Robert Ryan

Robert Ryan spent roughly three decades making Hollywood uncomfortable — and that's not a complaint. Born in Chicago on November 11, 1909, he came up through theater before landing in films during the early 1940s, and what he brought to the screen wasn't the easy charisma the studio system usually rewarded. It was something harder to name. A coiled tension. The sense that whatever his character was saying out loud, something uglier was running underneath it.

His breakthrough came in the late 1940s, when he delivered one of the most disturbing performances in postwar American cinema as the antisemitic soldier Monty in Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (1947). Ryan earned an Academy Award nomination for that role, and what's striking is how little he relied on scenery-chewing to make the character land — the menace was almost quiet, which made it worse. He followed that with a run of noirs and westerns that confirmed he wasn't a one-picture wonder: The Set-Up (1949), in which he played an aging boxer being thrown to the wolves by his own manager, is arguably his most complete performance, a film that runs in near real-time and never lets him off the hook for a single minute of it. He won the Best Actor prize at Cannes that year. Not a bad run for someone the studios never quite knew what to do with.

The thing nobody mentions is how consistently Ryan worked against type within a type. He kept getting cast as antagonists and hardcases, but he didn't play them as villains in the conventional sense — they were men with reasons, however warped, and that's what made them stick. Directors like Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, and Sam Peckinpah understood this and used it well. He moved through westerns, war pictures, and crime films without ever seeming to repeat himself, and his collaborations with Peckinpah in particular — both men drawn to stories about obsolescence and violence — produced some of the most textured work of his later career. The Wild Bunch (1969) is the obvious landmark there, Ryan's Deke Thornton caught between loyalty to men he used to ride with and an obligation to the law that's already left him behind. It's a thankless position, dramatically speaking, and Ryan made it the most interesting thing in the film.

By the early 1970s, he was still working at a pace that younger actors might've envied. Lawman (1971) — a lean, revisionist western directed by Michael Winner — gave him another late-career role worth examining. He plays a rancher whose men are being hunted down by a marshal (Burt Lancaster) who won't bend on the law regardless of circumstance. Ryan's character isn't exactly a villain either; he's a man trying to protect what he's built, operating by a code that the film doesn't entirely condemn. Lawman doesn't get talked about as much as it should, maybe because it arrived in the shadow of bigger westerns, but Ryan's performance is one of the reasons to seek it out.

He died in July 1973, which means Lawman stands close to the end of his filmography — a career that ran from wartime B-pictures to some of the defining revisionist westerns of the New Hollywood era. Hard to say if any actor of his generation covered that much tonal ground without losing coherence. Most didn't. Ryan did.