Once, when Monroe visited the set of Bigger Than Life at the end of the day—she was finishing Bus Stop for 20th Century-Fox on a nearby soundstage—Ray tried coaxing the actress into a cameo appearance. Staging cutaways for a hospital scene, Ray talked Monroe into donning a nurse’s costume and carrying two lamps into camera range. “Carry them on the set,” Ray advised her, “put them down, walk over to this desk, sit down and look at the star, who’s gone slightly off his nut.”
According to Mason, who was in the scene, the cameo was intended as a laugh for studio executives at dailies, not for actual use in the film, but Monroe lost her nerve anyway. Ray couldn’t shoo away her anxiety. “Oh Nick,” she said, “tell me what you want me to do! I can’t do it, Nick!” Finally Ray called cut, according to Mason, giving Monroe a comforting embrace before announcing “that he did not think it was such a funny idea after all, so let’s not do it. ‘Come on, Marilyn, what do you want to drink?’ ” Ray later fed the item to Hedda Hopper, who ran it straight: “Marilyn Does Bit in Nick Ray’s Film,” her column declared in May 1956, reporting that Marilyn had played her cameo role “like a lamb.” Yet Monroe cannot be glimpsed in Bigger Than Life—nor in any other Nick Ray film.
Observing the director more critically as time passed, Lambert began to see Ray as fundamentally a misogynist who resented needing women in his life. (“Do you look down on all women?” Dixon Steele’s old flame asks, challenging him, in In a Lonely Place, “or just the ones you know?”) Lambert wondered if Ray resented needing men too. One day, when Ray pointedly told his protégé, “I’m afraid that sex destroys intimacy more often than it creates it,” the Englishman wondered, “A reference to all the women he had never felt truly happy with, or to me?” Lambert asked; the director clammed up.
“Although Nick rarely wanted to make love,” wrote Lambert,“he behaved like a possessive lover, expecting me to be always here on call, to talk about projects (he had several he wanted us to work on together), to listen to music together (American folk songs, the blues, Schoenberg’s spine-chilling Erwartung, a melodrama about a woman stumbling on the dead body of her lover at night), or simply to share one of his long, impenetrable silences, when he seemed to be struggling to confide some deeply buried emotion.
“At first I used to ask what was wrong,” Lambert continued, “but instead of answering he would get up abruptly and leave the room.”
Many of their late-night conversations circled back to James Dean. Ray couldn’t shake off the deceased star’s haunting memory; indeed, he didn’t want to. The first anniversary of Dean’s death was coming up in September 1956, and many of those who’d been touched by the star wrote letters to the director of Rebel Without a Cause. Journalists lined up for another round of interviews with Ray. “I think within two years,” Ray told the press, “Jim would have taken his place with Laurence Olivier, Gérard Philipe and Marlon Brando as one of the great actors of modern times.”*
An editor at Harper’s magazine had asked Ray to keep a diary when making Rebel Without a Cause and afterward write an article about the film. The diary foundered during the filming, but now the material was located and dusted off for a book. A series of items in the Hollywood columns reported Ray had started on a book to commemorate Dean’s greatness. One excerpt was eventually published in Sight and Sound, another in Variety.
The Variety excerpt, in which Ray describes his first encounters with Dean, remains one of the most perceptive pieces ever written about the enigmatic star. The work in progress had a title (Rebel—The Life Story of a Film) and a publication date timed to capitalize on the fanfare surrounding the anniversary of Dean’s death. What it didn’t have was a writer to take the manuscript to fruition. Lambert had to help with the excerpts, and the full book never came to be.
After finishing Bigger Than Life, Ray announced that he was forming a new independent production company, Rexray, in partnership with his business manager Rex Cole and a lawyer, Lawrence Beilenson, who had started out as a Screen Actors Guild attorney before joining MCA and swinging politically to the right, in the 1950s, along with one of his close friends, Ronald Reagan.
A flurry of press releases detailed the company’s ambitious agenda, with most of the projects, including a film of “Heroic Love,” left over from the plans Ray had made with James Dean. Ray talked to 20th Century-Fox about “Heroic Love,” but the studio wasn’t interested in a partnership with Rexray, and Ray, Cole, and Beilenson had to shop their slate to other studios around Hollywood. None was tempted by the projects, however; Ray was still no one’s idea of a producer.
Twenteith Century-Fox was perfectly happy with Bigger Than Life, however, and Spyros Skouras talked to Ray about extending his two-picture contract, making one film a year for the next seven years for the studio. First, however, the director had to fulfill his current deal, and late in the spring Ray halfheartedly agreed to mount a remake of Henry King’s 1939 film Jesse James, about the outlaw and his brother, Frank. Buddy Adler and Sid Rogell pitched it to the director as “Rebel Without a Cause out West,” with the James brothers as “misunderstood teenagers,” as Ray later recalled.
After finishing Bigger than Life, however, Ray felt a distinct letdown when he and the Jesse James project were assigned to a staff producer. Despite the problems he’d encountered while making the James Mason picture, the story had been in Ray’s comfort zone, with its middle-class milieu, alienated protagonist, drug-addiction theme, manic father-son relationship, and tinge of social critique. Besides, he’d had power and influence while making the film; he’d shared the trust of star-producer Mason—they were almost a two-man club—and all their fights were good fights.
He didn’t feel the same kinship with the 20th Century-Fox staff producer, Herbert Bayard Swope Jr., and it was clear from the start that he wouldn’t be granted the same leeway on the Jesse James film. The studio hovered over the script and pushed its own contract players as the leads. Long before filming began, the director saw disappointment written on the wall—and his own actions helped make it so.
The Jesse James remake had begun taking shape in the spring of 1956, when Ray was still deeply immersed in Bigger Than Life. Buddy Adler bought a first draft from Russell Hughes, a Western specialist who had been assigned to write a faithful adaptation of Nunnally Johnson’s script for the 1939 Tyrone Power–Henry Fonda version. A revered figure within the industry, Johnson had turned director and producer of his pictures; he was still a luminary on the 20th Century-Fox lot, and the studio had no intentions of straying very far from the original.
Ray came along with a loftier notion. “My preliminary production scheme,” he explained some years later, “was to do the whole film on stage as a legend, with people coming in and out of areas of light, making it a period study of the behavior of young people, but doing it as if it were all a ballad. It meant never doing anything for realism, putting the psychological, but not the real, within a stylistic form to make a unified piece of work.”
Studio officials put the kibosh on his ballad-of-a-legend idea early in the summer. Even so, Ray went to work on the script with Walter Newman, a writer whose friendly relationship with the director dated back to their mutually hectic RKO days, when they’d doctored a few films for Howard Hughes and collaborated on the Gypsy love story that ultimately morphed into Hot Blood. Ray told Newman he wanted to nudge the Jesse James story down an unconventional path—he wanted a more psychological and less romantic treatment of the folk hero, as compared to the earlier film—and he thought he could fend off some of the studio’s objections to his approach. He intended to salvage some aspects of the ballad idea with a theme song and flashbacks from the memory perspective of different characters. Jesse James himself would narrate the film at points.
As Ray envisioned James, the notorious outlaw was as troubled as he was troublemaker; he was another confused, overwrought youth in the Bowie–Nick Romano–Jim Stark vein. “We had great hopes for [the film] because we were trying to do a few th
ings far ahead of its time,” Newman recalled. “For one thing, both Nick and I were psychoanalytically oriented and in doing research were struck by the fact that Jesse was unmistakably self-destructive. His exploits were increasingly more hazardous and—surely it was unconscious on his part—he kept making disastrous mistakes.
“For example, he gave the man who killed him the gun with which it was done as a gift—like an invitation to murder him,” Newman said. “And to make it easier, he turned his back on the man to straighten a ‘God Bless Our Home’ chromo on the wall.”
Ray and Newman didn’t have very much time, however; the studio wanted to start photography by September. The two of them embarked on the usual frenzy of research and fact-finding, trying, as was Ray’s wont, to plant the fiction in authenticity. They came up with a number of interesting details—Frank James was known to carry a pocket volume of Shakespeare—but just as with Hot Blood, another film Ray ultimately shrugged off, most of the research got left behind or was reduced to fleeting embellishments.
Still, Newman enjoyed their collaboration. He belonged to the rare group of writers who felt he almost could read Ray’s mind. “I very seldom understood a single thing that Nick said,” Newman recalled. “Nick mumbled a great deal, leaving sentences unfinished and hanging in the air and starting many of them in the middle. Something like the interior monologues in Ulysses. But his tone of voice was expressive and he used his hands, his body and his face a great deal and once you crack his code there’s great clarity and wild originality—he wasn’t afraid to leave the ground in a balloon and then cut all the ropes anchoring him to earth.”
With Rexray finding no takers for its wishful projects, Ray realized that he wasn’t going to be able to launch his own independant production company in Hollywood. He talked over the frustrations of his career with Gavin Lambert. For the first time the director began to muse about escaping the prison walls of American film and finding true creative freedom in Europe. He had long wanted to shoot a picture overseas, and he’d enjoyed his taste of Europe during his two trips promoting Rebel Without a Cause. Now Ray began to talk of living abroad permanently. After all, he still had a first-class ticket in his back pocket, courtesy of 20th Century-Fox.
Using his overseas contacts, the director tried to set up an international project. He tried in vain to interest producers in a film of Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope, a South African novel about the racial divide with rugby as a backdrop. The Roger Donoghue story belonged to Budd Schulberg, but for a while Ray tried to promote his own boxing film about early-twentieth-century French champion Georges Carpentier, nicknamed the “Orchid Man,” but that too went nowhere.
Finally, a promising manuscript he’d chased for some time came to him via a Paris-based producer who thought he could set up an international coproduction using Hollywood connections. This was Bitter Victory, a forthcoming English translation of the novel Amère victoire by René Hardy, a French author Ray had met in Paris.
Hardy’s novel had won the Prix des Deux Magots in France, and the author had a curious life story. A center-right resistance fighter during World War II, Hardy had been a pivotal figure in the notorious Caluire affair (named for the Lyons suburb where it occurred), which involved the betrayal of leading comrades to the Gestapo. Twice tried as a traitor, Hardy was first acquitted and then technically found guilty but spared the actual verdict and death sentence on a procedural point. Hardy lived with fame and success but also the widespread public belief that he’d been a traitor.
Set in World War II, Hardy’s novel told the story of a crack commando unit led by two officers—one a coward, the other an admirable man who’s fallen for the coward’s wife. After being parachuted behind enemy lines in Libya on a mission to obtain secret battle plans, the unit makes a daring raid on German headquarters. Afterward, however, the soldiers miss their rescue rendezvous and are forced to strike out across hostile desert terrain, facing desperate thirst, poisonous scorpions, and a deadly sandstorm.
One intriguing element of the novel was the homoerotic attraction of Leith, the admirable officer, to his longtime Arab guide, Mokrane. This echoed the subtext of “homosocial desire,” as film scholar Anna Phelan-Cox has written, that is “played out through Oedipal love triangles” in other Ray films like Rebel Without a Cause or The Lusty Men. Often these were father-son relationships (“whether literal or figurative filial,” in Phelan-Cox’s words) found within an “erotic triangle,” in which the “threat” of mutual desire is “usually eradicated by the death of one of the dueling men.” As Hardy wrote of Leith in the novel, when the officer gazes at his faithful guide, “a strange uneasiness, centering on the Arab, stirred him with an unknown emotion, a sort of weakness.”
Ray and Gavin Lambert hoped to preserve the Leith-Mokrane relationship in the screen adaptation. Ray wanted to film scenes on location in North Africa, a prospect as daunting as it was exciting. “We both saw possibilities in the story,” Lambert recalled. MCA agent Herman Citron worked out a deal for Ray to direct Bitter Victory, with Lambert writing the script.
The French novelist came to Hollywood for talks with Ray and his assistant. Lambert was a helpful liaison between Ray and the Frenchman, who spoke stilted English but nonetheless assisted with the script. The director wanted to eliminate the flashback structure of the novel, putting the action into logical sequence; he also wanted to build the coward’s wife into more of a star part and to create more of an aching romance between her and Leith.
The producer also came to Hollywood: German-born Paul Graetz. Graetz discussed the production with Ray and Lambert but also visited Columbia to arrange $1.5 million in financing from the studio that knew Ray from Santana/Bogart films and Hot Blood. In the summer of 1956, Lambert worked minimally with Ray on The True Story of Jesse James (as the 20th Century-Fox remake would be known) and maximally on Bitter Victory.
One Nicholas Ray picture that wasn’t overlooked by critics at the time of its release was Bigger Than Life, which was rushed into U.S. theaters in early August in order to capitalize on the anniversary of James Dean’s death. Anticipation ran high for the new offering from the director of Rebel Without a Cause, and the notices were as positive as any in Ray’s career. James Mason’s performance was generally applauded—despite the star’s own reservations—and although audiences found the grim drama problematic, Mason’s popularity gave the film a brief opening lift at the box office.
“A first-rate thriller,” exclaimed Time, saying the lead role had been “superbly acted” by Mason and the picture “hair-raisingly directed by Nicholas Ray.” “Taut” and “tingling,” enthused the Washington Star. “An engrossing drama which builds to a climax of almost unbearable excitement and suspense,” rhapsodized Kay Proctor in the Los Angeles Examiner. “A brilliant triumph for its director.”
The film encountered much the same reception overseas. Selling Rebel Without a Cause in Europe had made Ray aware of the importance of film festivals, and it was his idea for 20th Century-Fox to submit Bigger Than Life to the end-of-summer Venice Film Festival. In its early years Hollywood had not paid much attention to the Venice event, since Americans rarely won the top awards, but that had begun to change in 1951, when Elia Kazan was awarded a Special Jury Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire. Ray knew that French periodicals closely covered the Venice screenings. Mason appeared at the festival, giving many interviews, and Bigger Than Life was nominated for the top prize, the Leone d’Oro, or Golden Lion. But two other films tied for that honor, and because of the tie, the Golden Lion was not awarded in 1956.
Still, Ray was right about the festival’s prestige value. Simone Dubreuilh, who wrote for Liberación but also was affiliated with Cahiers du Cinéma, saw the James Mason picture at the Venice festival and wrote, in advance of its European bookings, that Ray’s latest film cemented his stature as one of the revolutionaries of the American cinema. Jean-Luc Godard also acclaimed it, later listing Bigger Than Life as one of the ten best American sound f
ilms ever.
Today, Ray’s legion of admirers regard Bigger Than Life as a near masterwork, a personal allegory of the director’s own fight against addiction and depression and his aversion to family, as well as a social allegory about the fragility of the American nuclear family in the 1950s. David Thomson, one of the best-known U.S. critics, named it among the one thousand essential films he’d urge upon friends. “One of Ray’s most important and dynamic films,” Thomson declared in his book Have You Seen . . . ? “Both Rebel and Bigger Than Life show how plainly he saw manias building in America.”
Ray could join in his own hero worship, or he could beg to differ. Bigger Than Life would be his last fond memory of Hollywood, and years later the director told the Canadian film journal Take One that he was “satisfied” with the film—a strong word for him—adding, “The ending is a little bit corny and embarrassing. . . . The unrealness of it embarrasses me at times.”
Following Ray’s guidance, Walter Newman wrote as swiftly as possible over the summer of 1956. His late summer draft for The True Story of Jesse James might have reflected the dangling conversations he had with the director. When Darryl F. Zanuck’s longtime assistant Molly Mandaville read the draft, she complained in a memo that she couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“This is an awfully difficult script to read,” Mandaville wrote on the last day of August, a week before filming was scheduled to start. “Time after time I had to refer back several pages in the script in order to get the thread of what had happened before, and connect it up with what I was reading at the time. It’s possible that when we see this on the screen this confusion won’t develop. But reading it in black and white is pretty tough going.”
One difficulty, as Mandaville noted, was the “peculiar flashback style” of the script. The many flashbacks from shifting perspectives alarmed everyone at the studio. After receiving Mandaville’s memo, Adler convened an emergency meeting in his office to go over the script line by line with Ray, studio story editor David Brown, and producer Herbert Bayard Swope Jr. Adler asked for fewer flashbacks, less of the first-person narration Ray always loved, fewer long speeches pouring out of the mouths of major characters, and a reduction in the number of minor characters. The director reluctantly agreed to the less-is-more consensus in the room, and Newman went back to work, now doing more cutting and rearranging than writing.
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