Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  Besides identifying a number of New York functionaries in the Party, Kazan narrowed his list to seven actors in the Group Theatre, along with playwright Clifford Odets, who had agreed with Kazan that they could point accusing fingers at each other. One of the seven actors was Art Smith, who had portrayed the dutiful Hollywood agent in Ray’s film In a Lonely Place. Smith’s career in motion pictures was effectively terminated.

  Most of Kazan’s old friends on the left were appalled, if not entirely surprised, by his about-face. Many turned their backs forever on the director. One who immediately phoned Kazan afterward to commiserate was the director of In a Lonely Place.

  Whether it was Kazan who showed Ray the way, or vice versa, is not known. But when it came to HUAC, Ray probably had more in common with Odets, who indeed named Kazan in his own “friendly” (though actually quite testy) testimony the following month. The leading playwright of the left, whom Ray deeply admired, cut himself off permanently from his political friends, and tarnished his reputation forever, by cooperating with the anti-Red inquisitors. Perhaps most damaging for Odets, though, was his own guilt and mortification. “The sad fact,” Kazan wrote years later, “is that what was possible for me hurt Clifford mortally.”

  Kazan was able to turn his personal trauma into drama. Always “tough as nails,” in the words of John Houseman, the stage and screen director rebounded vengefully from the controversy of his testimony. The hate mail and hostility of his enemies empowered him, Kazan wrote later; after the first storm of reproach—and after slogging through the anti-Communist Man on a Tightrope for 20th Century-Fox and Zanuck—“something mysterious had happened. I found I was the possessor of a new degree of energy, one that would send me spinning through ten years of unremitting work.”

  Kazan’s film energy peaked in the 1950s, and he continued to enjoy success on Broadway. In spite of his many sputtering enemies, Kazan also preserved key professional relationships. He had a gift for communing with writers as well as actors, and his most famous 1950s films were indebted to close collaborations with friends who shared his anti-Communist fervor, Steinbeck and Schulberg among them. Kazan started producing his own pictures after the blacklist, eventually writing the scripts as well. For Kazan, cooperation was an act of self-preservation and growth.

  For Ray, like Odets, the blacklist became another means of self-destruction. A man who had thrived on community and collaboration, Ray operated best within a circle of trust among friends. By the end of 1952, that circle was dwindling in show business.

  Rather than kowtow to HUAC, for example, Ray’s old Theatre of Action pal, composer Earl Robinson, returned to New York, leaving behind a lucrative niche in film music (he’d scored Frank Sinatra’s Oscar-winning 1945 short The House I Live In). Ray’s folklorist blood brother, Alan Lomax, fled to England to escape the witch hunt. Willard Motley, author of Knock on Any Door, chose exile in Mexico. Woody Guthrie and most of the other Almanac Singers, with whom Ray once lived, had been blackballed by 1951. Two of Ray’s musician friends, Burl Ives and Josh White, gave “friendly” testimony, and many in the folk and blues community never forgave them.

  Anyone who’d been connected with the Theatre of Action or Federal Theatre or left-wing benefits came under suspicion. Alvin Hammer of the Revuers was shut out of show business. Judy Holliday had to fight false accusations of Communism, and many believe she was graylisted during the 1950s. Among the many other actors driven from Hollywood were Howard Da Silva, Mickey Knox, and Stanley Prager, all veterans of Ray’s films; when they refused to appease HUAC their work dried up.

  The narrowing of the circle was reflected in a dramatic change in social life in Hollywood too. Ray lost many personal friends, including Ethyl Chaplin, who had hosted house parties when he was new to Hollywood, and Decla Dunning, who had leased him her house on Sunset Boulevard, both of them now blacklisted and driven from the film capital. And there was one other consequence of the blacklist era, often overlooked: Any creative artist who went on to make films in Hollywood in the 1950s found that their choices of subject matter were severely constrained. The era of socially conscious picture-making had come to an end.

  In some ways, Nicholas Ray was lucky. He avoided the kind of public ordeal Odets was subjected to and he kept the secret of his HUAC capitulation closely guarded. But neither did he feel the sense of empowerment Kazan derived from the experience. Like Odets, who was almost visibly burdened by his guilt and shame, Ray must have been tormented by his decision to testify—in ways that were invisible to most but that doubtless wounded and weakened him.

  On Dangerous Ground was released in February, the same month Ray completed The Lusty Men. Critics saw the Robert Ryan–Ida Lupino picture as an ambitious mingling of genres that reached for greatness and almost attained it. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther described the film as an intelligent attempt “to get something more than sheer melodrama on the screen—something pictorially reflective of the emotional confusion of a man.” Despite Ray’s sincere, shrewd direction, though, Crowther found the story “flimsy,” the explanation for the cop’s pathology superficial, and the romance between the cop and blind woman mawkish.

  “You won’t find it all too bad—particularly the first half,” agreed Philip K. Scheuer, the often discerning first-string reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, “if you regard it as an action yarn and don’t let the ‘metaphysical’ overtones depress you unduly.” Newsweek too found the film likable, plausible, effective, while never quite achieving “the dramatic intensity to match its good purposes.”

  To boost the picture’s earning potential, RKO released On Dangerous Ground in many cities on a double bill with the B Western Indian Uprising. Regardless of that gambit, Ray’s film performed only modestly at the box office. Among Ray’s credits, only the two Bogart vehicles had been clear moneymakers, and more than ever RKO saw him internally as an “arty” director.

  Overseas “arty” was a compliment, and that had been Ray’s reputation ever since the London debut of They Live by Night. Knock on Any Door and In a Lonely Place confirmed the director’s “very remarkable talent,” according to Sequence, though the slick studio assignments of A Woman’s Secret, Born to Be Bad, and Flying Leathernecks hurt Ray’s aura. The last issue in 1951 of Gavin Lambert’s magazine Sequence harshly ranked the director, along with inactive filmmakers like V. I. Pudovkin and Erich von Stroheim, among the “Goners—No longer, in any vital sense, with us.”

  The French came along in time to give Ray a needed boost. Although they prided themselves on making Hollywood discoveries, Parisian cinephiles initially missed out on They Live by Night. The first Ray film to be widely shown in the French capital was Knock on Any Door in 1950, with the magic of Bogart overshadowing that of the unknown director. While the screen adaptation of Willard Motley’s novel was well received, the praise mostly went to Bogart, with Ray barely mentioned.

  Not until the following year was They Live by Night screened as part of the Biarritz Festival du Film Maudit—“a kind of anti-Cannes fest,” in the words of film historian Jean-Pierre Coursodon. The festival was sponsored by Objectif 49, a cine club whose doyens included André Bazin, the father of a new school of criticism that was beginning to extol directors as the dominant “auteurs” of motion pictures—as authors who “wrote with the camera.” In fact, many auteurist critics treated the actual screenplay with faint scorn, and if anything Hollywood filmmakers who were not writers—whose lively camerawork lent humanity even to dull material—got extra credit.

  Not all the budding auteurists appreciated Ray’s debut picture, not right away. Some left the screening telling those outside to go home. Ray’s first picture, They Live by Night, had a brief, subsequent run in Paris in 1951, but it wasn’t until its third booking that lines began to form.

  In the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, which soon became the Paris auteurists’ house journal after its first issue in 1951, Francois Truffaut was to hail Ray’s first picture, They Live by Night, as a
“dazzling confirmation” of the promise of Knock on Any Door. Truffaut even compared the Hollywood director to Robert Bresson, who was emerging as the patron saint of French art cinema. Jean-Luc Godard was no less enthusiastic about Ray’s directing debut; later, Godard would make a point of including beloved shot sequences from They Live by Night in his Histoires series of documentaries, including “four shots of Cathy O’Donnell standing up from a kneeling position, they’re not quite centered frontal shots, and then they are, and you could say that this is a true beginning of artistic montage.”

  In a Lonely Place made its way to Paris not long after They Live by Night, becoming another beloved Bogart film and a fresh affirmation of Ray’s artistry. To some extent, Bazin’s young disciples found in this and other early Ray films a mirror of themselves: Like them and at the same time as them, he was starting out in his career. His unusual camera moves, intimate close-ups, odd angles, unconventional editing, and taste for location work amounted to an anti-traditional aesthetic. His vision was seen, from the earliest prescient reviews, as a struggle against forces (both exterior and interior) more powerful than his own artistic stamina. In “the youth of the heroes” of They Live by Night, in “their stubborn intensity” (as Eric Rohmer wrote later), these young iconoclasts of film theory saw nothing less than an allegory of themselves as young rebels pitted against the outside world, the establishment, the crass commerical cinema.

  By the time of On Dangerous Ground, Ray’s “greatness”—already the operative word among the Parisian cineastes—was reflexively assumed. Indeed, Jacques Rivette, struck by the “wonderful progression” of ideas and style in Ray’s 1952 release, raised the stakes in his appraisal, grouping the Hollywood director, with only six pictures to his name, among “the masters” who saw even “the most simple mistakes turn out to their advantage, rather than diminishing their stature.”

  Ray’s British admirers had been more circumspect. Gavin Lambert’s language was measured (he found Ray’s direction of They Live by Night “striking,” for instance, “swift, compact, tense, with many expressive and appropriate angles”), and Sequence preferred to ignore the Ray films it didn’t like rather than finding hidden genius in their flaws.

  The French had lagged behind the British; the first major appreciation of Ray did not appear in Cahiers until 1953. But now they grabbed the lead, hailing Ray as a master of the cinema whose stature was enhanced even by his mistakes. First as critics, later as filmmakers, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, and others in the Cahiers group saw themselves as Ray’s spiritual children. And their exuberant, flowery, militant praise began to spread around the world and influence other critics.

  Within Hollywood, Ray struggled for projects worthy of his growing French mystique. During the making of The Lusty Men he announced he was leaving RKO, despite the two years remaining on his current contract. The public statements were actually intended as a negotiating wedge; behind the scenes, Ray’s agents were discussing an improved one-year contract for the director, raising his salary to $1,500 weekly. The new RKO contract also promised Ray opportunities to write scripts and produce his own films.

  The contract was an expedient move for RKO, and it was also a bit of a ruse. For Ray, the writing and producing provisions were intended to extend his creative authority from the blank page to the final cut, while the extra money would boost his bank account. Later in life, Ray even suggested that Howard Hughes had asked him to help run the studio during the second half of 1952. In truth, what the contract had was a “Jerry Wald clause” obliging him to work without credit on problematic RKO scripts and releases. Even as the French were celebrating him as an artist unfettered by commercial motives, Ray was encumbered by financial worries. As part of his new contract he talked Hughes into a $15,000 advance for divorce-related fees and lifestyle expenses.

  To RKO, the writer-producer provisions in his contract were a sop to Ray’s ambitions. The studio put a little seed money into development of Ray’s projected film about Gypsy life on New York streets, based on Jean Evans’s research into the Gypsy subculture. The director’s dream casting of Marlon Brando and Jane Russell briefly tantalized Hughes, but when Brando began to look impossible and the casting switched to Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell the momentum slowed to a turtle’s pace.

  And there were other problems: By the early 1950s, Hughes had become all but dysfunctional, and RKO was distributing more pictures than it was producing. The studio’s annual output would dwindle from a peak of fifty-three films released in 1940 to only thirteen by 1955. Everyone at the studio, Ray included, wondered not if, but when Hughes would sell the studio.

  Working closely with producer Jerry Wald during the spring and summer, Ray conferred over the postproduction of The Lusty Men while repairing RKO scripts and films. The highest-profile project on the endangered list was Androcles and the Lion, an adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play about an escaped slave and a noble lion, set in ancient Rome. The RKO coproduction had fallen behind under writer-director Chester Erskine.

  Ray got together with producer Gabriel Pascal to speed up the remaining scenes and cut corners on costs. As usual, Hughes wanted to make everything sexier, and Ray was drafted to stage an elaborate interlude with women dancing around in flesh-colored leotards. This peculiar fantasia wasn’t so far from Ray’s cabaret experience, and the several days’ work he did on the picture in August would scarcely merit mention if the director hadn’t met a seventeen-year-old blonde named Betty Utey, a dancer in Spanish choreographer Carmelita Maracci’s troupe.

  “Hughes wanted more sex,” Utey recalled. “The whole troupe of us were told to wear bikinis and report to RKO. I’d never worn a bikini before and I felt really funked out. I stood there in this line-up, and Nick selected very voluptuous kinds of bodies. I wanted to run off the sound stage, because he was a very piercing personality and I felt like a fool. He walked over to me and he said, ‘What’s your favorite fruit?’ I told him I liked peaches. So a prop man appeared with a peach and I ate it full out, it dripped all over me. He featured me in the scene.”

  The expensive sequence, directed by Ray, was later cut after the film’s original director, Erskine, complained that it was “vulgar, inaccurate and clumsily incorporated.” But Utey would crop up again in Ray’s life.

  Over the summer, however, Wald had developed a grudging respect for Ray. The two shared long phone calls, lunches, and meetings, with Wald bending over backward to include Ray on every aspect of the postproduction on The Lusty Men, even bringing him in on plans for the publicity and advertising. Together the producer and director kvetched about all the other RKO emergencies that vied for their attention.

  At one point it looked like Wald himself might take over RKO. The producer complained incessantly about how “discouraging, disconcerting and just plain bad for our morale” it was to be constantly overruled by Hughes, and in June 1952 he was called to a secret meeting with Hughes’s top business adviser, Noah Dietrich, for a surprising offer. Hughes wanted to shed the albatross of RKO, and Wald could have the studio if he could rally a group of investors willing to pay $6.50 a share for Hughes’s one-million-plus shares. Wald spent a week on the phone with Louis B. Mayer, David O. Selznick, New York banker Serge Semenenko, and other nabobs, but all considered RKO a sinking ship, its stock already devalued by Hughes’s mismanagement, and the takeover idea fizzled.

  Soon Wald himself was looking to get out, maybe take Ray with him. In August, the producer, increasingly proud of The Lusty Men, finagled a bonus for the director to supervise a new, happier ending to the rodeo picture. The pathos that concluded They Live by Night and In a Lonely Place reflected the tone Ray favored for his endings, but more than once in his career he’d be forced to accept a little Hollywood uplift.

  Ray’s original ending showed Jeff McCloud (Mitchum) curled into the arms of Louise (Hayward) after being fatally wounded during his last rodeo ride. His dying words: “Guys like me last forever.” McCloud’s death finally
causes Wes (Arthur Kennedy) to heed his wife Louise’s pleas and quit the circuit. As he walks away arm-in-arm with Louise, Wes hears his name called out by an announcer. “Pass!” he shouts, striding away from the rodeo as another first-time bronco rider charges into the arena.

  Convinced the ending was too dire, Wald brainstormed a rose-colored finish with Jeff surviving his brush with death and walking off into the sunset with an ex-girlfriend. Ray shot it for a paycheck bonus, arguing with Wald all the way.

  Wald considered the clash of endings a minor difference of opinion, and he slapped the new finish on the version he previewed at the studio in September. One of the guests was David Dortort, the original screenwriter, who met Ray there for the first time; when the preview was over, he recalled, the director and producer had “one hell of an argument.” Ray insisted that the ending of a film belonged to its director. Wald waved him off: Even the illustrious Fritz Lang, making another picture for the Wald-Krasna unit, didn’t have final cut. The producer was not about to give Ray the last word on a film he’d practically conjured out of nothing. Wald stood his ground, but he was taken aback at Ray’s vehemence and felt wounded by the incident.

  Later, Wald reconsidered and restored Ray’s ending, which made more sense and which everyone liked better anyway. But the incident soured relations between Wald and Ray, and the producer dropped his bid to sign the director for another picture. Not long after, Wald would depart RKO for offices at Columbia, leaving Ray behind.

  What Ray was going to do after RKO remained up in the air. He and Humphrey Bogart continued to indulge in “moon talk,” as grandiose ambitions are derisively described in The Lusty Men, announcing plans to film Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or W. R. Burnett’s Little Men, Big World. Ray got Bogart briefly excited about an original story he brainstormed over drinks called “Round Trip,” but the idea never advanced to the script stage.