Sea, Sex, Sun & Sadism: Robert Ryan Meets Herman Melville in BILLY BUDD (Peter Ustinov, 1962) by Frank Howard

About twenty years ago, I was on a Robert Ryan kick (he's still one of my all-time favorites).  After watching countless noirs and Westerns, I needed to get the smell of horse dung out of my nostrils and yearned for sunlight and sea air, so I rented Peter Ustinov's 1962 adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd  Ustinov also stars as Captain Fairfax, along with Terence Stamp (in his film debut) as Billy and Ryan as Master-at-Arms Claggart.  As I watched I started to wonder why Ustinov cast Ryan in the film.  He was the best screen villain around, so the role of the evil and sadistic Claggart may have made sense, but Ryan sticks out like a sore thumb.  The boat is populated mostly by trained British actors and there is Ryan, with his flat and nasal Midwestern "A" sauntering through his part.  He is, as always, effortlessly brilliant in the movie, it's one of his major achievements, but surely there were a dozen fine English actors Ustinov could've chosen.  Perhaps Ustinov cast him because he's so different than the others in the film and wanted to emphasize the character's apartness?  I think something else may have been going through the director’s mind.  I'm betting he saw Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955), where Ryan plays Sandy Dawson, a crime boss with homosexual tendencies.  Apparently Ustinov, confronted with Melville and all the gay subtext in the book, saw no one else but Ryan in the role, he was his first and only choice.

In House of Bamboo Ryan is especially close with one of his henchmen, Griff.  He refers to Griff as his "ichiban" (number one boy) and their scenes together hint at something more than a platonic relationship.  This is mostly in Ryan's playing, not the script, which suggests this aspect of the character was the actor's creation, not Fuller's.  New gang member Eddie (Robert Stack) starts to get a little too much attention from Ryan and his "number one boy" gets crazy with jealousy.  Ryan murders his troublesome ichiban in the bathtub, cradles his head in his hands, and tenderly strokes his hair. 

The intermingling of sex and violence is in another great Robert Ryan film, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952), where he plays Jim Wilson, a cop who also happens to be a sadist (fancy that).  There is a famous scene with Ryan in a hotel room questioning a suspect when the man instructs Ryan: "Hit me…HIT me." (Ryan enthusiastically complies with his request).  Later he's alone with some trampy snitch named Myrna and she shows him the bruises her boyfriend had given her.  She suggests Ryan would do the same to her.  He slowly leans in, his mask-like face an inch from hers and cloaked in shadow, and whispers "That's right, sister".  A slow fade out followed by a shot of Ryan descending her stairs and adjusting his clothes makes it implicit that some rather rough sex had occurred.   

By 1962 Robert Ryan (1911-1973) had already had a long and celebrated career filled with scenes like these.  When a script called for something more than a mere bad guy, filmmakers were on the phone with Ryan's agent.  The real Robert Ryan couldn't have been more different than the characters he played.  He was the most liberal man in Hollywood, a vocal supporter of gay rights (before the word "gay" was even in use) and civil rights -- he was best buds with Martin Luther King Jr. long before "I have a dream".  He was deeply Catholic and by all accounts seems to have been a loving father and husband.  He was also a serious drinker, but one who never stepped foot on a stage while under the influence. His alcoholism never got in the way of his acting.  He had "black moods" that when he didn't have the catharsis of work to dispel, he medicated with copious amounts of booze.  He'd lock himself in his study at The Dakota (the setting of Rosemary’s Baby) and would work through what he needed to work through with the help of friends like Jim Beam and Jack Daniels (Ryan sublet his apartment to John Lennon and Yoko Ono and, of course, Lennon was killed in front of that 19^th Century beehive).  

What were his demons?  Was Ryan hinting at something buried in his person that he knew he'd only be able to reveal within the shelter of playing a fictional psychopath?  Something has always stuck with me about Ryan, he approached Richard Brooks about buying the film rights to The Brick Foxhole (1944), one of the first (if not the first) books about gay-bashing.  A film adaptation of the book was eventually made as Crossfire (1947), but much to Ryan's disappointment homophobia was replaced by the safer and more fashionable topic of anti-semitism (footage from the death camps was still fresh in moviegoers’ minds).  Ryan is in the film, in fact he received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the deplorable murderer Monty.  You view the scenes of Ryan's character picking up an innocent Jewish (gay) guy in a bar and taking him back to his place, and that horrifying moment when Monty turns from seducer to executioner, and it's clear Ryan is playing the Monty from the novel, not the screenplay.

Melville's Billy Budd is an incomplete novel and is mostly interpreted as a parable about absolute good (Budd) and absolute evil (Claggart).  The Budd character is Christ-like, someone who is punished for his kindness and sacrifices himself for the betterment of his shipmates.  It's also his most openly gay book, which is an achievement, for if you've read Moby Dick you know that book is awash in sperm.  Billy Budd's overtly homoerotic passages may be the reason why it was never published in Melville's lifetime.  That Claggart wants to destroy Budd simply because he must destroy anything that is good and pure is an interesting concept in itself.  However, if the bachelor Claggart wants to fuck Billy, or is deeply in love with him and cannot face his own sexual urges, his desire to kill him makes more sense and has higher dramatic stakes.  In a passage from the book, Billy accidentally spills some soup on a newly cleaned floor:

Claggart, the master-at-arms, official rattan in hand, happened to be passing along...Stepping over [the soup], he was proceeding on his way without comment, since the matter was nothing to take notice of under the circumstances, when he happened to observe who it was that had done the spilling...Pausing, he was about to ejaculate something hasty at the sailor, but checked himself, and pointing down to the streaming soup, playfully tapped him from behind with his rattan, saying in a low musical voice peculiar to him at times, “Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it, too!"

Later, a bitter Claggart is caught checking Billy out:

When Claggart’s unobserved glance happened to light on belted Billy...that glance would follow the cheerful sea Hypersion with a settled meditative and melancholy expression, his eyes strangely suffused with incipient feverish tears. Then would Claggart look like the man of sorrows. Yes, and sometimes the melancholy expression would have in it a touch of soft yearning, as if Claggart could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban. But this was evanescence, and quickly repented of, as it were, by an immitigable look, pinching and shriveling the visage into the momentary semblance of a wrinkled walnut.

 It is clear that homosexual desire is in play, but a film in 1962 could only hint at such things.  So Robert Ryan was the actor chosen to fill in the gaps.  Ustinov was convinced that Ryan could convey the neurotic homosexual undertones in the source material that the script wasn't allowed to, and to make sure that the HMS Avenger was the most miserable place on earth.  Everyone from the captain on down falls under the spell of Terence Stamp's Billy (Stamp is alarmingly beautiful in the film, the camera drools over him).  The meeting of cinema's most terrifying actor and cinema's most beautiful actor culminates in the film's most overtly homoerotic scene.  One evening, after a day of mentally and physically torturing the men on the boat, Claggart is on deck looking at the stars.  Billy approaches him softly:

Billy:  Would it be alright if I stayed topside a little bit to watch the water?

Claggart:  I suppose a handsome sailor may do many things forbidden to his mess-mates.

Billy:  I know some of the men are fearful of you, hate you. But I told them — you can't be as they think you are.

Claggart:  Why not, pray?

Billy:  No man can take pleasure in cruelty.

Claggart:  Tell me,  in all ignorance, do you dare understand me, then?

Billy:  I think so, sir.  I think that sometimes you hate yourself. I was thinking, sir, the nights are lonely. Perhaps I could talk with you between watches when you've nothing else to do.

Claggart:  Lonely. What do you know of loneliness?

Billy:  Them's alone that want to be.

Claggart:  Nights are long…conversation helps pass the time.

Billy:  Can I talk to you again, then? It would mean a lot to me.

Claggart:  Perhaps to me, too.

It is then that Ryan's expression changes and he realizes he's let his guard down.

Claggart:  Oh, no. You would charm me too, huh? Get away.

Billy:  Sir?

Claggart:  GET AWAY!

The softening of Ryan's face, then his bewildered and angry reaction, make this staggering moment explode in gay panic.  Again it seems clear that Ryan was playing the Claggart of the book and not the screenplay.  The dominant Claggart eventually prompts Budd, the object of his desire, to murder him.  Ryan's facial expression the moment before he dies is priceless.  An orgasmic smile comes across his face.  A smile of relief, or a smile that says to Billy, "now you're fucked".  Or both.   

Frank Howard is an actor & louche ranconteur of the first order. His early adolescent charm landed him roles in Sixteen Candles, Sister Act 2, One More Saturday Night, That Was Then...This is Now & Clockstoppers. Now he mainly luxuriates by the pool in much-too-short shorts & gives bourbon its due.