The Auteurs

Above: a publicity still of Joan Fontaine and Robert Ryan in Born to Be Bad (1950). Courtesy Photofest/Film Forum.

Among the many things the American interpretation of la politique des auteurs did was partially bury left-of-center movies by accepted masters—attending New York’s retro of Nick Rays’s films makes such non-essential entries like A Woman’s Secret (1949) and Born to Be Bad(1950) stand out not because they are unappreciated masterpieces but because they aren’t.  Do they need to be?  Ray is present in both works in spades, which I suppose should be enough for any die-hard auteurist, but no one said a director has to grasp a picture with the overwrought claws of his or her full-blown, mature and idiosyncratic artistry for a film to be deemed worthy, or interesting, or beautiful, or a masterpiece.  Needing to make sense—and meaning, and importance—of a movie by associating it with its director will always do maximum disservice to fine films that escape the clutches of a given cineaste.  These movies are of Ray but they are not only Ray.

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Related Films

Born to Be Bad

Dir Nicholas Ray

1950 United States

A Woman's Secret

Dir Nicholas Ray

1949 United States

Nicholas Ray.  Did Hollywood produce any other figure in whom inhered the very ethos of the struggling Artist against the System?  Well, there was certainly Orson Welles.  But Ray?  The case of Ray invites polemics.  One could argue over whether there was a case of Artist versus System here.  His was the romantic, tragic plight of an artist caught amidst the brutalities of an industry that could only accommodate his “vision” a few times (e.g., In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, perhaps Rebel without a Cause).  But what of Party Girl and They Live by Night and Bitter Victory?  These are films around which one can rally.  The films of Nick Ray are seemingly a permanent revolution against the system in which they were nevertheless made.

Ray’s 1957 war film, Bitter Victory, caused Jean-Luc Godard to famously claim that “the cinema is Nicholas Ray.”  (Godard had previously expressed a similar sentiment in his review of Ray’s Hot Blood.)

What can we take from Godard’s claim?  The critic Carloss James Chamberlin has already quite brilliantly examined the truth-values of such claims about Ray the long-suffering auteur in his gargantuan piece on Bitter Victory.  Indeed, the films that frequently inspire cultist defenses of Ray’s are not only the acknowledged masterpieces (your garden variety anti-auteurist still likely genuflects to In a Lonely Place) but also the mishmashed films maudits (like Wind Across the Everglades).  Some of Ray’s most interesting directorial efforts are works that dwell on the far side of respectability; works with hot blood that conjoin multiple genres and styles and codes.  So that, in finding no unity to this product of the System’s genius, we are inclined to find that unity in Nick Ray, the film’s imperfect ‘author.’  Look at Johnny Guitar, a masterpiece, but not exactly easy to pin down.  This is a fruitful and accepted way of looking at the fellow’s body of work.  So: what else might it mean to say that the cinema is Nicholas Ray? Read More

Related Films

55 Days at Peking

Dir Nicholas Ray, Guy Green & Andrew Marton

1963 United States

Bitter Victory

Dir Nicholas Ray

1957 France

Hot Blood

Dir Nicholas Ray

1956 United States

Wind Across the Everglades

Dir Nicholas Ray & Budd Schulberg

1958 United States

While Nicholas Ray was directing the bloated and misbegotten epic 55 Days at Peking, he had a dream that if he made the film, he would never complete another feature. The dream turned out to be true. His subsequent work would consist of numerous abortive projects-to-be, as well as The Janitor, a short episode of an erotic compendium film, Wet Dreams, the ironically-titled Nick's Movie, largely directed and finished after Ray's death by Wim Wenders, and the project that came closest to fruition, but not quite—We Can't Go Home Again.

Incidentally, one thing makes Ray's prophetic dream somewhat less uncanny—he had had it a number of times before, on previous shoots.

We Can't Go Home Again took its title, rephrased, from Thomas Wolfe, and its cast and crew from Ray's students at SUNY Binghamton, where he was teaching. Ray felt, or claimed to feel, that the best way for the students to learn about cinema would be to assist him in making a film. The project grew, evolved, changed out of all recognition, shrugging off subjects, titles and themes, moving through different formats and never quite coalescing into a final form. Read More

Related Films

Rebel Without a Cause

Dir Nicholas Ray

1955 United States

Bigger Than Life

Dir Nicholas Ray

1956 United States

The Savage Innocents

Dir Nicholas Ray

1960 France

The Lusty Men and The True Story of Jesse James play as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum on August 5^th.

***

The West is an idea that is ripe for the kind of explorations Nicholas Ray is fond of making. When faced with the unknown, as in latter 19^th-Century America, new communities begin to form, separate from the strictures of traditional society. The Lusty Men (1952) is about rediscovering the emotional possibilities of the frontier, while The True Story of Jesse James (1957) attempts to define the mythology of that era’s first push forward. Read More

Related Films

The True Story of Jesse James

Dir Nicholas Ray

1957 United States

The Lusty Men

Dir Nicholas Ray & Robert Parrish

1952 United States

The Lusty Men plays as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum on August 5^th.

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Homes for Strangers: The Cinema of Nicholas Ray is an on-going series of articles covering the 2009 retrospective on Nicholas Ray, running from July 17^th to August 6^th—with a special bonus on August 16^th & 17^th at the Anthology Film Archives—at New York's Film Forum.

Related Films

The Lusty Men

Dir Nicholas Ray & Robert Parrish

1952 United States

Top: Hot Blood.  Above: Bitter Victory.

Hot Blood and Bitter Victory play as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum on August 4th.

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Bigger than Life tends to feel like an anomaly within Nicholas Ray’s work in CinemaScope. Whereas that film is precise, controlled, claustrophobic, and scary, most of the other ’Scope films push Ray’s experiments in abstract space and temporal isolation to further extremes. The pleasures of Hot Blood (1956) rest partly upon the removal of narrative content from form, while Bitter Victory (1957) manages to fuse On Dangerous Ground’s relationship to nature with the acidic attitudes toward masculinity from In a Lonely Place. Read More

Related Films

Hot Blood

Dir Nicholas Ray

1956 United States

Bitter Victory

Dir Nicholas Ray

1957 France

Rebel Without a Cause plays as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum from July 31^st-August 3^rd.

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What does he know about Man alone?

We’re at Ground Zero. Nicholas Ray will forever be remembered as the man who created the icon we know as James Dean. Far beyond the scope of the director’s career, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) stands in for 1950s alienation, for the birth of adolescence as a culturally recognized phenomenon, for the legitimacy of youth culture in the face of adulthood, and for Dean as a figure no longer bound to merely being an actor. In other words, Rebel Without a Cause is remembered for everything in it except for Nicholas Ray.

Or is it? The film represented a turning point in Ray’s career as well: it was his third film as a non-contracted director, and he hoped its success would help him become his own producer. (His efforts ultimately failed.) It was his first film in CinemaScope, a format at which he quickly became a master, but initially didn’t know what to do with (so say some cast & crew who worked with him). The script’s dialogue was derived from improvised rehearsals with the teenage cast, a technique Ray had utilized on his best films, but was now able to bring to its apotheosis. Read More

Related Films

Rebel Without a Cause

Dir Nicholas Ray

1955 United States

Wind Across the Everglades played as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum on July 30^th.

***

Wind Across the Everglades (1958) is necessarily incomplete. This has everything to do with the personalities behind its creation, Nicholas Ray and Budd Schulberg. Aside from King of Kings and 55 Days at Peking, it is the one Ray film which solely bears his name as director that could be argued has the least of him in it. The chaotic production resulted in poisoned relations between Ray and Schulberg, while both were indulging their alcoholism. Ray got sick, and was barred by Schulberg from the final shooting and editing.

Down what path of auteurism shall we travel with Wind Across the Everglades? Does Schulberg’s involvement make it a lesser film by simple virtue of another artist having placed their soul into it, or are the mediocrities of the Masters better than the masterpieces of the hacks? Does anyone even care?

A theory: without having any way of knowing who shot what, how much Ray was able to manipulate the script (Schulberg apparently demanded that no word be changed), or from whom the editors followed their instructions for each scene, the film’s first half feels much more like Schulberg and the second half feels like Ray. Read More

Related Films

Wind Across the Everglades

Dir Nicholas Ray & Budd Schulberg

1958 United States

Knock on Any Door plays as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum on July 29^th & 30^th.

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Almost all of Nicholas Ray’s films are built around identification with those who move beyond the constructed norms of American social strata. More than anything, they are individuals seeking their own type of community that does not have to answer to any preconceived ideas about how people need to co-exist. His best work brings this new community to startling, haunting life; his lesser efforts tend to overstate their intentions. Knock on Any Door (1949) appears to fall into the latter category. Read More

Related Films

Knock on Any Door

Dir Nicholas Ray

1949 United States

They Live by Night plays as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum on July 29^th & 30^th.

***

From the very first image of his very first film, Nicholas Ray announced himself to the world: Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) in an abstract, undefined space, living only for each other. Then suddenly, the world appears. They Live by Night (1948) is Ray’s mission statement, doing everything that would appear in his later masterpieces. It all began with a boy and a girl who were never properly introduced to the world we live in.

Although never actually specified what decade the characters live in, They Live by Night reeks of the Depression. Every square inch feels worn out, tired, barricaded. At the same time, however, possibility lurks behind every fence. Bowie lingers behind such a fence after he and his friends break out of jail. Once he crawls under it, he steps into the unknown. Thankfully, Keechie is waiting on the other side of that fence. Once they find each other, they must never be apart. She is wise yet weary of her fate (Laurel, Mary, Vienna and Vicki all have Keechie inside them). He has been unjustly persecuted by the law, and his innocence makes him superstitious. Together, though, they are reborn, pure. Read More

Related Films

They Live by Night

Dir Nicholas Ray

1948 United States

A Woman’s Secret and On Dangerous Ground play as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum on July 28^th.

***

A Woman’s Secret (1949) and On Dangerous Ground (1952) typify two separate strains in Nicholas Ray’s work for RKO. (They Live by Night, Born to Be Bad, Flying Leathernecks and The Lusty Men are the other films he made for Howard Hughes’s company.) One is a fussy, studio-bound melodrama held down by an inert script; the other is a dreamy, location-focused study of barely controlled feeling, psychosis made healthy by wide expanses of rural America. One lacks genuine tension; the other is consumed by it. One shrugs off its ending; the other swoons in its conclusion’s hopefulness. Read More

Related Films

A Woman's Secret

Dir Nicholas Ray

1949 United States

On Dangerous Ground

Dir Nicholas Ray

1952 United States

Born to Be Bad plays as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective on July 27^th.

***

Born to Be Bad (1950) is the bitchier, far less-well-behaved sister of All about Eve, which just so happened to come out the same year. The film also happens to be one of Ray’s least interesting efforts, one in which traces of his style emerge to the surface, only to be drowned out by a limp script and unimpressive performances.

Christabel Cain (Joan Fontaine) has to be the most passive-aggressive Social Climber (a popular role for women in 30s and 40s cinema) to ever grace the screen. Mooching off her rich uncle’s secretary (Joan Leslie) only to steal the secretary’s man (Zachary Scott) and her future social position, Christabel lazily and not-so-subtly demands that the universe should revolve around her. A tryst with volatile writer Nick Bradley (Robert Ryan, in his first of four roles with Ray) only makes her deceptions deepen. Read More

Related Films

Born to Be Bad

Dir Nicholas Ray

1950 United States

Johnny Guitar plays as part of a 15-film Nicholas Ray retrospective at New York’s Film Forum on July 26^th & 27^th.

***

"I searched for you in every man I met."

"You got nothin’ to tell me ‘cause it’s not real. Only you ‘n’ me, that’s real."

The first line is saloon owner Vienna (Joan Crawford) channeling In a Lonely Place’s Dixon Steele. The second is her ex-lover Johnny (Sterling Hayden) insisting that they’ve got a second chance. The first line is a feeling, spoken or unspoken, that courses through the veins of Bowie & Keechie, Jim Wilson & Mary Malden, Jeff McCloud, Jim Stark, and Tommy Farrell & Vicki Gaye—Ray’s most romantic characters. The second could summarize Ray’s entire cinematic project. Johnny Guitar (1954) is about what it takes to create the reality Johnny claims is his and Vienna’s. Read More

Related Films

Johnny Guitar

Dir Nicholas Ray

1954 United States

Bigger than Life plays as part of a 15-film series at New York’s Film Forum on July 24^th & 25^th.

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In a Lonely Place and Bigger than Life (1956) are the only two movies in Nicholas Ray’s body of work that qualify as horror films. Bigger than Life, however, offers none of Lonely Place’s possibilities of hope. The terror of the soul—expressed both individually and societally—is exposed to such a suffocating and unbearable degree that one may actually want to accept the “happy” ending that finds schoolteacher Ed Avery (James Mason) in the arms of his doting family. As usual, Ray uses the skeleton of a genre—in this case, the family melodrama—to plumb something which infests the underbelly of the genre. Like In a Lonely Place, freedom for the hero comes at a terrible cost. Read More

Related Films

Bigger Than Life

Dir Nicholas Ray

1956 United States

Above: Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart.

I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks when she loved me.

In a Lonely Place (1950) is a film noir that doesn’t care about the murder. It barely has time to pay attention to  whether washed-up screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) killed a hat-check girl he took back to his place who was going to tell him the story of a book he’s about to adapt. Far more terrifying to express is what that formulaic plot uncovers: the emotional violence a couple can inflict upon each other. For that is what the relationship between Dix and his neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) is all about. It is unlikely Bogart was ever more frightening, and he doesn’t even touch a gun. Nor was he ever so pathetic, so vulnerable, so damaged. His Dixon Steele lashes out at the universe for the success it took from him, and for the wisdom and sensitivity it refuses to recognize—primarily because he is so quick to temper with those he can’t stand, which is most of the world. In other words, Dix is Nicholas Ray.

Maybe even more impressive is the bringing to life of Gloria Grahame. A wooden and catty actress in her 40s work, In a Lonely Place is her greatest performance, rivaled only by her turn in Minnelli’s The Cobweb. Laurel Gray is calm, composed, collected. Grahame jams her hands in the pockets of her skirt, or knowingly half-smiles at Bogart in a manner suggestive of someone who is as comfortable as she is controlled. Every facial movement is precise and meaningful. Laurel Gray is a failed actress, and like all great Ray protagonists, acutely aware of her own failures. Like one group of them—Vienna in Johnny Guitar, Jeff McCloud in The Lusty Men—she has wearily accepted what has befallen her. She therefore stands toe to toe with Dix’s bipolarity and his potential alcoholism. (Note how Ray positions Grahame above Bogart, dominating him, which inverts an earlier shot.) Only when Dix’s inner demons bring him to almost kill someone that her self-control—and her parity with Dix—fissures, and she begins to wonder if he really might be capable of murder. Read More

Related Films

In a Lonely Place

Dir Nicholas Ray

1950 United States