Robert Ryan

Ryan in "The Professionals" is, I think, rather like the Anthony Quayle character in "The Guns of Navarone" (1961) another "men on a mission" movie, but set in WWII.

Quayle in "Guns" and Ryan here play men with a certain expertise who, nonetheless, get hurt (Quayle, falling down a cliff) or sick (Ryan, from the desert dust and heat), aren't up to physical par with the other men on the team, and in some ways endanger the mission.

It adds some suspense...one member of the team simply isn't as good as the others. It also adds some "reality" -- not all of us could perform on such a mission, so we sympathize a little with Ryan.

Also: Ryan, the horse expert, loves horses, and won't shoot the first group of them left behind by the banditos, which leads to trouble...

As for Robert Ryan, the actor:

He was very sick in the last years of his career, and his face had, I thought, a very handsome, wounded, sad grace. It worked for "The Professionals" here,and it worked incredibly well for "The Wild Bunch." He was always a great actor, but particularly good near his end, when he looked so weary. (Remember him as the jerk general versus Lee Marvin in "The Dirty Dozen" of 1967?) He's great in his last film, "The Iceman Cometh," with Lee Marvin (again!)

Still, its true: the "action men" in "The Professionals" are the other three guys, especially the "old buddies" Lancaster and Marvin.

Give a look at Bad Day at Black Rock, I think you'll see a little more of Ryan's abilities there with a more developed character.

I am an admirer of Bob Ryan. I think he had all the elements to be a successful leading man, but it seems to me that he mostly played supporting parts to other big names. Ryan was very tall, handsome, built well. He was a Shakespearian-trained actor who always knew what he was doing in front of the camera. Like another actor I enjoy, Jack Palance, Ryan unfortunately didn't have what the studio heads felt necessary to headline a film.

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I am collecting DVDs of Film Noirs. Robert Ryan cut his teeth in them! I have two starring him so far. I was surprised because the movies he starred in during the '60's when I started watching new features, he seemed like the straight officer-type as someone said. Someone to rebel against. Hardly the type of character he started out as. But, then, Cagney became Yankee Doodle and Widmark became a prosecuting attorney in Judgement at Nurenburg. Actors grow up.

"Two more swords and I'll be Queen of the Monkey People." Roseanne

"The Professionals" was one among many movies before and after, Western and non-Western, where the action protagonists were groups of men. "The Magnificent Seven," "The Great Escape," "The Dirty Dozen," even the Rat Pack films are some of them. What I think their audiences--Sixties audiences--demanded of each character in these movies, maybe because "The Magnificent Seven" first gave it formula, was that he be not only a stellar specialist like a munitions man, a "professional," but also endowed with charisma and hipness. New stars came out of it; think Steve McQueen or Charles Bronson. Robert Ryan's horse-handling character departs from the pattern. We get a final shot of the professional foursome, a shot that implies each is master of his specialty, but Ryan does not rise to that. Yet what he does not rise to is not necessarily the movie on its own story terms but instead the genre of which "The Professionals" seems to be a part.

Robert Ryan is one of my favourite actors, period. He simply wasn't granted as much screen-time as Marvin, Lancaster or Strode were. Lancaster's character was perhaps the most entertaining of the quartet and was given the best lines, Marvin is adept at playing these sort of gritty, resourceful, tough-guy roles and was good to watch and Strode played an intriguing character too. On the contrary, Ryan's character was a little colorless by comparison, I agree with the consensus here. He's introduced as a feisty, fiery type - he punches someone out within a minute of first appearing in the film, but for the remainder of the picture, he seems a sort of repressed, slightly dour man. Ryan was excellent given what he had to work with, and whilst his character was underwritten, I still found him likeable. And that has to attributed to Ryan's acting ability - he's excellent at playing these world-weary types.