Screenings in NYC: THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998).

The Big Lebowski.  To watch it once is sublime.  To watch it twenty times is sublime twenty times.  To watch it with a full crowd is probably about as much fun as is legally possible within city limits.  I’ve seen it with small groups many times, but I’ve only actually seen it with a crowd once, back in 1998 when it was first released.  As the credits rolled, my buddy and I turned to each other and both said, “I could’ve watched that all day.”  The rest of the world has since come to share in our enlightenment.  In the intervening years, the Lebowski legend has only grown, and pretty much everyone with a brain and a soul and a sense of humor is in agreement.

It’s actually really hard to write about The Big Lebowski because it’s such well-trod turf and because it’s such an individualistic piece of work that its primary charms are in watching it, not having it described to you.  Of course, if you know your film history, you know that The Big Lebowski didn’t spring up out of nowhere — it’s a fairly direct takeoff of Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (a distant relative of yours truly, for the record).  I was lucky enough in 1998 to have just chanced to watch The Big Sleep for the first time about a week before I saw The Big Lebowski for the first time.  I can’t possibly understate how
much funnier The Big Lebowski is when you’re in on the joke:  The pointed difference between 1940s Los Angeles and 1990s Los Angeles, the jazzy past versus the country-Western present, the labyrinthine mystery plot that one suspects even the screenwriters couldn’t decipher (and in The Big Lebowski at least, treat as almost an afterthought), and most of all. Jackie Treehorn’s dick drawing.

In The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart tries to get a vital clue from running a pencil over the indentations of a notepad.  In The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges attempts the same trick, only to find that his adversary has been idly doodling penises while on the phone.  That joke is incredibly hilarious on its own, but once you realize that it’s a spoof of a deadly-serious source, it becomes transcendently funny.

The Coens’ brilliant inspiration was to take a Chandleresque noir set-up, and then drop two amazing and ridiculous characters into it to see how they’d handle things.  First there’s Jeff Bridges as The Dude, about which plenty has been written and said but not as often the fact that the character is based off a real person the Coens know.  And then there’s John Goodman as the bellowing and verbose gun nut Walter, who again is a stroke of genius even if you don’t know that he is playing a real person with very little exaggeration.  John Milius is a writer and filmmaker who was an early confederate of Steven Spielberg and the 1970s film-school generation, who had a hand in the writing of the Indianapolis speech in Jaws and in one of the Dirty Harry sequels, and who made the vastly misunderstood and thoroughly awesome 1982 adaptation of the Conan The Barbarian pulp stories.  If you’ve ever listened to the incredible DVD commentary for Conan The Barbarian, you’d know that what John Goodman is actually doing in The Big Lebowski is a pitch-perfect John Milius impersonation.

Goodman.

Milius.

Like I say, The Big Lebowski is funny enough without knowing these little factlets, but it becomes a new level of comedic achievement when seen in that light.

Another great joke of The Big Lebowski is that for a movie about confused bowlers of conflicting political ideologies solving mysteries, it is as impeccably crafted as any prestige picture.  The photography by Roger Deakins is typically beautiful, the editing by the legendary Roderick Jaynes is crisp and sharp.  Just think back on those elaborately-choreographed and inventive Busby Berkeley dream-sequence numbers.  This isn’t lazy filmmaking by any stretch.  It’s as smart and as artistic as any so-called “Best Picture.”

The Coens are such an interesting case.  They work in two distinct modes: madcap and noir.  The first mode is exemplified by their comedies, a la Raising Arizona.  The second mode is the Miller’s Crossing mode, which dates all the way forward to their recent triumph No Country For Old Men.  (There’s actually a third, far more esoteric and personal mode, which includes movies like Barton Fink and A Serious Man, but that’s a subject for another day).  The Big Lebowski comes down stronger on the side of comedy, though it’s an intriguing blend of madcap and noir.  The stakes, as far as The Dude and Walter know, are real:  A young woman could be killed if they don’t deliver a ransom.  But the fact that these two guys are the world’s least-qualified messengers, who spend their private-dick downtime at the bowling alley, is what makes the movie so fresh and so funny.

For having said up front that The Big Lebowski is hard to write about, I sure have found plenty of words.  I guess it IS fun to write about.  But I’d still rather go watch it again.

The Big Lebowski is screening tonight FOR FREE in Central Park.

And I’m 24-7 over here: @jonnyabomb

Screenings in NYC: AGAINST ALL ODDS (1984).

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:  A vintage classic is “re-imagined” for a modern era, with mixed results.  It’s a pretty common joke nowadays, but back in 1984 it was still fairly novel.  Taylor Hackford’s Against All Odds is a loose remake of Jacques Tourneur’s impeccable noir Out Of The Past (1947), with Jeff Bridges stepping in for Robert Mitchum, Rachel Ward stepping in for Jane Greer, and James Woods stepping in for Kirk Douglas.  I’m a huge fan of the original film, written by Daniel Mainwairing (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers), who adapted Out Of The Past from his novel “Build My Gallows High“, which he wrote under the name Geoffrey Homes and which I’ve read and can highly, highly recommend.

So it’s fair to be skeptical of any 1980s movie that is meant to walk in those shoes, but it’s apparent that Against All Odds, however artistically successful it may or may not be, was at least very evidently a passion project, having generously made room in the cast for a pair of vintage noir icons.  It’s like the way Stan Lee keeps being dutifully included in all the Marvel movies, only the point of comparison would be if he got to play Doctor Doom.  Interestingly enough, original femme fatale Jane Greer has a role in the newer movie, playing the mother of the character she would have been playing in 1947, and in a bizarre but very welcome nod to noir history, veteran actor Richard Widmark gets to play the nefarious string-puller — it’s only bizarre because while Widmark played the heavy and the hero in so many classic films, none of them happened to be Out Of The Past.

That eagerness to pay tribute to the soon-extinct lions of noir is what endears this movie to me, even as its conflicting filmmaking approach probably disqualifies it as the real thing.  Journeyman director Taylor Hackford made the huge hit An Officer And A Gentleman right before he made Against All Odds, and that brand of sweeping romanticism somewhat clashes when grafted onto a genre of lovecrimes, coldblooded violence, and heartless betrayals.

Unlike authentic film noir, Against All Odds is a film drenched in daylight.  It begins with its hero, Terry Brogan (Jeff Bridges) roaming a tropical paradise, in search of an heiress, Jessie Wyler (Rachel Ward) who has gone missing and who Brogan has been hired to find by her boyfriend, skeezy bookie Jake Wise (James Woods, who else?), against a competing offer from Jessie’s mother (Jane Greer) and her consigliere (Richard Widmark).  The fact that all these people can find no headhunter any more experienced than Terry Brogan, who is an aging football star eager to reignite his fading career, is a bit of a head-scratcher which the movie doesn’t seem bothered to pry into too deeply.  Terry has betting history with Jake, which means Jake has him over a barrel, but still, if you have a mystery to be solved, do you hire a Tom Brady or do you find a Lt. Columbo?  And again, doubling back after the initial tropical opening, to go into football-field flashbacks isn’t exactly fertile noir territory.  After a brief cameo from the great Bill McKinney as the head coach of Terry’s team, the trainer Terry turns to in his hour of need, Hank Sully, is portrayed by one-time NFL star Alex Karras, best known to most of us for his henchman role in Blazing Saddles and for playing Webster’s dad.  It’s no great surprise that Sully turns out to have a role in the network of double-crosses that ensues, but with bad guys like this one, it is hard to buy into the menace that the movie kind of needs to be a true noir.   James Woods does supply some snakish creepiness, especially in a legitimately-terrific practical-stunts sportscar scene where he and Bridges race each other in actual traffic on Sunset Boulevard in West L.A., but the plot sidelines and neuters him in ways Kirk Douglas never had to worry about in the original.

The main point of interest in this film, and the reason why 92Y Tribeca screened it recently, is that it is a lesser-remembered part of the filmography of Jeff Bridges, who is now finally receiving his just due on a widespread basis.  As an older character actor, he’s endlessly fascinating, but as a leading man, he had an all-American quality that led some to undervalue his acting talent.  There was never anything bland about Jeff Bridges, and taking another look at even his earliest movies confirms it.  There’s an edge and a viciousness that creeps into Bridges’ portrayal of Terry Brogan that gives the movie more weight than it would have had with any other lead actor.  I don’t believe that this is a very great noir, but he’s good at playing a noir hero.  The other thing you’re going to notice about him in this movie is, “Holy crap that guy is good-looking.”

I don’t care how straight you are, and I’m pretty damn straight so I will venture to speak for the species, but it’s pretty impossible not to notice that this is some attractive dude.  Rachel Ward is a pretty excellent-looking woman, but she’s away from the screen for large stretches of this film, whereas Jeff Bridges is on screen pretty much the entire time.  It definitely occurred to me more than once that “If I looked like that, I’d probably only have half the problems I have now.”  This movie ogles Jeff Bridges the way most movies ogle beautiful women.  Maybe that was the intent.  Maybe this was meant to be a new hybrid: chick-flick film-noir.  If that’s the case, more power to ‘em.  But please, watch the original first.

Now there’s only one thing left to address about Against All Odds, and that’s the elephant in the room:  Phil Collins.

Phil Collins wrote and performed the title track, which became one of his signature songs, and in retrospect the song is probably more famous than the movie from whence it came.  You really can’t watch the movie now and not be nervously anticipating the arrival of Phil Collins.  I’m not slagging Phil Collins — I think it’s a good song and I happily admit that I like it, even though I think the dramatic kicking in of the drums is a bit of a bite off of Phil’s own song “In The Air Tonight” – but again, this is not the kind of tune that ever would have accompanied a classic studio noir and all you have to do is turn on TCM to see what I mean.  A real film noir could never provide you with your wedding song, ladies and gents.  A real film noir might make you consider swearing off the notion of romance for at least as long as you forgot you swore it off.  Not to mention the fact that there’s not a great reason for this movie to be named “Against All Odds” except for the fact that it has a song called “Against All Odds” at the end of it.  I can’t say I was completely unaffected by that ending — I’m only human, damn it! — but again, it’s not of a tone that truly fits the genre of films the movie seems to have planned to homage.  True noir achieves a poetic bleakness, not a romantic yearning.  I suppose what I’m saying is, Against All Odds succeeded in getting its title track stuck in my head, but the rest isn’t quite as inescapable.

P.S.  If you were wondering why Against All Odds reminds you so much of The Golden Child, it’s because both movies share a cinematographer (Don Thorin) and a composer (Michel Colombier.)  Also, if you look closely, you can see Victor Wong fly through one of the island scenes in the form of a tropical bird.

(Yes, this was a very strange place to make a very specific reference to The Golden Child.)

__________________________________________

Fall in love with me all over again on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

Movie Review: DRIVE (2011).

I’ve been thinking about something lately, and seeing Drive recently turned out to be a bit of synchronicity since, in its own way, Drive is largely an illustration of the concept: Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean it isn’t real.  And vice versa.  Drive isn’t something that happened.  It started as a terrific, mean little novel by James Sallis, and was adapted into a screenplay by Hossein Amini, envisioned by director Nicolas Winding Refn with star Ryan Gosling, and filmed (impeccably) by cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel.  It’s an incredible movie, far and away one of the most accomplished of this year, but it’s not reportage.  It’s a daydream for nighttime.

Somehow, that makes it truer than many movies that purport to be “based on a true story.”

The story is as simple and quite frankly, as familiar as any in noir history:  The central character is a young man (Ryan Gosling) known only as Driver.  That naming comes from the book and the press: he’s never named in the film, at best only called “The Kid”.  His only friend is a man named Shannon (Breaking Bad‘s phenomenal Bryan Cranston), a crippled mechanic who keeps Driver employed by day as a stunt driver for the movies, and at night as a wheelman for low-level armed robbery jobs.  Driver lives by himself in a sparse apartment in Los Angeles.  Eventually, he forms a potentially romantic connection with a young mother (Carey Mulligan) and her son, whose father (named Standard, played by Oscar Isaac) is set to return from jail soon.  As Shannon puts Driver in contact with movie producer Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his underworld affiliate Nino (Ron Perlman), Driver’s personal and criminal lives are due to intersect.  Basically, the loner meets a nice lady as he’s descending deeper into darkness.  Oldest noir tale in the book; all it’s missing is the femme fatale.  What makes this movie so dramatically far apart from business as usual is its style.  This movie is so distinctly orchestrated that, even though on paper it’s similar to so many other movies, on film it resembles a precious few.

Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the most compelling visual stylists working in movies today.  Here he’s made what feels exactly like a long-lost Michael Mann movie, frozen somewhere between 1983 and 1986 and thawed out just now for a modern audience.  Guys, I don’t think I have a higher caliber of compliment in the chamber than that one.  Honestly, the movie that Drive most resembles is Mann’s 1981 breakthrough feature Thief:  It has the same seemingly languid yet impeccably deliberate pace, the roiling mood, the shocking outbursts of realistic violence, the addictively throbbing electronic score, the exacting attention to detail, the blue-collar sidekick played by a familiar TV actor (Cranston in for James Belushi), the bizarre but thunderingly effective left-field casting choices (Willie Nelson as the heart of Thief, Albert Brooks as the snake in Drive) — it’d be easy to describe Drive as the most successful Michael Mann homage in memory, except for the fact that it’s its own thing. Refn has been building up to exactly this, for a while now.  Drive is an irresistible blend of the stylized realism of Bronson (2008) and the universalized dreaminess of Valhalla Rising (2009).  It also brings a whole new color palette: While Michael Mann favors steel blues and pistol grays, Refn experiments with warmer colors like greens, browns, and even pinks.  Somehow, both interpretations of Los Angeles are apt.

Having spent a formative portion of my life in Los Angeles, I have always recognized a measure of truth in Michael Mann’s movies.  Mann shoots L.A. the way L.A. looks to me.  In his first movie set in Los Angeles, Nicolas Winding Refn manages the same feat.  It’s not just the look; it’s also the atmosphere.  In a scene where Driver takes Irene (Mulligan’s character) and her son on a joy ride through the L.A. river, it looks and feels just the way L.A. looks and feels at sunset.  One reason so many people discount the virtues of Los Angeles is because we’re pummeled with pedestrian images on TV shows such as 90210 and Entourage; uninspired, pansy shit selling emptiness.  There is actual beauty to Los Angeles if you know where to find it, along with an existential isolation and a visceral spookiness; all of which is contained within Drive.

So I recognize this movie to be true.  It fits in with my experience, particularly now, when I am thinking and writing about Los Angeles from the East Coast.  In my mind, my memories merge with cinematic imagery: In my opinion, that’s how both individual memory and the art of cinema work; it’s why movies mean so much to so many of us.  So while I’m not half the driver that Driver is (an understatement), while I’ve never carried on with the estranged wife of an imprisoned felon (as far as I know), while I’ve never taken a blunt instrument to a strip club owner (that I can remember), there is a lot contained in Drive that I can attest to resembling the world of Los Angeles.  This is one reason I loved the movie so much.

I’m also fully enamored of Refn’s style, most particularly the way he works with violence on-screen — his editing rhythms and lolling camerawork manage to lull the audience nearly into a trance, which makes the sudden eruption of savagery all the more unsettling.  It creates the effect in people that violence in movies should have: it makes violence scary.

I also love the way that, just as he did in Bronson, Refn perfectly deploys music, both the score by Cliff Martinez (Traffic) and the poppy Euro-trash electro-candy that punctuates the ongoing events.  The music is both functional, enhancing the mood of the story, and diagetic, which means that the songs that are playing on the soundtrack are often the songs that Driver is listening to in his car or in his apartment.  It’s easy to imagine (as Refn and Gosling intended), that these are the songs Driver chooses because of how they make him feel about himself, which is the way that most of us listen to our favorite music, which in fact tells as much about a person as any dialogue passage could ever do.  The one song that’s repeated throughout Drive, “A Real Hero” by College featuring Electric Youth, seems to be the most indicative of Driver’s inner thoughts, since he sure doesn’t speak them aloud.

Right there’s another thing to love, the performances.  Ryan Gosling seems like such a canny dude, he seems smart and well-adjusted enough to not crave being a  movie star, even as he’s clearly got the required talent and charisma.  If Ryan Gosling becomes a major star, it’ll be because enough people saw Drive.  His character says the bare minimum, speaking mostly through his actions and as previously noted, his iTunes shuffle.  I’m a Clint Eastwood man.  I respect the hell out of that.  I also read in an interview that one of Gosling’s main sources of inspiration for the role was Prince as “The Kid” in Purple Rain.  That, I don’t just respect.  That, I goddamn adore.  And I can see it!

I’ve also become a huge fan of Bryan Cranston, due to his tremendous work on Breaking Bad, the best drama on American television today, by a long shot.  If you listen to the subtle voice work he does in Drive, as a Valley veteran — so different from New Mexico’s Walter White – you’ll see what a great actor he is.  Cranston has a relatively small role, but a pivotal one:  His character, Shannon, is the more [necessarily] talkative partner to Driver, and the one who humanizes him to Irene in the first place.  He’s also the character, I believe, who starts off the interesting motif in this movie of characters describing how they met each other — Shannon describes how he first met Driver, Standard describes how he first met Irene, Bernie Rose describes how he first met Nino — for a movie that doesn’t overdo it on the dialogue, it sure is telling where they decide to distribute their exposition.

And let’s talk about that pair, Ron Perlman as Nino and Albert Brooks as Bernie.  They’re both playing Brooklyn Jews, and fairly stereotypical ones at that — the wannabe-Italian who runs his operation out of a pizza joint in a San Fernando Valley strip mall, and the movie producer (who sets up a pivotal confrontation at a Chinese restaurant, for Pete’s sake).  Being one of that tribe, I never love to see Jewish bad guys, but these guys are so authentic and so damn fascinating that I’ll allow it.  It helps that they’re badass as all hell.  Perlman is a veteran character actor who can do the monstrous thug thing in his sleep (though I hope he doesn’t, for Mrs. Perlman’s sake), but Brooks is something of a revelation.  He’s scary!  Look at the poster below, where he looks like John C. Reilly’s evil twin.  There’s something great about when comedians play villains in serious movies.  It almost always seems to work.  Why?  That’s a question to ponder for another time, but meanwhile, see this movie and see a truly unique bad-guy performance.

There’s plenty more to admire about Drive, but at a certain point it’s time for me to shut up and insist you see the movie.  Movies like this one demand to be seen theatrically, where you can get lost in the sound and the big picture, and besides, a movie this good deserves your hard-earned shekels.  If you don’t love it on first watch, as some people who have seen it don’t, give it a minute to percolate.  Drive is the kind of movie that is absorbing to watch, but takes on a second life once it seeps into your mind.  It grows in potency the more you think about it.  Kind of like a memory.  Like I said, Drive didn’t actually happen, except it totally happened.

Suggested Reading:

Valhalla Rising.

Purple Rain.

Vanishing Point.

The Stunt Man.

Faster.

Drive Angry.

Fast Five.

  

  

 

 

From The Archives: KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005).

#7.  Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

This is the last of the great Los Angeles movies on my list, from a guy who knows a fair amount about Los Angeles.  Shane Black had a hand in the writing of many of the action films of my youth – Predator, Lethal Weapon, The Monster Squad, The Last Boy Scout, and Last Action Hero.  Then he went away for a while.  When he came back, he brought Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, and this movie, some kind of weird blend of action movie, detective flick, and romantic comedy.

Downey plays a petty New York thief who hides out in Los Angeles, in a strange turn of events receiving a mentor in the form of Kilmer’s private investigator.  Together they get wrapped up in a comically complicated murder investigation/ missing-person case, and Downey’s character provides a sarcastic meta-voiceover throughout.  The cinematography by Michael Barrett is colorful and lively, and the playful score by John Ottman merits mention also.  This movie was obviously a labor of love.

Forget High Fidelity or Gladiator or Anchorman or Borat – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the stealth choice for most quotable movie of the decade, it’s easily the most gay-friendly action film ever made (Kilmer’s character is openly, belligerently gay), and it’s even somewhat affecting emotionally.  There was something sad about two fallen movie stars teaming up in a fantastic movie that so few people saw in theaters.

With Robert Downey Jr., the story would seem to have a happy ending, since a few years later he played Iron Man and became one of the most famous stars on the planet, although Val Kilmer seems to be continuing his voyage into the wilderness.  He still pops up all over the place, but it doesn’t look like he’s about to get his second chance at wearing superhero tights.  But for a moment there, their paths crossed, and it was a wonderful match-up.  Their banter is traffic-camera quick, knowing, and hilarious.

Extra credit for Michelle Monaghan (most recently seen in Source Code) in the most lovable female role of the decade, by far, as a failed actress who becomes a third partner to the two main dicks. She’s elusive, sarcastic, flighty, gutsy, and totally crush-worthy.  If only more screenwriters would write female roles as interesting as this one, then the critics would stop going on and on about how today’s movies are crap compared to the films of the 1930s.

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, go fix that.  It’s a Christmas movie, but you can watch it anytime, really.  I do expect royalties from Shane Black though – I have been promoting this movie tirelessly since 2005, and besides, I guarantee he overheard me and my buddies playing the that-guy-looks-almost-exactly-like-that-famous-person “Native American Joe Pesci” game one night in a bar and threw that in the movie as a bonding experience between two characters.  It’s fun, and it’s brilliant!

Cult Classics: THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955).

 

At 9:30pm this evening (it’s March 18^th as I write), The Night Of The Hunter will be screening at the Rubin Museum of Art. Tonight’s screening will be introduced by supercool actress Parker Posey.

The Night Of The Hunter is a one-of-a-kind film that is one of the great one-hit-wonders in cinema history. The chance to see it projected, with an audience, is a rare and awesome opportunity.

Here’s what I wrote back on November 16^th of last year, when the great Criterion released The Night Of The Hunter in a deluxe DVD edition.

The Night Of The Hunter

Probably the biggest release of the week is this, the first and only feature directed by the renowned actor Charles Laughton, from 1955. The movie was not well received in its own time, which scared Laughton off of the director’s chair, to the great loss of cinema. At least we have this one weird, beautiful movie, which stars Robert Mitchum as a demented preacher (actually a serial killer by trade) who takes up with a widow (played by Shelley Winters) who he thinks knows where some stolen money is hidden. The woman’s two young children catch on to his intentions first, and what ensues is a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game between a monster and two innocents. It’s a remarkable movie, ominous and lyrical, which Laughton had the vision to shoot as a dream and a fairy tale. (Take a look through some of these amazing screen shots!) This movie has been tremendously influential to such prominent film students as Scorsese and Spielberg, and after a hard-to-find early run on DVD from MGM (which I am happy to own), the Criterion Collection has now adopted this special film and given it their prestige treatment. Highly, strongly recommended.

Here’s a trailer:

And here’s a picture of Parker Posey, just because that never hurts:

What I Watched 11.28.10: Land Of The Dead/ Tangled/ On Dangerous Ground.

 

What I Watched 11.27.10: Rolling Thunder/ Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

 Rolling Thunder.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

A Tribute: ROBERT RYAN (1909 – 1973).

 

When you get in a habit of writing about movies and their makers, you get in a secondary habit of writing memorial pieces to the dearly departed.  Looking back doesn’t have to be a melancholy process; it can also be an occasion to celebrate favorite film presences who always deserve the attention.

Today, November 11^th, is Robert Ryan’s birthday.  If you don’t know who he is, I’m about to help you with that.

Robert Ryan is one of the great unsung movie stars of the past century.  While it’s certainly fair to classify Robert Ryan as “unsung”, it may not be entirely accurate to generalize him as a movie star – while he had the occasional lead role and his headshot lines the walls of the Formosa alongside much more famous names, Ryan was more often a supporting player, a character actor, and very often, a heavy.

It’s somewhat fitting that today is Veteran’s Day, as Ryan served in the United States Marine Corps as a drill instructor during World War II.  He was also a boxer, a ranch hand, and an attempted playwright.  When he entered movies as a contract player at [initially] RKO Pictures, film noir was the name of the game, and Ryan was a perfect, if unlikely, fit for the genre.  He was equally adept at playing cops and killers, and so he did, for the majority of his career (sometimes even playing both at once).  As he started looking older, he started getting cast more often as generals and men out of step with changing times.  Never could he have been cast as an out-and-out weakling, but very rarely was he allowed to play a thoroughly decent man either.

I suggested that Robert Ryan was an unlikely fit for the dozens of tough-guy roles he played because he was in real life a pacifist and a prominent civil rights activist.  More than that, though, all you have to do is look at a still photograph of Robert Ryan to wonder how he ever got pigeonholed as a tough guy.  He had the heavyweight boxer’s frame and the dark brow of a tough guy, and clearly the integrity and the talent, but there is a kindness and an obvious sensitivity in his eyes that cannot be missed.  Maybe it’s that dichotomy that was so endlessly fascinating to directors and casting agents.  He looks immediately like a good guy; maybe that’s why it was so shocking and effective when he played against that initial impression.  That conflicted image is still potent and alive and born out by his many performances if you watch them today.

There’s not a ton written about Robert Ryan.  There are a couple scarce or out-of-print biographies, but otherwise I’ve just used the internet and David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary Of Film to write this piece.  The best place to learn about Robert Ryan, fittingly, is in his movies.  Here are some of my favorite Robert Ryan roles (a couple are probably already familiar to you, but some, like The Outfit, are harder to find, and I am still questing to see them myself!):

Crossfire (1947)

In this movie, Robert Ryan plays one of a group of American soldiers released home from the military.  One of them apparently killed another man, and Robert Mitchum and Robert Young play the investigating officers in the case.  The motive turns out to have been anti-Semitism, and the guilty man turns out to be Ryan’s character.  It’s a testament to his frightening talent that it’s not immediately apparent that Ryan is playing a hateful murderer, and that he’s never quite entirely, one-sidedly, despicable either.  The horrifying thing about racists is that they begin as people, before hatred twists them into the demons they are, and Robert Ryan resolutely illustrates this idea in this movie. 

Also, in a movie with a surplus of ‘Robert’s, including the venerable Mitchum, he stands out as the most memorable.

Act Of Violence (1948)

This is a quietly astounding movie, one which is not as well-remembered as it could be.  Directed by Fred Zinnemann (who also made High Noon and From Here To Eternity), Robert Ryan plays a crippled POW who returns to plague a local war hero, played by Van Heflin (from Shane), and his young wife, played by Janet Leigh (of Psycho fame).  Ryan is so furious in his pursuit that Heflin, in desperation, turns to some shady characters for protection.  Why is Ryan’s character so intent on wreaking vengeance on such an all-American hero (and his former friend)?  The answer to that question is truly surprising – it’s one of the great morality plays of the film noir era.  In Act Of Violence, Ryan literally appears from shadows; he’s intense, and scary, and ultimately, entirely within comprehension, as the kind of tormented figure that can emerge from wartime.

 

The Set-Up (1949)

The Set-Up is another film noir, this one directed by the versatile Robert Wise.  Though shot in film noir tradition with film noir themes of steep odds and tragic heroism, The Set-Up is primarily a sterling example of a boxing picture, and it is a widely-acknowledged inspiration for Martin Scorsese while shooting Raging Bull.  (I guarantee you that Quentin Tarantino saw it too, when considering Bruce Willis’ storyline in Pulp Fiction.)  In this movie, Robert Ryan plays an over-the-hill boxer who discovers that he’s expected to take a dive by a powerful gangster.  He’s a loser several times over, but he’s not about to lose for lack of trying – but there’s a price to standing up against the underworld.  That price is apparent through the pummeling Ryan takes throughout the movie.  He was seldom better cast – imposing enough to be credible as a professional boxer, but at heart, lacking of the drive and the viciousness of the most successful champions.  He’s too down-to-earth, too human for that.  Essential Robert Ryan.

The Racket (1951)

Another film noir, The Racket was actually a remake of an earlier, Howard Hughes produced, Academy Award nominated film.  Just goes to show that remakes aren’t always a terrible thing.  The Racket is a fairly straightforward story of an incorruptible cop who goes up against an otherwise unstoppable crime boss.  It’s a story at least as old as cinema itself, but one thing that distinguishes it  — besides the classic tough-guy dialogue — is the casting of Roberts Mitchum and Ryan, reteamed from Crossfire, as the two polar opposites.  Guess who plays who?  Actually, maybe it’s not necessarily that obvious.  Both stars had a tremendous capacity for menace as well as embattled decency, but in this case Mitchum is the cop and Ryan is the crook.  The Racket is a solid B-picture, maybe not as transcendent as some others of the same vintage, but for certain fans of studio-era crime movies, this could be considered the Heat of its day.

The Naked Spur (1953) 

For his role in this movie, I put Robert Ryan on my list of the top twenty movie villains of all time.  Already well-practiced at threatening Janet Leigh on screen (as in Act Of Violence), Ryan also gives Jimmy Stewart a run for his money in The Naked Spur, the third of the batch of five dark-themed Westerns that Stewart made with director Anthony Mann.  Those who only know Jimmy Stewart from the perception of the idealistic and square persona that he is believed to have embodied in several Frank Capra films (a perception that isn’t entirely accurate to begin with) would be surprised to see Stewart in the films he made with Mann (and in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for that matter) – Stewart plays a desperate, stern man who is determined to bring a notorious killer to justice, dead or alive.  Ryan plays the killer, of course, but this time without his usual shades of gray.  In this movie, he’s a schemer who thrives on the discord and chaos that he creates; pretty unrepentant.  If this were the only movie one ever saw Robert Ryan in, one might despise him on sight, so good is his performance. 

 

Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) 

Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin play Robert Ryan’s henchmen in this movie.  Let me repeat that:  Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin, in their imposing prime, play secondary bad guys to Robert Ryan’s lead bad guy.  Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin take orders from Robert Ryan.  And in this corner:  the ever-lovable Spencer Tracy, as a one-handed stranger who arrives at a small town run by the aforementioned gentlemen, stirring up secrets that they may kill to keep hidden.  All we can say to you, Spencer Tracy, is “good luck!” 

I’m being somewhat flippant about this John Sturges classic, which is a comparatively-lesser-known great American film of the 1950s – both a solid thriller and a significant political statement.  It’s just that so much has been written about Bad Day At Black Rock already, that it’s hard to add much besides additional praise.  Paul Thomas Anderson is just one of many contemporary directors who have cited this movie as a formative influence; I wonder how many contemporary onscreen bad guys have studied Robert Ryan’s performance in it!

 

The Professionals (1966)

Ten years later, Ryan’s friend Lee Marvin was a big movie star, and he, along with the eternally great Woody Strode, played supporting roles to Marvin and Burt Lancaster in The Professionals.  This is kind of an all-star super-team of old-school movie tough guys, the four of whom are hired by railroad tycoon Ralph Bellamy (you know him best from a weirdly similar role in Trading Places) to rescue his young wife from a marauding revolutionary who has taken her south of the border.  In the great Hollywood tradition of casting great stars in ethnically incongruous roles, Jack Palance plays the revolutionary, “Jesus Raza,” and the Italian bombshell Claudia Cardinale plays the Mexican-born “Maria,” an old flame of Raza’s, as it turns out. 

The Professionals is a great big-screen action classic with some fascinating sociopolitical subtext, but as an item of interest for Robert Ryan completists, it’s more of a fun sidebar than a necessity.  He and Woody Strode, as the horse wrangler and the team scout, are really playing strong support to the buddy-movie pairing of Marvin and Lancaster.  Ryan does play an interesting contrast to his frequent persona, though.  This is one of his most thoroughly decent roles – Ryan’s horse expert is tender and protective of every horse the group encounters.  He’s one of those guys who seems to care more about animals than people, and who can blame him, in a movie where one species is clearly more consistently trustworthy than the other.

 

The Dirty Dozen (1967)

What can I tell you about The Dirty Dozen that you don’t already know?  Hopefully, not much.  This is a man’s-man’s classic, featuring some of the screen’s toughest tough guys in a story of an elite squad of criminals and killers who are recruited by Lee Marvin himself to fight the Nazis.  My one regret about The Dirty Dozen, which reunites Marvin with Borgnine and Ryan, is that the latter two aren’t on the team – instead, they play a bureaucrat and an officious rival, respectively.  As Colonel Breed, Ryan definitely gets saddled with the most thankless role (well, second to those Nazi creeps, anyway).  He’s the Walter Peck.  More accurately, if you’ve seen Stripes, he’s the John Larroquette.  He’s still on our side, technically, but he’s a total prick.  Not the best movie to be a fan of Robert Ryan in, but otherwise, The Dirty Dozen is an action-movie essential.

 

The Wild Bunch (1969)

The Wild Bunch is one of the greatest American films, without hesitation.  It’s arguably rebel-director Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece.  It’s one of those classics that doesn’t feel like homework; it feels like a still-living document.  It feels dynamic, alive.  If it’s that, though, it’s more like the flare-ups of a dying bonfire.  It’s the last mission to end all last missions.  It’s one of the best-ever examples of possibly my favorite genre of film, the badass-old-guy movie.  The Wild Bunch captures a group of movie actors at a moment closer to the ends of their careers than the start.  (Except for Ernest Borgnine, of course, who’s still a fully active badass at 93 years of age.)  This movie is notorious for setting new levels of onscreen bloodshed and gore, but that reputation obscures its true legacy as a melancholy recording of the twilight years of the Western.

In a film full of unforgettable performances, Robert Ryan gives arguably the most affecting one.  Certainly he’s my personal favorite character, as Deke Thornton, the bounty hunter so designated by the railroad tycoons (them again) who are blackmailing him against his freedom to hunt down his fellow outlaws, most of whom – specifically William Holden’s Pike Bishop — he used to run with in their glory days.  (I’m not sure if it was screenwriter Walon Green’s contribution or Peckinpah’s that makes The Wild Bunch a movie that has some of the best character names ever.)

The Wild Bunch was one of Robert Ryan’s last screen performances.  At this point in his career, he was 60 years old, but looked significantly older (perhaps due to the lung cancer that eventually claimed his life in 1973, a year after his wife died of the same disease.)  The life lived shows in every moment of the performance.  Thornton is a neutered pit bull on a leash, forced to track down his old partners by a venal corporate monolith.  If he were free to roam, would he join back up with Pike and the others?  What would be the point?  Those guys are pretty clearly doomed, one way or another.  There at the dusty, wind-swept border, at the end of a violent life whose most hard-lived days are well in the past, what is the point of going on?  And if you do, then which direction do you go?  Nobody says anything remotely like this in the movie, by the way – it’s all there on Robert Ryan’s face, all of the above and much more.  His face was his character, and he knew how to wield it like a mighty instrument.  You can watch and re-watch The Wild Bunch for many great reasons, but I find myself watching it more often than not for Robert Ryan.

So there’s a start; some enthusiastic recommendations to get acquainted with one of the great film careers.  You can go further, or choose different movies, but whichever way you choose, you won’t go wrong.