CATCH A CLASSIC
Robert Ryan Westerns
TCM, Beginning at 7 p.m.
Although in real life a pacifist who supported social causes like the efforts to fight racial discrimination, Robert Ryan was renowned for his appearances in violent film genres like war movies and Westerns and for his ability to embody bigoted villains whom he would find “totally despicable,” as he explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1959 during one of the frequent times he spoke about this dichotomy between his onand offscreen lives. That recognition may have been part of what helped Ryan portray such unforgettable personalities, but whatever the reason, you can enjoy the star in three of his memorable Western roles as villainous, or at least amoral, characters in tonight’s triple feature on Turner Classic Movies. The lineup starts with director Anthony Mann’s 1953 The Naked Spur (pictured), which boasts an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom that follows a bounty hunter (James Stewart, in his third Western collaboration with Mann) in pursuit of a murderous outlaw (Ryan). Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell co-star. Next, in Day of the Outlaw (1959), Ryan plays a ruthless cattleman at war with the homesteaders in the town he helped establish, who finds himself fighting to save the community when a gang of outlaws (led by Burl Ives) rides in and threatens to wipe it out. Finally, co-writer/ director Sam Peckinpah’s Oscar-nominated Revisionist Western The Wild Bunch (1969) finds Ryan, in one of his later roles, portraying a bounty hunter working for a corrupt railroad agent, who leads a posse in pursuit of the titular gang of aging outlaws looking for one last big score before the 20th century fully settles in and leaves them obsolete. William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O’Brien, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates also star.