Universal’s Ride the Pink Horse, Richard Widmark as the giggling killer in Fox’s Kiss of Death, and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle in Fox’s Miracle on 34th Street. Ryan relished the attention, though his chances of winning seemed fairly slim: he would be dividing the psycho vote with Widmark, and really, who was going to choose a Jew-hating murderer over Santa Claus?
Cheyney Ryan arrived on March 10, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, and ten days later Jessica had recovered sufficiently to accompany her husband to the Shrine Auditorium. As most had predicted, Gwenn won best supporting actor. Crossfire was shut out by Gentleman’s Agreement, which took best picture, best director (Elia Kazan), and best supporting actress (Celeste Holm). According to Dmytryk, the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals had conducted a vigorous campaign against Crossfire.49 The picture had made the year-end lists of all the major critics and collected honors ranging from an Edgar Allan Poe Award (for best mystery film) to a Cannes Film Festival award (for best social film). But in Hollywood, Crossfire was still a double-edged sword. A few months earlier, when MPPA president Eric Johnston had praised the picture in a speech, the legal counsel for the Hollywood Ten had puckishly invited him to serve as a character witness for Scott and Dmytryk. Johnston declined.
*In response to my Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI reported that its central records system contained no file for Ryan.
*Cinematographers still refer to this device as “the obie.”
*When John Huston finally brought the novel to the screen in 1951, his star was the legendary war hero Audie Murphy.
*Inferno (1953), The Proud Ones (1956), Hour of the Gun (1967), and The Wild Bunch (1969).
*Stockwell had just won a special Golden Globe Award for his performance as Gregory Peck’s son in Gentleman’s Agreement.
six
Caught
The Shrine Auditorium may have been a temple of self-congratulation on Oscar night, but outside its walls the movie business was in serious trouble. Ticket sales had boomed after the war when soldiers were streaming home, but in 1947 domestic box office revenue plummeted as people like the Ryans started families and moved into the suburbs. Britain and other countries, hoping to revive their own war-ravaged film industries, levied tariffs on US imports, diminishing the once-lucrative European market. And the federal government renewed its antitrust campaign against the major film studios, pressuring them to sell their theater chains. If that happened, the entire business model for the studio system would collapse.1
Dore Schary had come to RKO promising to cut costs, and the board of directors reaffirmed its confidence in him after the HUAC hearings. But in his first year as production chief, the studio’s annual profit had plunged from $12 million to $5 million. In February 1948 the trade papers reported that Floyd Odlum, RKO’s chairman and majority stockholder since 1936, would sell his controlling interest in the studio to Howard Hughes, the aviation giant and mercurial moviemaker who had produced such landmark pictures as Hell’s Angels (1930) and Scarface (1932).
In early May, Ryan made a quick trip to New York for the Berlin Express premiere, and by the time he returned to the West Coast, Hughes had struck a deal with Odlum, purchasing 24 percent of RKO for the grand sum of $8.8 million — then the largest cash transaction in the history of the movie business. The announcement sent shock waves through the studio: Hughes had a reputation as a controlling and capricious moviemaker. For years his pet project had been The Outlaw, a sexually suggestive western
