TCM News Alert!

By David in TN

saturday, august 5, 2023 at 11:19:00 a.m. edt

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week is on hiatus during the month of August. This is Summer Under the Stars Month. Each day a different performer is featured.

This Monday, Robert Ryan (1909-1973) films are shown, Among others: Act of Violence, The Naked Spur, Billy Budd, The Set-Up. Oddly, Crossfire and Bad Day at Black Rock aren’t among them.

Robert Ryan was a left-winger who specialized in playing bigoted characters, as in Crossfire, Bad Day at Black Rock, etc.

On Monday Night-Early Tuesday Morning at 12:45 a.m. ET TCM has a rare showing of Executive Action (1973) by hack director David Miller. This is a fantasy of Hollywood leftists. Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Will Geer and Lloyd Gough play a group of right-wing conspirators who carry out the “plot to kill JFK.”

I think it was Ryan’s last film. It was the kind of role he relished.

N.S.: I consider Robert Ryan to have been a crypto-communist, like his friend, Richard Brooks, who wrote the novel that Crossfire (1947) was based on. By the way, Ryan and Brooks were both shirkers, but they wore USMC uniforms stateside. Ryan, the Yale heavyweight champion, taught boxing, while Brooks was a Marine Corps reporter.

A crypto-communist was a communist who didn’t join the party, so there was no record anywhere. My Trinidadian Uncle Frank (1904-1992) and Aunt Ruth (my late mom’s big sister) (1921-2016) were both Stalinist crypto-communists. Uncle Frank was a civil engineer who worked for The Phone Company, while Aunt Ruth was an elementary school teacher in Bellmore, New York. When Uncle Frank was in his seventies, he would say, “Stalin did what had to be done.” If either had joined the party, they would have lost their jobs.

Ryan’s best roles came early in his career as heavies, psychos, and near-psychos. He had an especially powerful chemistry with Ida Lupino in a couple of RKO cheapies (pardon the redundancy), On Dangerous Ground (1951) and Beware, My Lovely (1952).

In On Dangerous Ground, he played an out-of-control, bachelor NYCPD detective whose job is hanging by a thread, due to his penchant for beating confessions out of suspects. He accusatorily asks a fat, middle-aged detective colleague, who has a wife and a houseful of kids, “How can you live with yourself?!” The colleague replies, “I don’t! I live with other people!”

Ryan’s boss gives him a chance to redeem himself, in more ways than one. He sends the detective a couple of hours north to assist in a murder investigation. A pretty, teenaged girl has been murdered and maybe raped. The suspect, a mentally retarded, crazy young man, is hiding out, and the victim’s father (Ward Bond) is hunting for him, to kill him.

Ryan meets and interviews the killer’s older sister (Lupino), who is blind, and who, while resourceful, depended on her kid brother.

The detective and the blind lady, two crippled people, fall in love. She redeems him.

I can’t describe the story without degenerating into clichés, but Ryan, Lupino, and Bond make it work.

There must have been some interesting breaks, considering that the cast contained a communist and a patriot.

Later in Ryan’s career, he decided he wanted to play likeable, kindly cut-throats. In The Wild Bunch (1969), he played the least sympathetic role, that of Deke, the pretentious, old crime partner of Bill Holden’s Pike Thornton, who is forced by a railroad tycoon to hunt down his old friend. Ryan’s character was saddled with prairie scum (Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones, et al.), to whom he felt morally superior. In Executive Action, he played a nice guy presidential assassin.