Nicholas Ray, Writ Large
March 13–April 12, 2003
Certain directors
are best appreciated on the big screen, and Nicholas Ray stands
foremost among them. A master of CinemaScope composition, rhythmic
editing, and color in all its gaudy splendor or monochromatic nuance,
Ray created dramatic tension through formal contrasts. His is a
cinema of restless movement and constant searching, whose every
frame registers his own deeply felt, fiercely independent vision
of the world and his preoccupation with themes of constraint and
rebellion, impotence and rage, the problem of desire, and the possibility
of love.
Few
Hollywood studio directors had a better sense of place (the suburbs
and back roads of America, the desert, the tundra, the bayou) or
character (fathers and sons, outlaws and outcasts, party girls,
soldiers), and few could mix genres so seamlessly or direct actors
with such care and inventiveness: Ray, who was himself an actor,
brilliantly cast James Cagney, James Mason, Richard Burton, and
Joan Fontaine against type, and drew career-topping performances
from Gloria Grahame, Susan Hayward, Charlton Heston, Christopher
Plummer, Natalie Wood, and James Dean, among others.
Pesenting newly restored, newly struck, and
rare prints from studios and archives, this Nicholas
Ray retrospective is the most comprehensive in North
America in more than a decade, offering a golden opportunity
to discover the bigger-than-life filmmaker who was first lionized
by the French directors and critics Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut,
Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, and then later revered by such
like-minded mavericks as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Robert Altman.
Organized
by James Quandt, Senior Programmer, Cinematheque Ontario, and Joshua
Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media, The Museum
of Modern Art. The Department is deeply indebted to Sony Pictures
Entertainment, Warner Bros., UCLA Film and Television Archive, 20th
Century Fox, The Library of Congress, Cappa Productions, the National
Film and Television Archive (London), George Eastman House, and
Myron Meisel for their generous loan of prints, many of which have
been newly struck for this exhibition.
1958. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray.
Screenplay by George Wells. With Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse, Lee
J. Cobb. “A smashing Scope print of a true cult film, beloved
by nouvelle vague directors and French critics…. Set in Chicago
during Prohibition, Party Girl employs a gaudy mise-en-scène
to capture the violence of the time, and the torment of the relationship
between syndicate lawyer Taylor and showgirl Charisse. The film’s
atmosphere of bitter self-recognition, spangled spectacle, and acid-splashed
violence is powerful, but Ray ensures the possibility of regeneration”
(James Quandt). New 35mm Scope print. 99 min.
. 1951.
USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by James
Edward Grant. With John Wayne, Robert Ryan, Don Taylor. “Made
as the Cold War was escalating, Flying Leathernecks pitted the liberal sensibilities of director Ray and
star Ryan against the right-wing jingoism of Wayne. Ryan, the
captain of a squadron of Marine fighters in the battle of Guadalcanal,
is determined that his men not be expendable. Martinet
major Wayne feels otherwise” (James Quandt).
A rarely screened 3-strip Technicolor preservation print. 102 min.
.
1955. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Winston Miller.
With James Cagney, John Derek, Viveca Lindfors. “Ray’s
VistaVision Western explores the relationship between
aging drifter Cagney, fresh out of prison and determined
to go straight, and his ‘surrogate
son,’ orphan Derek. When the two men accidentally
become embroiled in a train robbery, their oedipal
struggle turns deadly. Ray’s sense of locale is typically
vivid, from the world of Swedish immigrant farmers
to the actual native ruins that give the final confrontation its fateful geometry” (James Quandt).
35mm print. 93 min.
.
1952. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Horace McCoy, David
Dortort. With Robert Mitchum, Arthur Kennedy, Susan Hayward. “The
Lusty Men ranks high in the Ray pantheon…. Mitchum gives
a magnificent performance as an aging bronco buster
who hitches up with a young rodeo rider and his wife
in a last-ditch attempt to find a place for himself in the world.
The atmosphere of dust, drift, and desperation is both elegiac
and abject” (James Quandt). Rare 35mm archival print. 113 min.
. 1954. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray.
Screenplay by Philip Yordan. With Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden,
Mercedes McCambridge. “Truffaut called Johnny Guitar
a ‘hallucinatory’ Western, and you may feel you have
popped one too many peyotes as you stare into the Technicolor delirium
of this gorgeous Freudian, Wagnerian, Sophoclean, Marxist, anti-McCarthyist,
feminist, gender and genre–bending classic…. Everything
in Guitar—clothes, colors, locales—seems heavily
coded to serve the sexual and political allegory” (James Quandt).
Recently struck 35mm Scope print. 110 min.
.
1951. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by A.
I. Bezzerides. With Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ed Begley. “Ryan’s
savagely dedicated city cop, exiled to the wintry
countryside when his zeal alarms his superiors, encounters
a young blind woman. [The] two wounded outsiders, one
physically and one emotionally blind, are brought together in tentative mutual
affection” (Philip Kemp, critic). Bernard Herrmann’s
haunting score and George Diskant’s starkly
desolate landscape photography are perfectly keyed
to Ryan’s and Lupino’s performances, making this
one of Ray’s most anguished and tender films. 35mm studio print. 82 min.
.
1947. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Charles
Schnee. With Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard
da Silva. With its singular atmosphere of restless
foreboding, aching loneliness, and romantic futility,
Ray’s sad and tender nocturne of young
lovers on the lam inspired directors as varied as
Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, and Terrence
Malick to make their own variations on the genre. A feature debut
remarkable for its emotional sensitivity and technical daring.
35mm studio print. 95 min.
.
1955. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Stewart
Stern. With James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo. None of its countless
imitators have ever been able to replicate the startling freshness
of Rebel’s mise-en-scène and acting.
Ray inscribed the stifling world of 1950s conformity
and the inchoate frustration and longing of adolescence through his
symbolic, breathtaking use of color and the widescreen. 35mm Scope print. 111 min.
.
1957. USA/France. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by René Hardy,
Ray, Gavin Lambert. With Richard Burton, Curt Jurgens, Ruth Roman.
Thanks to a full-length restoration by Sony Columbia, Bitter
Victory can
truly be called Ray’s neglected masterpiece. The vast
and punishing Libyan desert, framed in its appalling
beauty by Ray’s widescreen
lens, forms the existential backdrop to this World
War II drama about two British officers done in by
mutual contempt: one, an embittered intellectual who fights courageously
but without purpose (Burton); the other, a coward who fights merely
to vent his petty jealousies (Jurgens). Newly restored 35mm Scope print.
103 min.
.
1949. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Daniel
Taradash, John Monks, Jr. With John Derek, Humphrey Bogart, George Macready.
Ray’s impassioned courtroom drama anticipates Rebel
without a Cause in its sensitive portrayal of a dead-end
kid destined for the electric chair on cop-killing
charges until a liberal-minded lawyer crusades on his behalf.
Newly restored 35mm print by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. 100
min.
. 1949. USA. Directed
by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz. With Maureen
O’Hara, Gloria Grahame, Melvyn Douglas. An oddly alluring
RKO melodrama about a fading chanteuse who takes on a young, unstable
protégée and lives to regret it. Although Ray loathed
the film, its shortcomings are overshadowed by Grahame’s gripping
performance, the enveloping mood of sour cynicism, and the slickly
noirish, low-key photography of first-timer George Diskant. 35mm
archival print. 84 min.
.
1950. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Andrew Solt.
With Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy. In one of
the darkest pulp films of 1950s Hollywood, Bogart
is a washed-up screenwriter whose drunken fits of
rage make him the prime suspect in the murder of a hatcheck
girl. His neighbor, played by the sultry Grahame, fears becoming
his next victim. Newly restored 35mm print by Sony
Columbia, Los Angeles. 94 min.
.
1950. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Edith Sommers.
With Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan, Zachary Scott. “Cast
against type, Fontaine plays the scheming bitch with
a smirk that suggests the men she manipulates should
be happy to be duped by such a blonde hottie. Ray seems
an unlikely director for this sardonic melodrama, but he loads
it with enough mean sheen—the dresses and décor
are deluxe—to
make it immensely enjoyable” (James Quandt). 94 min.
.
1956. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Jesse Lasky,
Jr. With Cornel Wilde, Jane Russell, Luther Adler.
The closest Ray ever came to making a musical….
His mastery of the Scope screen, startling shifts between naturalism
and fantasy, and wild, clashing colors led an admiring Jean-Luc Godard
to observe, “I can hear people say [that] the film
is just a commercial chore about gypsies, with Wilde
forced to marry Russell while she quits the tribe
of which he is Dauphin and then realizes how much she needs him. Perhaps,
but…Hot Blood offered [Ray] a chance to tackle a
subject which to his own admission is dear to him—the
ethnic minority—to
depict a race through an individual….” New 35mm Scope print. 85 min.
.
1963. USA/Spain. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Philip
Yordan, Bernard Gordon. With Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, David Niven. “Heston
heads a multinational army sent to Peking during the Boxer Rebellion
of 1900 to save a group of sequestered diplomats from rampaging anti-Christian
nationalists. ‘Troubled’ is hardly the
word for the chaotic shoot that Ray decamped from,
leaving the remainder of the film to be directed by Andrew
Marton…. [Yet] 55 Days is surprisingly cogent and
stylish, given its rocky history” (James Quandt). 35mm IB Technicolor print.
154 min.
.
1956. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Cyril Hume,
Richard Maibaum. With James Mason, Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau. “Mason
gives a performance of wracking accuracy as a schoolteacher whose gentle
patience and liberal aspirations as father, husband, and instructor
suddenly turn into malevolent, even murderous psychosis.
Driven by delusions of grandeur, he declares that ‘God
was wrong’ and turns
into a black-clad holy avenger, ready to sacrifice
his own son…. [Bigger than Life]
masterfully employs both the CinemaScope frame, whose
horizontal sprawl is used here to constrain, and expressionistic
color to convey the simultaneous entrapment and entropy
of the seemingly secure world of home, store, and school” (James Quandt). New 35mm Scope print. 95 min.
.
1961. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Philip Yordan.
With Jeffrey Hunter, Robert Ryan, Viveca Lindfors, Rip Torn. “Seemingly destined
to be an anonymous super-production, full of widescreen spectacle and
little feeling, King of Kings is instead a simple, deeply felt,
and intelligent epic, an obvious influence on Scorsese’s
The Last Temptation of Christ. Reflecting Ray’s
liberal politics, it focuses less on a Sunday school rendition
of the passion of Christ than on the Judean revolt
against Roman oppression, and makes marked parallels
between the Romans and Nazis. Ray was determined to
avoid the visual traditions and clichés of ‘the
greatest story ever told,’ presenting it as
if it were happening ‘before us for the
first time’” (James Quandt). 35mm Scope print. 168 min.
. 1974.
USA. Directed by David Helpern, Jr., James C. Gutman.
Screenplay by Myron Meisel. An incisive documentary
on Ray’s life and career as an actor,
director, and teacher, from his early stage collaborations
with John Houseman, Clifford Odets, and Elia Kazan
and his travels with Alan Lomax recording and collecting American folk
songs, to his three-decade career as a filmmaker in Hollywood and
Europe and his final years mentoring aspiring movie
directors. Featuring interviews with François
Truffaut, Houseman, Natalie Wood, and the riveting Ray himself. 58
min.
. 1957. USA. Directed
by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay
by Walter Newman. With Robert Wagner, John Carradine, Agnes Moorhead.
A violent, elegiac ballad of the legendary outlaw. Jean-Luc Godard, who
was drawn to the film’s striking visual conceits, wrote
that ”one is hardly likely to forget the twin
leap into the river by the James brothers and their mounts,
the attack on the train shot in an almost supernatural atmosphere by
the superb Joe MacDonald, or the band of mysterious horsemen clad
in white coats, riding at dawn through the plains
of Minnesota.” 35mm
studio print. 93 min.
.
1958. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by
Budd Schulberg. With Burl Ives, Christopher Plummer, Gypsy Rose Lee. “[Critics]
Serge Daney and Jonathan Rosenbaum have both claimed that the
film is far superior to Apocalypse Now in its portrayal of the
struggle between a Willard-like Christopher Plummer
as an idealistic teacher, and a Kurtz-like Burl Ives,
a thuggish plug of a man called Cottonmouth, who is the
spiritual leader of a gang of poachers who kill rare birds for
their plumage in turn-of-the-century Florida. Ray
daringly employs the Western genre to deliver a powerful,
prescient ecological protest, his interest in folkways and indigenous
cultures giving the film a pungent sense of authenticity” (James Quandt). New 35mm studio print. 93 min.
. 1954. USA. General Electric
Theater series for CBS. Directed by Nicholas Ray.
Teleplay by Charles Jackson. With Joseph Cotten, Thomas Gomez.
Fleeing “the jungle of the civilized world” to
explore a real jungle, Henry (Cotten) collapses and
is saved by McMaster (Gomez), born of an American
father and Indian mother. Henry soon finds himself imprisoned within
the jungle’s “high green wall,” and forced
by McMaster to give daily readings of Dickens novels.
Adapted from a story that Waugh would later incorporate
into his novel A Handful of Dust, Ray’s film
is a gripping exploration of culture, madness, violence, and despair. 26 min.
. 1973–76.
USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray with students from Harpur
College, New York State University. Screenplay by Ray, Susan
Schwartz. With Ray, Tom Farrell, Steve Anker. “From
the post-sixties terrain of American sexual and political
unrest, We Can’t
Go Home Again fashions a vast, exasperating fresco
of psychodrama, paranoia, and protest, recorded in
various formats, mixing glimpses of such counterculture icons as Jane
Fonda, Tom Hayden, Allen Ginsburg, and Abbie Hoffman with scenes
of Ray and his students debating, shooting the film,
and going to extraordinary lengths to finish it” (James
Quandt). Rare 35mm print courtesy Rosebud Films,
Madrid. 90 min.
. 1980. West Germany. Written
and directed by Nicholas Ray, Wim Wenders. With Ray,
Wenders, Susan Ray, Edward Lachman. Ray, who died
of cancer in 1979, was defiant and proud to the last, participating in
this film about his own death, which some have considered courageous and elegiac, and others exploitative and unseemly. Digital version.
90 min.
. 1960. USA. Written and
directed by Nicholas Ray. With Anthony Quinn, Peter
O’Toole, Yoko Tani. “A decisive
break with Hollywood, The Savage Innocents is set
in the Canadian Arctic, where Ray did extensive ethnographic
research for his tale of Inuk (Quinn), an aboriginal who
becomes a fugitive from the law when he kills a priest for refusing
his wife’s sexual favors. O’Toole is one
of the two Mounties who pursue Inuk across the tundra….” (James
Quandt). Rare 35mm print courtesy Carlton International Media Limited, London. 107 min.
.
1977. West Germany/ France. Directed by Wim Wenders. Screenplay
by Wenders, based on
Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith. With
Nicholas Ray, Bruno Ganz, Dennis Hopper. Wenders
brilliantly captured the nasty edge of Highsmith’s
thriller in this classic of New German Cinema, in
part by casting two of America’s
most subversive directors, Samuel Fuller and Ray,
in small but key roles: Fuller as a mobster, and Ray
as a reputedly dead painter who profits by forging his own works. 35mm
archival print. 126 min.
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