Ryan O’Neal Was The Great Gatsby Of ‘70s Cinema: Impossibly Handsome, Entirely Untrustworthy

Ryan O’Neal was the great American cypher: good-looking, facile, capable in blue-collar pursuits, and largely interchangeable in the dreamlife of this country. He was the perfect mate in Love Story and the perfect mourner, too, his Oliver an Ivy League son of privilege, essentially unremarkable, who is taken by a a young woman with all of the soulfulness and depth that he isn’t capable of exhibiting. He is Jay Gatsby: a fabulist of indeterminate origin and questionable intention. He’s not calculating; he’s like milk left open in a crowded refrigerator. He will take on the flavor of whatever he’s closest to: the perfect supplement and never entirely satisfying as the main course. But he found fame and, for a while, extraordinary success under the guidance of artists who understood his specific appeal. When matched with the right partner and the kind of aspirational material that would make his aptitude inspirational in the way the success of an “every” man, he could become inspirational, even transcendent. In the right vehicle, he was the perfect vessel for an audience’s suture. In the right vehicle, we were all Nick Carraways blinded by the easy glamour and the perhaps not entirely-deserved success that O’Neal represented — the born-on-third-base, won-the-lottery, I deserve this that is the foundation for the myth of the American Dream. What other ethos could more inflame inheritors of a nation founded on Manifest Destiny?

I think that’s why Ryan O’Neal always comes off as a little shady, even (or especially) in roles where he was meant to be straight-laced. His narrow eyes a little too shifty, his surprise and outrage a little too rehearsed, he was too pretty to really trust and too charming to entirely dislike. I first saw him in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, led there after I’d watched The Bad News Bears on videocassette and fallen in love with Ryan’s daughter Tatum, all spunk and dirt in a pixie cut. The real-life chemistry between father and daughter was real, but Ryan’s character Moses Pray, a Bible salesman conman using his daughter as part of his hustle, was not. He’s unctuousness manifest, flop sweat in human form. When he tells his tiny partner-in-crime that he’s got scruples, the kill shot Tatum delivers is so deadly precisely because it hits O’Neal exactly where he lives: “I don’t know what that is, but if you got ‘em, I sure bet they belong to somebody else.”

She won the Oscar for identifying the mechanism for her father’s stardom, the youngest to do so. Naturally, her dad declined to attend the ceremony.

After this brief period of winning from bona fide cultural sensation Love Story (1970) through to maybe disliked-at-the-time but eventual cult classic The Driver (1978), O’Neal became better known for his tumultuous personal life: his drug addiction, his temper spilling over into very public brawls, his tempestuous romantic life including allegations of abuse from Farrah Fawcett, finally Tatum’s 2004 autobiography that told a sordid tale of a lost childhood and a father out of control. Gatsby on the screen, O’Neal became Gatsby in his life, too. He was undone by the public that sought to deify him. The only thing we love more than building effigies is burning them to the ground.

But for this brief window he worked with Bogdanovich three times, Walter Hill twice (once off his screenplay for The Thief Who Came To Dinner, once for The Driver), with Richard Attenborough and of course with Stanley Kubrick. Roger Ebert called O’Neal’s casting in Barry Lyndon “bold.”  He said of O’Neal that he was “not a particularly charismatic actor… self-pitying, narcissistic, on the verge of tears,” he nails him as “a man to whom things happen” and also “ideal for the role.” Ebert was right on every count: O’Neal had a particular talent for an appealing churlishness, a penchant for passive tantruming that found him so often in the subservient position whether as Thackeray’s amoral fool, reduced at the end of the film to one leg and a humiliating annual pension managed by his estranged wife and a son who despises him. That, or as bumbling musicologist Dr. Howard Bannister in What’s Up, Doc?, bespectacled and gawky and at the complete mercy of Barbra Streisand at peak category 4 hurricane. He was so good as the milquetoast foil for Babs, he gave it another go in crowd-pleaser The Main Event seven years later. I love him in What’s Up, Doc?, though, really I love him in all three of the pictures he shot with Bogdanovich (the other after Paper Moon is the underestimated Nickelodeon), a director who fully understood O’Neal’s charms as an impossibly handsome nebbish you rooted for for maybe no other reason than he’s good looking and initially harmless, and that possibly you won’t feel so bad when his luck runs out because you didn’t have that much invested in him anyway. 

My favorite film of his is Walter Hill’s The Driver in which O’Neal’s unnamed hero is a driver-for-hire for LA noir’s late-night underworld. He uses cars as wardrobe and the driving of them as character. A man of little words, he falls in with a beautiful woman and trusts her only to find himself after everything abandoned, in the hands of the police, holding an empty bag in a bus station. Before that, though, there’s an extended chase where a hotshot kid tests his skills against The Driver… and loses. Rather than kill him for his impertinence, though, The Driver lets him go. It’s in this moment that O’Neal revealed himself to me as maythe mbe more than a hollow representation of an aspirational ideal. There’s real sadness in his eyes as he lowers the pistol he has trained on the upstart, this pretender to The Driver’s heavy and meaningless crown: an understanding communicated by those clear, blue eyes that the world will catch up to this younger version of himself in the same way that it has to him, and killing him now might be a mercy, but then the kid would miss the best years of his life.

In The Thief Who Came to Dinner, a television movie Hill wrote a few years earlier, he wrote O’Neal as this character whom someone describes as “too pretty to be any good.” For him to come back a couple of years later with this role in The Driver (after Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson, still harboring a beef after his collaboration with Hill on Hard Times, passed) is testament I think to both how Hill envisioned Driver as composed mostly of surfaces — but also for his belief that O’Neal could carry this last scene with the hard-won experience of knowing how being seen as shallow and pretty is a terrible recipe for happiness and longevity. Gatsby, after all, dies in a swimming pool.

Unlike Gatsby, though, O’Neal survived long enough to write a third act to his life. He was at Farrah Fawcett’s side when she died of cancer, the two of them reconciled late in life from their tumultuous tabloid affair; he was the center of his family and children again when he died, mending bridges with Tatum by owning his failures and fighting for a path forward; he was at the end a man of depth surrounded by people who loved him. His last great roles include an eyeblink at a garden party in Terrence Malick’s gorgeous adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress, Knight of Cups, where he is a relic of an artificial past, the cast-in-stone fossil outline of a creature once powerful and alive. His good looks set and ossified now into descriptors like “dignified” and “wizened,” I don’t think O’Neal was ever as vain as his characters were – I wonder if he began to see his gifts as curses.

The late role I think of the most with O’Neal, though, is as millionaire Gregory Stark in Jake Kasdan’s Zero Effect (1998). A rapist, an industrialist, vain, vile, he hires idiosyncratic private investigator Daryl Zero (Bill Pullman) to find the identity of a blackmailer only to, like Oedipus, discover that the source of all of his troubles is his own hubris. In the last moments of the film, Stark finds his tormentor, a young woman he’s wronged terribly, in the middle of a planetarium show. Shocked, he has a heart attack and his victim is forced to be his savior. I think we all hope the people we’ve most injured will forgive us before we die. We hope they will recognize the work we’ve done to be better human beings and that this is enough to begin to make the pain we’ve inflicted at least meaningful if never satisfactorily redressed for them.

Ryan O’Neal died on December 7, 2023 and his son Patrick said “My dad passed away peacefully today, with his loving team by his side supporting him and loving him as he would us.” He earned this quiet place to sit with us after a blessed life marked by self-destruction and hardship. For all the false starts and dead ends, he lived the best version of the dream after all.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.