Robert Ryan Centennial, Celebrated by the Chicago Reader

Timed to coincide with his impending centennial and the discovery of a letter written by Ryan to his children, J.R. Jones has written a fascinating cover story about the native Chicagoan and the heretofore (mostly) unknown facts about the Ryan family's Chicago roots and Ryan's early life there. It's accompanied by the letter he wrote to three of his children in the early '50s, but only recently unearthed by one of his daughters. TCM will be running a 2-day marathon of his films in honor of his birthday on 11/10 and 11/11.

You can read the article and letter here:

The Actor's Letter

Robert Ryan has always been a favorite of mine and when I was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago a few years ago, I had the pleasure of programming a retrospective featuring the films of Ryan and John Garfield (attendance was sadly quite dismal). I knew Ryan was a Chicagoan, but, in hindsight, I should have marketed this fact a lot more than I did. One of my fellow programmers had attended the Oakwood School in Los Angeles, which Ryan co-founded with his wife, and made efforts to bring Ryan's son Cheyney to Chicago for one of the screenings. Unfortunately, this didn't work out.

It's probably not going to raise the awareness of the perennially under-appreciated Ryan by much, but it's great to see such a nice tribute to a guy who was not only a fine actor, but also a committed liberal activist and humanitarian. And, as someone who thoroughly enjoyed his (too) short time in the second city, I get a kick out of the actor's Chicago connections and welcome the engrossing historical details.

Ryan's one of the greats. He died way too young. He had a bunch of films in the can when he died. He's got five listed films in his IMDB filmography that came out that year (1973), including EXECUTIVE ACTION, THE OUTFIT and THE ICEMAN COMETH.

Okay, great performances of his without even looking at his filmography below 1973, off the top of my head, in rough chronological order:

CROSSFIRE
ACT OF VIOLENCE
CAUGHT
ON DANGEROUS GROUND
CLASH BY NIGHT
THE NAKED SPUR
MEN IN WAR
DAY OF THE OUTLAW
THE LONGEST DAY
THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE
THE PROFESSIONALS
THE DIRTY DOZEN
and my absolute favorite performance of his...
THE WILD BUNCH.


Great story about Ryan that I read in TV Guide once upon a time:
Ryan had done a radio documentary in the 1950s where he narrated a liberal program about threats to our freedoms from McCarthyism and anti-Communism and such. As a result, he got death threats. Ryan drives home one night and finds a tall man standing in his driveway cradling a Winchester rifle. He got scared until he recognized the man, none other than his FLYING LEATHERNECKS co-star, John Wayne, who'd heard about the death threats and come over to defend him.

P.S. Okay, I peeked at his filmography and realized I'd left off quite a few good films. Let me just list the awesome directors he worked with over the years: Fred Zinnemann, Max Ophuls, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, Richard Brooks, Robert Aldrich, Sam Peckinpah, Edward Dmytryk, Sam Fuller, John Sturges, Joseph Losey, Budd Boetticher, Robert Wise, Raoul Walsh. Quite a list, huh?



This post has been edited by Brian Camp on Nov 5 2009, 10:50 AM

. . . a friend of mine has a big screen projection cinema in his basement and I was asked to organize a film series for his friends who enjoy movies, but have not seen a lot of old stuff - well, I chose ON DANGEROUS GROUND, THE INTROSPECTIVE FILMS OF ROBERT RYAN as my subject (he is my favorite actor) and screened ACT OF VIOLENCE, THE SET-UP, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW, ON DANGEROUS GROUND, DAY OF THE OUTLAW, CLASH BY NIGHT, and HOUSE OF BAMBOO (I also wanted them to see the work of some favorite directors) . . . I began with a quote from David Thomson which calls Ryan's career " . . . a lifetime of roles too small for his talent" and hoped to show Thomson was way off the mark by trying to prove (with these films) that Ryan's unique talent was bringing his artistic insight to these "small" roles and helping us understand the psychology of many a damaged character who was usually about as far removed from Ryan, the man, as an actor could find - I remember reading someplace that he was not so much a great leading man as he was a great co-star . . . the audience of around thirty people attended the two day festival and did seem to appreciate his work at the end of the series . . . I regret I did not have time to show Cromwell's THE RACKET with Ryan, Robert Mitchum, and Elizabeth Scott going head to head to head . . .

This post has been edited by Wade Sowers on Nov 5 2009, 03:37 PM

Eh, it's not a great picture. Mitchum hated playing a cop and Ryan seems off as a syndicate man. It seems like he's trying to go for ethnic in the role and it just doesn't wash.

Wow.

This post has been edited by Richard Harland Smith on Nov 5 2009, 05:03 PM

. . . true, not one of the greats, but it is one I enjoy as a solid 50s gangster/noir - corruption, corruption, all over the place . . . of course, this one was based on a play (and it shows) from the 1920s that was, apparently, quite contemporary in talking about Chicago corruption of the time (there was a film from 1928 by Lewis Milestone which is now lost) and the translation to the 1950s without a real update in the story did not work so well, according to the authors of FILM NOIR AN ENCYCLOPEDIC REFERENCE TO THE AMERICAN STYLE who seem to know a lot more about all of this stuff than I - it would have been interesting to see what Sam Fuller would have done with the movie for which he wrote a script in 1948, which would have really been a new movie with the same title grounded in post-war America, which was rejected by Cromwell who then went back to the original source . . .

This post has been edited by Wade Sowers on Nov 5 2009, 06:15 PM