Robert Ryan

Men in War

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James Edwards and Robert Ryan

A “lost patrol” war movie, 1957’s Men in War shows that director Anthony Mann was as expert in this genre as he had already proved himself to be in film noir (Raw Deal), the western (Winchester ’73) and the epic (Quo Vadis). Made without any buy-in from the US military, it’s a pared-back affair and Mann uses the lack of budget to good effect, relying on key performances from his two leads to deliver the goods. There are two different types of human endeavour on display in Men in War – the social and the individual. Robert Ryan plays the fiercely egalitarian lieutenant in charge of a platoon trying to make its way … Read more

The Set-Up

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Robert Ryan's Stoker on the canvas

Here’s the set-up to 1949’s The Set-Up. On one side Stoker, an ageing boxer convinced he has one more shot at glory. On the other Tiger, an upcoming young fighter in the pocket of a local gang boss. The boss, via an intermediary, asks/commands Tiny, Stoker’s manager/trainer, to get Stoker to throw the fight. Tiny is convinced Stoker will go down anyway so he doesn’t bother to pass on the message that Stoker is to take a dive in the third. Tiny is not just a coward – he avoids an awkward confrontation with Stoker – this way he also doesn’t have to share any of the sweetener with his boy. The Set-Up is … Read more

House of Bamboo

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Robert Ryan as Sandy Dawson

In many ways an atypical Sam Fuller film, House of Bamboo does conform to Fuller type in one specific way – strong performances by his two leads. They are Robert Ryan and Robert Stack, as two guys involved in different ways in crime in post-War Japan. Doing almost nothing at all, Ryan acts Stack right off the screen as crime boss Sandy Dawson, an American who has found rich pickings in the debris of post-War Japan. And yet Stack is also pretty effective as a smalltime hoodlum who arrives in the country and immediately starts throwing his weight around and extorting money in the smallest of smalltime ways. What Eddie Spanier (Stack) doesn’t … Read more

Odds Against Tomorrow

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Slater (Robert Ryan) and Ingram (Harry Belafonte)

There are a lot of ways of approaching 1959’s Odds Against Tomorrow. It’s that sort of film. But let’s be boring and approach it from the usual angle and say it’s the first film noir with a black lead actor in it. It’s Harry Belafonte, whose HarBel company also produced it, and he plays one of three men involved in a bank job. Ed Begley plays the organising force, an ex cop called Burke hoping the job will plug the gap where his pension would have been if he hadn’t been been the fall guy in some police corruption scandal. Robert Ryan is Slater, the ex soldier whose anger issues are partly down … Read more

Act of Violence

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Janet Leigh and Van Heflin

A man arrives in a small, neat town in California. It’s a bright sunny day but he’s brought a sliver of dark, noirish New York with him on the Greyhound bus. And also a gun. As he limps across the street away from the bus station, a band plays, veterans march and flags flutter. It’s Memorial Day. Joe is in town to kill an old Army buddy. Like those implacable, remorseless creatures from It Follows, Joe relentlessly pursues his victim. To the nice house in the suburbs that his quarry, war veteran Frank, helped build. Out to the lake where Frank has gone fishing. Back to his house after Frank realises he’s being … Read more

Caught

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Leonora is consoled by Dr Quinada

Revenge would be a better title but Caught it is, director Max Ophüls’s broadside against Howard Hughes, who’d fired him from Vendetta only days into shooting a film that was meant to launch the career of Faith Domergue, a Hughes “discovery” (booty division). Vendetta ended up with five directors’ names attached to it so clearly the launch needed more grease on the slipway than anticipated. Hughes’s treatment of women, it turns out, is what Caught is all about, a reworking of the Libbie Block novel Wild Calendar also incorporating the stories Ophüls and screenwriter Arthur Laurents had heard about the infamously philandering studio boss. Naive and nice young thing Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes) … Read more

On Dangerous Ground

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Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan

One of the most cultish of Hollywood directors, Nicholas Ray, made his directorial debut in 1949. 1951’s On Dangerous Ground was his seventh film in two years (eighth, if you count Roseanna McCoy, where he replaced director Irving Reiss). If this maverick made films in a hurry, he also made films that moved at speed. On Dangerous Ground almost tells two stories before heading off to tell two more. The linking factor is Robert Ryan, in one of his trademark masculine-but-neurotic roles, playing Jim Wilson, a cop with a tendency to punch first and think later. First up, there’s a cop killer on the loose, and Wilson, along with buddies Pop (Charles Kemper) … Read more