TCM Schedule for Friday, August 13 -- Summer Under The Stars -- Robert Ryan

Today's star is Robert Ryan, one of the great screen heavies. Ryan was a liberal Democrat who tirelessly supported civil rights issues. Despite his service as a drill instructor in the U.S. Marine Corps, he also came to share the pacifist views of his wife Jessica, who was a Quaker. Enjoy!


6:00am -- Trail Street (1947)
Bat Masterson fights to make Kansas safe for wheat farmers.
Cast: Randolph Scott, Robert Ryan, Anne Jeffreys, George "Gabby" Hayes
Dir: Ray Enright
BW-84 mins, TV-G

Due to his towering frame, cruelly-lined face and a simmering intensity uncommon in his generation of "tough guys", Ryan usually played hateful villains. Even on the rare occasions that he played a good guy, they often possessed a violent, obsessive personality that was a tad unsettling.


7:30am -- Return of the Badmen (1948)
A farmer falls for the female leader of a band of notorious outlaws.
Cast: Randolph Scott, Robert Ryan, Anne Jeffreys, George "Gabby" Hayes
Dir: Ray Enright
BW-90 mins, TV-PG

Ernie Adams' 427th and last film. He plays the station agent/telegrapher.


9:15am -- Flying Leathernecks (1951)
A World War II Marine officer drives his men mercilessly during the battle for Guadalcanal.
Cast: John Wayne, Robert Ryan, Don Taylor, Janis Carter
Dir: Nicholas Ray
C-102 mins, TV-PG

Robert Ryan was cast by director Nicholas Ray because he had been a boxer in college and believed that he was the only actor that could play opposite John Wayne and "kick Wayne's ass."


11:00am -- Men In War (1957)
Two enemies join forces to save their men during a retreat from the North Koreans.
Cast: Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Robert Keith, Phillip Pine
Dir: Anthony Mann
BW-98 mins, TV-PG

Robert Ryan (Lt Benson) was 47 years old when this film was made, at least twice as old as a real Army lieutenant would have been.


1:00pm -- Crossfire (1947)
A crusading district attorney investigates the murder of a Jewish man.
Cast: Robert Young, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame
Dir: Edward Dmytryk
BW-86 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Robert Ryan, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Gloria Grahame, Best Director -- Edward Dmytryk, Best Writing, Screenplay -- John Paxton, and Best Picture

The focus of the novel by Richard Brooks dealt with homophobia, but the subject was changed to anti-Semitism for the film.


2:30pm -- Act Of Violence (1949)
An embittered veteran tracks down a POW camp informer.
Cast: Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor
Dir: Fred Zinnemann
BW-82 mins, TV-PG

Continuity error: At the end of the movie Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan) bends the knee of his right leg, the 'lame' leg he has been nearly unable to bend throughout the entire story.


4:00pm -- God's Little Acre (1958)
A dirt-farmer lets his family fall apart while he hunts for his grandfather's buried gold.
Cast: Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Buddy Hackett, Jack Lord
Dir: Anthony Mann
BW-118 mins, TV-PG

A 1967 re-release attempted to appeal to the new generation by playing up the sex in the advertisements. The '67 poster featured the drawing of a topless woman underneath a bare-chested man on a bed, as well as a topless (but chaste) photo of co-star Fay Spain that was definitely not in the picture itself! For this re-release, Tina Louise was given top-billing and Michael Landon went from tenth billing in 1958 to second billing this time.


6:00pm -- Captain Nemo And The Underwater City (1969)
The infamous submarine captain rescues six shipwreck survivors.
Cast: Robert Ryan, Chuck Connors, Nanette Newman, John Turner
Dir: James Hill
C-106 mins, TV-G

Nanette Newman was only cast after couple of actress including a Bond Girl passed.


What's On Tonight: SUMMER UNDER THE STARS: ROBERT RYAN


8:00pm -- The Boy With Green Hair (1948)
An orphaned boy mystically acquires green hair and a mission to end war.
Cast: Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan, Barbara Hale, Dean Stockwell
Dir: Joseph Losey
C-82 mins, TV-G

The film was one of the last movies made at RKO Radio Pictures under production chief Dore Schary and one of the most idealistic fantasy films ever made in America. Completed for release after Howard Hughes took over the studio, The Boy With Green Hair never got the kind of push that it needed to become anything more than a cult curio in American cinema.


9:30pm -- The Set-Up (1949)
An aging boxer defies the gangsters who've ordered him to throw his last fight.
Cast: Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter, George Tobias, Alan Baxter
Dir: Robert Wise
BW-73 mins, TV-PG

Based upon a narrative poem published in 1928 by Joseph Moncure March, who gave up his job as the first managing editor of "The New Yorker" to devote himself to writing. On the strength of it, he went to Hollywood as a screenwriter, remaining there for a dozen years. In 1948 he volunteered to work on this film, but was turned down. He was incensed that his black boxer Pansy Jones was changed into the white Stoker Thompson.


11:00pm -- Billy Budd (1962)
Adaptation of Herman Melville's classic tale of a ship's captain caught between an innocent young sailor and an evil officer.
Cast: Terence Stamp, Peter Ustinov, Robert Ryan, Melvyn Douglas
Dir: Peter Ustinov
BW-123 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Terence Stamp

Terence Stamp's film debut.


1:15am -- The Wild Bunch (1969)
A group of aging cowboys look for one last score in a corrupt border town.
Cast: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien
Dir: Sam Peckinpah
C-144 mins, TV-MA

Nominated for Oscars for Best Music, Original Score for a Motion Picture (not a Musical) -- Jerry Fielding, and Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Material Not Previously Published or Produced -- Walon Green (screenplay/story), Roy N. Sickner (story) and Sam Peckinpah (screenplay)

According to Sam Peckinpah biographer Marshall Fine, there was concern on the set over the bridge explosion. Bud Hulburd, the head of the special-effects crew, was not particularly experienced, having ascended the ranks after Peckinpah fired his predecessors. Stuntman Joe Canutt appealed to both Hulburd and Peckinpah to no avail, so finally, out of concern for the other stuntmen, Canutt enlisted the help of screenwriter Gordon T. Dawson, who was instructed to stand behind Hulburd with a club. If the stuntmen began to fall before the final charge was set off, something that would've resulted in death, Dawson was to club Hulburd unconscious before he detonated the last charge. Luckily, the stunt went off without a hitch.


4:00am -- The Outfit (1973)
An ex-con takes on the mob to avenge his brother's death.
Cast: Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan
Dir: John Flynn
C-103 mins, TV-14

Brian Garfield, in an intro to a reprint of the novel this film is based on, notes that it was originally written by director John Flynn as a period piece, intending to be set in the postwar 1940s. That's why such "film noir" veterans such as Elisha Cook Jr., Richard Jaeckel, Marie Windsor and Jane Greer appear in it. The studio, however, decided it would be too expensive to shoot a period picture, so the script was superficially updated, the World War II vets became Vietnam vets, and actors like Robert Ryan, Karen Black and Sheree North joined the cast. The result was that the story was restored to its original conception (the series this book was based on was written and set in the then contemporary 1960s and 1970s). Had the period piece idea gone through, this would have represented a rare case of backdating a character.

"I have been in films pretty well everything I am dedicated to fighting against," Robert Ryan once remarked, referring to the intolerance, greed and brutality of some of his characters. His portrayals of racial bigotry were especially ironic because he was a tireless campaigner for civil rights.

Ryan's dark, craggy looks, raspy voice and black Irish temperament made him well-suited to play villains, film noir anti-heroes and various combinations thereof. Often cast as a second lead, he was always compelling and easily held his own with such powerhouse performers as Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Ida Lupino and Burt Lancaster. Onstage he dared to partner with Katharine Hepburn in a 1960 production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

He was born Robert Bushnell Ryan in Chicago in 1909 and attended Dartmouth College, where he held the school's heavyweight boxing title for four years. He also won a boxing championship while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps as a drill instructor. While studying acting in Hollywood, he appeared in theater productions and made his movie debut in an uncredited bit in the Bob Hope movie The Ghost Breakers (1940).

Ryan signed with RKO, where he played a number of small roles before gaining attention as Ginger Rogers' stalwart serviceman husband in Tender Comrade (1943). His breakthrough year was 1947, when, among other things, he shared hero duties with Randolph Scott in the Western Trail Street, brooded in Jean Renoir's moody drama The Woman on the Beach and stole Edward Dmytryk's brilliant film noir mystery Crossfire from two other Roberts, Mitchum and Young. Ryan's disturbing portrait of a vicious anti-Semite in the latter film brought him many accolades including his only Oscar® nomination - as Best Supporting Actor.

Among Ryan's many other film appearances in the 1940s were Return of the Bad Men (1948), another Western stint as second lead to Randolph Scott's hero, with Ryan as The Sundance Kid; The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Joseph Losey's gentle pacifist fable with Dean Stockwell as the child of the title; and, in 1949, two more outstanding film noir melodramas, Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948) and Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949).

The 1950s were also busy years for Ryan, who made nearly 30 feature films during the decade along with several TV appearances. For once, in Nicholas Ray's film about the Marine Corps' Flying Leathernecks (1951) he plays the more humane character opposite John Wayne's hard-boiled commander. In another combat film, Anthony Mann's set-in-Korea Men in War (1957), it's Ryan's turn to play the by-the-book officer. Ryan is dominant as the patriarch of a slovenly backwoods family in Mann's film version of Erskine Caldwell's steamy novel God’s Little Acre (1958).

Ryan gives one of his most vivid performances as the brutal, bullying Claggart of Billy Budd (1962), Peter Ustinov's version of the famous Herman Melville story. In Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969), a follow-up to 1954's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Ryan takes over from James Mason as the Jules Verne character. He is a standout in the powerful acting ensembles of three violent, influential films: Richard Brooks' The Professionals (1966), Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).

Among Ryan's final roles before his death in 1973 were two more ruthless characters, a mob boss in The Outfit (1973) and a greedy businessman involved in the assassination of JFK in Executive Action (1973). He finished his career with a truly splendid performance (possibly his best) as Larry Slade in a film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1973).

Ryan was married to one woman, Jessica Cadwalader, from 1939 until her death in 1972. They had three children.

by Roger Fristoe

* Films in Bold Type Air on 8/13