When they finally kill Robert Ryan’s crime-syndicate leader, Mailer, at the end of The Outfit, Ryan’s in his wide-legged triangle stance when the aging star takes a bullet to the back and gut. Accentuated by his black pants against the light wall-to-wall apartment, his right leg twists and turns his foot up and inward as his posture fatally breaks. Just before the bullets rip, Ryan tries to make a deal one last time. He tries to appear confident, because that’s really all that he has—his physicality is an image, not something he can act on. When his words fail him, he’s shot down in an instant.
The film where this aspect of Ryan’s insecure machismo is most present is John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock, where a one-armed army veteran, Macreedy (Spencer Tracy), hops off a streamliner in a practically lost-in-time desert town in search of a man named Komoko. What he finds as a bunch of coy and hostile locals, led by the bad-mannered Reno Smith (Ryan), who have something to hide that they know Macreedy has come to dig up. Smith is accompanied by two of Hollywood’s best heavies, Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine, who act as the brawling muscle to Smith’s intimidations. Smith, instead, chooses to control the environment by looming, like when Macreedy is sitting outside the gas station and Ryan puts his leg up and stands over him while yelling about how he would’ve gone to the war but couldn’t and he blamed his neighbor Komoko for Pearl Harbor.
Smith is the perfect Robert Ryan character: overbearing, insecure, and ultimately sniveling. Smith’s a man with no true principles, just a way of life built on resentment. Psychologically, the archetypical Ryan character is the American reactionary, the conservative born not through some concept of preservation (even though he will declare the “old ways” of doing things as an excuse for his violence), but one masquerading as something formidable to mask his impotence.
What’s interesting about Ryan the actor is that Ryan the man couldn’t have been further from his characters. Ryan planted himself on the right side of the great Hollywood political debate in the post-war years by being staunchly anti-McCarthy, and was a strong proponent for Civil Rights. Perhaps because of this conviction, Ryan was particularly attuned to the personal inadequacies of his contemporary conservatives, seeing them not for their espoused (veiled) values, but their aggrieved spitefulness that drives them only to a path of destruction.
Macreedy sees Smith for his racism quickly, and the plot pointing towards the only Japanese man in a small town going missing makes it an easy guess as to what happened to Komoko and why. However, it’s not just the basics of Smith’s racism that drive him towards murder. As Macreedy finds out, Smith sold Komoko land thinking it was useless without water, but Komoko miraculously made a working well out there. This made Smith angry enough that he killed him in a drunken rage—Komoko, the Japanese man who was supposed to be lesser than him, Smith, the guy who couldn’t pass the physical to enlist in the Marines, had humiliated him by accomplishing something he couldn’t.
Bad Day at Black Rock is a shocking Hollywood film because of the nerve it’s striking is still so prevalent today—it’s an undercurrent in American conservatism that’s becoming as dangerous as it ever was in living memory. And now the country’s run by Mailers that are recruiting the Reno Smiths of the country (those who couldn’t cut it in the military or even their local sheriff’s department), and sending them off un-vetted to go terrorize all the people still trying to live their lives.
Some have described current paradigm as “a revolt of the unemployable against the employed,” where the people who felt they were nebulously wronged by some liberal-leftist-communist-Marxist ideology (whatever word they want to use which doesn’t have any basis in what they mean—just as how “conservative” in American parlance has little to do with act of “conservation”—and instead they’re just stand-ins and false synonyms for anything they’re opposed to) now are armed by the state, given impunity, student loan forgiveness, and $50,000 signing bonus to crack open the First Amendment’s skull after busting open the Fourth’s door without a warrant. It’s a political order built up like the cocksure posture of a Robert Ryan character, attempting to project strength when his words keep revealing how much of a miserable failure and a coward he is underneath it all.