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Robert Ryan, Crossfire by Michael Atkinson For those dead serious about their love of cinema, a Robert Ryan movie is like the sharp-tasting root truffle of Golden Era Hollywood B pictures. Even though he could outact his most famous peers with his eyes shut, Ryan was never quite a star. He was too angular, too dangerous and too untrustworthy to be very likable; he looked like someone you might bump into in the street at night and wish you hadn't. Those who love him are drawn to that sense of looming hazard, and to the intelligence Ryan mixed in with it. No other American actor of the '40s and '50s was more convincing as a man on the edge--or one who'd gone over it. Ryan's brutal psycho cop in On Dangerous Ground, his rancorous bigot in Odds Against Tomorrow and his cruel Claggart in Billy Budd are all characters with something rotten boiling right underneath the surface. But the prototypical Ryan character is Monty, a beady-eyed time bomb with a bloodthirsty hatred for Jews in 1947's Crossfire. Less an "issue film" on anti-Semitism than a portrait of a chaotic postwar America, Crossfire gave Ryan a chance to sink his teeth into the role of a back-from-the-war sociopath who's just clubbed a Jewish civilian to death when we meet him. Anyone else would've probably ruined the part by playing Monty as a calculated villain, but Ryan brings this noir juggernaut of a movie to life by never showing Monty's hand. Since Monty is an impulse killer, Ryan spends most of the movie telling lies and making them look believable--something other actors of his era couldn't seem to do. We never actually believe Monty, of course--somehow Ryan lets the poisoned soul of the character leak out--but this is real, not actory, dissembling. Ryan was just one of those actors who don't have to do anything to give us ideas about them--he only needs to look, and breathe. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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Ryan cooks whenever Monty loses it and goes off in a subtle explosion, graduating in a flash from amiable drunk chatter to hair-raising insults. "Whatsamatter, Jew boy?" he taunts with a voice like dry wood cracking under pressure. Ryan sneers, but doesn't actually sneer, when Monty tries to be personable with a cop about "those kinds of people" and tells him that "some of them are named Samuels, some of them got... funnier names." When Monty does go ka-boom, suddenly throttling a nervous accomplice, Ryan clenches his teeth like a crazed ape, spitting, "No Jew is going to tell me how to drink his stinking liquor!" Even after he mellows, Monty's reluctant to let go of his buddy's throat, and Ryan has his hands shudder sweatily around the guy's esophagus. The crucial element of Ryan's secret in Crossfire is that he gives his character equal helpings of sharp awareness and dim stupidity. That insight into evil alone sets Ryan apart from most actors, but he builds on it by never letting you know where one begins and the other ends. That's why Monty is the scariest bigot in film history--and why Ryan ought to be better known these days than he is. What did you think of this performance? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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