Robert Ryan haas an eventful and interesting bio that accounts for his Noir roles . His hard and beatened face give new dimensions and meaning to Noir. Note the below:

Born into a lace-curtain Irish family in Chicago, Ryan saw his father lose most of his money in the 1929 market crash. He attended a Jesuit high school, then went on to be a champion boxer at Dartmouth before bumming around for a few years in the lean 1930s. “I spent seven years of vagabonding,” he said, “working at this and that and not being very interested in anything I was doing.” This hard-knock education gave him a real-world knowledge in his face and body that most actors lack, so that he was never really a young-looking man on screen, even in his breakthrough, a queasy Ginger Rogers vehicle called Tender Comrade (1943) that later got its writer, Dalton Trumbo, in trouble for injecting “Communist propaganda” into the script (at one point Ginger says, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy.”). Ryan joined the army soon after and became a drill sergeant, which surely effected his later work as an actor, and he came out of the war as a man with pacifist leanings. These ideals were backed up by his marriage to Jungian scholar and novelist Jessica Cadwalader; together, they had three children and even started a progressive elementary school in Hollywood.

Note his film credit “Crossfire”

QUote
Ryan was a socially conscious liberal, but he had to swallow his principles a few times during his stint as a contract player at RKO, appearing in the dread 1949 Howard Hughes project I Married a Communist (later renamed The Woman on Pier 13) and several standard war movies where he looks distinctly uncomfortable mouthing pro-military sentiments. But in Crossfire (1947, right), a well-meaning, effective noir film about an anti-Semitic murder, Ryan resoundingly established himself as the screen’s pre-eminent player of dyed-in-the-wool bigots. As Montgomery, a chummy bully with a lust for discipline and an unreasoning hatred of Jews, Ryan sketches in the barroom stink of this man’s mind in odious detail, and he was so vivid in this part, which won him his only Oscar nomination, that he played periodic reprises of it for the rest of his life: as a gun-toting, small-town hater of the Japanese in Bad Day at Black Rock (1954), and then a truly awful hater of blacks in Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). (Surely if he’d lived he would have played a hater and killer of gays, too.) A lifelong leftist and fighter for civil rights, Ryan was forever scourging right-wing intolerance in his best bigot roles, and surely playing these men full out cost him personally, at times. “I have been in films pretty well everything I am dedicated to fighting against,” he once said, a touch wearily.

Tony said,”Eddie Muller announced at Noir City 7 that The Film Noir Foundation together with the UCLA Film and Television Archive will restore Anthony Mann’s lost 1944 b-noir Strangers in the Night.” Wow! This is really great news!…because next to Hitchcock, Mann is my second fav(orite) director.
Tks,
DarkCityDame :)