''Saturday's Hero'' In April 1950,
Columbia Pictures sent a unit to San Francisco to look for some athletes to appear in a film they were making called ''
Saturday's Hero'' (1951). Aldo's brother Guido saw an item in the
San Francisco Chronicle about the auditions and asked his brother to drive him there. Director
David Miller was more interested in Ray than in his brother because of his voice; also, Ray was comfortable talking to the camera owing to his political experience. He later recalled, "They... said, 'What's wrong with your voice kid? Are you sick? If you're sick you don't belong here.' I said, 'No, no, no, this is the way I've always spoken.' And they loved it." Ray worked on the film between the primary and general elections. He was elected constable on June 6. "I was 23 and a sort of child bride to the voters," he later said. Ray said Spencer Tracy told him: "Kid, I don't know what it is that you got, and I got, and some of us have, but you can work in this business forever." "That," said Ray, "made me feel good, you know, coming from a guy like him. I never bowed down to anybody at Columbia or anywhere else, but my overall idea was, I'll do whatever they tell me because it's their business, not mine, and I've got to learn it." However, other good roles followed instead. "Because of Harry, all my first pictures were big hits, tremendously popular", Ray recalled. Ray was loaned to Warner Bros to appear in
Battle Cry (1955), which was directed by
Raoul Walsh, who would become one of Ray's favorite directors. The film was a box-office hit—probably the most popular movie Ray ever made—although it led to his being typecast. "In some ways the tough soldier role locked me in", reflected Ray later. "There were no sophisticated roles for me. I never seemed to get past master sergeant, though I always thought of myself as upper echelon."
Clash with Columbia Ray was meant to appear in
My Sister Eileen (1955) as The Wreck, but he walked off the set, claiming his role was too small, and had to be replaced by
Dick York.
Battle Cry was a big hit at the box office, so Columbia gave Ray a lead role as a sergeant who marries a Japanese girl in
Three Stripes in the Sun (originally
The Gentle Wolfhound) (1955) and then loaned him to Paramount for ''
We're No Angels'' (also 1955), in which he starred with
Humphrey Bogart,
Peter Ustinov,
Basil Rathbone,
Leo G. Carroll, and
Joan Bennett. Ray was profiled in
Sight & Sound as follows: Aldo Ray's technical advance in the four years since
The Marrying Kind enables him now to work in subtler, more economical degree; there is an authoritative reserve and, still remarkably intact, the original rare lack of ostentation. All the same, his career seems to have become a nomadic drifting round the studios looking for the right kind of film. The good humour, the lenitive smile, the frog in the throat voice betray nothing of the disappointment the actor must feel after such exciting beginnings under Cukor's guidance. Ray was meant to appear in
Jubal but refused because Columbia had made a profit on his loan-outs for
Battle Cry and ''We're No Angels'' but not paid Ray a bonus;
Rod Steiger took the role instead. Ray was put on suspension. Ray then refused to appear in
Beyond Mombasa (1956) because he did not want to go on location. This led to his being replaced by
Cornel Wilde and put under suspension again. However, the situation was resolved when he agreed to make
Nightfall (1957), playing an artist who encounters a pair of ruthless bank robbers. In 1956, in between appearances in
Three Stripes In The Sun and
Men in War, Ray worked in radio as a personality and announcer at hit music station
WNDR in Syracuse, New York. A photo of Ray with a colleague in the WNDR studios, taken as part of a station promotional package, survives and can be found on a WNDR tribute website. By 1957, in any event, he had left WNDR and the radio business and returned to Hollywood. On January 31, 1957, Ray appeared on
NBC's
The Ford Show Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford. He and
Tennessee Ernie Ford did a comedy skit from a
foxhole.
Two with Anthony Mann Columbia loaned Ray out to Security Pictures (who released through
United Artists) for him to appear in
Men in War (1957) opposite
Robert Ryan; it was directed by
Anthony Mann, who became Ray's favorite director. Ray was given 5% of the profits, which he later estimated at $70,000. Instead Ray appeared in an adaptation of
David Goodis's novel
Nightfall (1957) directed by
Jacques Tourneur and
The Naked and the Dead (1958), an adaptation of
Norman Mailer's novel directed by
Raoul Walsh. It was produced by
Paul Gregory, who said: Aldo Ray was drunk the entire time. He was a very sweet guy, but he was gone. He drank drank drank. Raoul Walsh would say, "Let's get him in the morning 'cause in the afternoon it's over."... I just could not get used to it, actors who got all this money and then didn't behave professionally. The English actors have classical training. They perform like professionals. You take someone like Aldo Ray who was just picked up and catapulted into stardom, and then he was just a sponge for booze. He killed himself drinking, not living up to his moral contract. Ray later admitted that producers were scared of casting him in projects because of his drinking. Ray then appeared opposite
Lucille Ball in an episode of
Desilu Playhouse. He said he made more money from these two projects "than I'd made the whole eight years before." Ray made
The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, directed by
John Guillermin, in the UK and
Johnny Nobody in Ireland. He later described his British sojourn as a "big mistake" because none of his British films were widely seen in America. He had a small role in
Sylvia (1965) and made a pilot for a TV series financed by producer
Joseph E. Levine,
Steptoe and Son (an unsuccessful adaptation of the British TV series). "I feel I shall have a complete regeneration of my career", he said in 1965. In 1966 Ray co-starred in
What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966),
Kill a Dragon, shot in Hong Kong, and
Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966) as well as playing "Jake", a deaf mute, in an episode of
The Virginian entitled "Jacob was a Plain Man". He also made several guest appearances on television. In the same year Ray claimed, "I've been turning down a lot of TV and B movies. I won't consider anything but important roles in important pictures." He said he was "almost independently wealthy", having saved and invested wisely in real estate from the times when his fee was $100,000 a film. He was interested in returning to politics but not until he had made "at least" four more movies. "The ideal situation would be three films every two years." and
Frogman, South Pacific, by William Zeck. His best-known work of the 1960s was his portrayal of Sergeant Muldoon, alongside
John Wayne, in
The Green Berets (1968).
Career decline As the 1960s ended, Hollywood's appetite for Ray's machismo started to wane. Though he worked steadily in the 1970s, the quality of his roles diminished, and he was typically cast as a gruff and gravelly
redneck. By 1976, Ray was broke. He blamed this on his ex-wives and red tape that meant he could not develop his real estate properties. "I lost it all", he said. "And I am very, very bitter about it... The biggest mistake I ever made was discovering women. I only wish society had been as free and easy when I was coming along as it is today because if that had been the case I wouldn't have been married. Three women in my life utterly destroyed me." In 1979, Ray appeared in a pornographic movie,
Sweet Savage, in a nonsexual role. He won Best Actor at the
Adult Film Association's third Erotica Awards. Ray said later: I wanted, I guess, to see what it was all about—a kind of half-assed adventure, you know? It was also a kind of vacation for me in a bad time—a nice location in Arizona—and I picked up a few thousand bucks. After it came out, a few people wagged their fingers at me—'Oh-ho-ho, you dirty dog'—but I knew I hadn't done anything wrong. They shot all the sex stuff after I'd flown back to L.A. I won the adult film Oscar for that, by the way, but somebody copped it. He said he was open to a return to politics "if my movie career doesn't take off like I think it will." During the last stages of his career, Ray made a number of films for
Fred Olen Ray. "He'd give me $1,000 in cash, pay my expenses, and I'd do a day's work", said Ray. "Somebody showed me one of his cassettes—'starring Aldo Ray'—but it was just a one-day job... I needed money at the time, and Fred knew I needed a buck, so I did it. He exploited me, yeah... but I was ripe for it." He also appeared in two films for Iranian-born filmmaker
Amir Shervan, better known for his cult classic
Samurai Cop. ==Personal life==