Nicholas Ray

by Patrick McGilligan

  He had had time to rest and time to reflect on recent disappointments. The old ambivalence he felt toward Hollywood had reasserted itself. Setting aside his own mistakes, had he tried hard enough? Did the very nature of film and the money-grubbing of the industry make it impossible for him to pursue idiosyncratic, personal motion pictures? Was any and every attempt at artistic glory doomed to failure?

  Ray’s call to Hopper was the first sign that he wasn’t through directing. Not long thereafter, he exchanged wires with MCA, and the agency started putting out feelers on his behalf. All the rumors about his behavior had hurt his reputation, and producers were wary, but there were always second and third chances in the film business. “He couldn’t get insured,” Betty Utey said later, “because of his alcoholism. To prove that he wasn’t drinking was the big thing.”

  The newlyweds left Maine with two beagle puppies, stopping in New York to visit the Museum of Modern Art, then driving all the way back to Los Angeles, arriving in late November and renting a home on Miller Drive in Beverly Hills. Ray made sure Hopper’s column was up-to-date. “He’s reading scripts like mad,” the columnist reported.

  Lew and Edie Wasserman revived their friendship with the director, and the department store magnate Alfred S. Bloomingdale, another high-stakes-card-playing muckamuck friendly with Ronald Reagan, helped Ray set up a story development company. “There were people in high places who believed in him,” recalled Utey, “especially if he wasn’t drinking.”

  The drinking had tapered off, though it’s unclear whether the director had stopped altogether. “At that time in my life I thought vodka was men’s cologne,” explained Utey. “I thought he’d stopped using whatever cologne he was using, so I was pretty innocent.”

  As before, Ray found it impossible to achieve a breakthrough on his own. Without the umbrella of a studio, his efforts at story development went nowhere. Ray may have spent weeks reading “like mad” but he fielded few actual offers. The deal MCA finally came up with had little to do with Hollywood: a new project that was backed by British, French, and Italian money, with as yet no commitments from any American studio.

  The project’s Rome-based producer, Maleno Malenotti, had put together the financing for previous pictures by maverick Italian filmmakers like Gillo Pontecorvo and American blacklistees like Jules Dassin. Malenotti wanted to film an acclaimed novel by Hans Ruesch called The Top of the World, published in 1950. Ruesch’s story revolved around the primitive existence of an Inuit Eskimo named Ernenek; the film would call him Inuk. After Inuk accidentally kills a Christian missionary who has refused the sexual “loan” of his wife—an Eskimo courtesy—two Javert-like police troopers hunt him down across miles and years to bring the Eskimo to justice.

  The novel’s setting appealed to Ray at least as much as its plot: It would be an Arctic adventure for him. The director was a fan of the documentarian and ethnographer Robert Flaherty, and The Top of the World bore similarities to Flaherty’s pioneering Nanook of the North, which Ray first saw at Taliesin, along with Rockwell Kent’s footage of Greenland. For Ray, this new project was a chance to return to the purism of his past, to ideas born at Taliesin, but also to his own happy days as an ethnographer, traveling on behalf of the Works Progress Administration.

  Now, over Christmas 1958, Ray wrote like mad, working on a script draft he could take to the next stage of casting and location scouting. Ray boasted later that it was “the first major script I wrote all by myself”—a sole credit he’d long craved as a badge of honor.

  But as usual he had unsung assistance, including a secretary and a supportive new wife, to help him conduct a flurry of research into Eskimo life. Over time, his attitude toward scripts—his sometimes poor relationship with Hollywood professionals and his frustration with projects that came to him with ready-made, inferior scripts already stamped with final approval by studio executives—had converged and hardened into a cynicism. Scripts were something to be improved upon during production—if not by more scribbling, then by ingenious camerawork. Paradoxically, perhaps, Ray enjoyed writing and was always happy writing.

  “There was a need for Nick to be in control, which he never was,” said producer Jud Kinberg, an associate of John Houseman’s and a friend of Ray’s in Hollywood and Rome, “and I think writing gave you the most control you can get, because until somebody else stepped in you were the one who made all the decisions. And it never happened down the line. It didn’t even happen to the writer, but for the time that it was being written you were the producer, the director, the actors. You were everything.”

  By February 26, 1959, Ray had completed a draft, carrying only his own name and a new title: The Savage Innocents. “I took more from the Archives of Copenhagen and a book by Peter Freuchen* than I did from the novel,” Ray later boasted to interviewers, sounding a little like Dix (Bogart) in In a Lonely Place, who stoutly refuses to read the bestseller he is adapting. (“It’s not the book,” Dix’s agent complains after the script is done. “The book was trash,” Dix retorts.)

  In fact Ray borrowed heavily from the first half of Ruesch’s story, while skipping the second half. His script also benefitted from work by several other writers who either preceded him or later overlapped him on final revisions: novelist Hans Ruesch, Italian scenarist Franco Solinas, and, curiously, Ray’s eventual assistant and second-unit director, Baccio Bandini. All were credited with “adaptation” for the European release.

  Yet once again, Ray was determined to make the Eskimo film his own. He saw The Savage Innocents as a chance to redeem himself after Bitter Victory and Wind Across the Everglades. He believed he had failed to bring those subjects to life in a glorious manner. The Savage Innocents was his third topographical film set in a foreign culture: the tarantulas and sandstorms of Bitter Victory—and the gator-infested swamplands of Wind Across the Everglades—would comprise an informal trilogy with the arctic wilderness and dangers of The Savage Innocents.

  Indeed, scene after scene of Ray’s new project echoed the images and themes of the earlier films. In Bitter Victory, the Arab guide carves into the stomach of a camel in order to extract the juices of its bladder and prolong the life of Leith; in The Savage Innocents, Inuk would gut a dog and thrust the frozen hands of a trooper into its warm belly. One trooper perishes in The Savage Innocents, but the other persists in his determination to capture Inuk; their long slog toward justice would eerily evoke the tropical death march shared by Walt Murdock and Cottonmouth at the end of Wind Across the Everglades.

  The Italian producer liked Ray’s draft enough to approve funds for the scouting and planning to begin in earnest in March 1959. The director planned a trip to Ottawa, where he met up with a Canadian wilderness adviser, Douglas Wilkinson, assistant director Bandini, a close associate of Malenotti’s, and the Italian cinematographer Aldo Tonti. This would be the first of Ray’s films in the new seventy-millimeter format, and Tonti, whose background included shooting Nights of Cabiria for Federico Fellini, would ensure its visual grandeur. After ten days spent touring the rugged north, Ray settled on a group of sites near the town of Churchill on Hudson Bay and nearby Baffin Island, not far from Greenland and the Arctic Circle.

  Though Ray seemed ebullient while scouting in Canada, he acted “tired, gloomy and irritable” upon returning to Hollywood, according to an assistant director, Jacques Giraldeau. “He had lost his enthusiasm. I’ve always felt that the discrepancy between the reality and what he had imagined from his desk in California was the cause of his change in attitude.”

  The script remained fluid, a work in progress. Malenotti was anxious to sign a marquee name for Inuk, in order to lock in the financing, so Ray went after Anthony Quinn, the flamboyant, Mexican-born actor, who specialized in ethnic leads. Quinn was at the height of his popularity and transition to stardom: He would win Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor in 1953 and 1957, and garner nominations for Best Actor in 1958 and 1965. Quinn was amenable to playing the Eskimo, but he vigorously critiq
ued his scenes, adding his own rewrite demands to those of the producer and irritating Ray, who hadn’t expected quite so much feedback.

  Much preparing remained. Ray embarked on a flurry of trips: first to Wisconsin, where he and Betty Utey stood in the harsh cold over his mother’s grave (she had died in March 1959), and then to Europe. He met with the producer in Rome, discussed studio interiors in London to follow the location work in Canada, went to Paris to cast the French-born Japanese actress Yoko Tani as Quinn’s Eskimo wife,* and made quick stops in Berlin and Copenhagen to conduct research and scout secondary locations (later abandoned). In Copenhagen too, he rendezvoused with Quinn and Tani and reviewed the schedule, discussing Eskimo customs and listening to Eskimo music.

  While in London, Ray also sought an actor to play the First Trooper, who suffers frozen hands and has his life saved by Inuk during the long trek. Peter O’Toole, then a twenty-six-year-old thespian unknown to moviegoers, and his wife, actress Sian Phillips, were excited to meet the great man who’d directed the famous Rebel Without a Cause. But the reality dismayed them. “He was oddly disappointing: distracted and unfocused,” Phillips recalled. “But he wasn’t drunk—maybe he was ill?”

  O’Toole had a previous stage commitment, but Ray decided to work around his schedule, using a local double for the actor in Canada. Bandini and Tonti and a small crew traveled to Churchill ahead of the main company, shooting second-unit footage, with the director and cast members arriving in the wilds in mid-May. The weather was still subzero, and the wind was a shrill and freezing menace. Again—as with those other “adventures,” Bitter Victory and Wind Across the Everglades—the isolation cast a spell of gloom over the production.

  If Ray had hopes of fostering another two-man club with Quinn—who’d won his first Oscar under Elia Kazan’s tutelage in Viva Zapata!—he was in for a letdown. The punishing location discomfited the star, and Quinn kept forcing changes in the script. Ray had written “all the Eskimo dialogue in beautiful, fluent, poetic language,” for example, as the director insisted later. “But when they began playing, Quinn found that he couldn’t adjust to Yoko’s rhythm without using pidgin English. I should have recast, or at least determined to dub.”

  Quinn’s performance was his business, and sometimes the camerawork too. Later, referring to “terrible problems” with the star, Ray said that he’d had to compromise and allow Quinn to step in as a kind of codirector—much as he had, to better results, with James Dean. “On one or two occasions I even had to shoot scenes in two different ways,” recalled Ray, “as Quinn saw it and as I wanted it.”

  Whether fueled by drink, drugs, or gritty resolve, Ray’s physical stamina won over the cast and crew—and finally, grudgingly, Quinn himself. As an Eskimo stood nearby, Winchester at the ready, Ray captured footage of bears as they emerged from hibernation. The director was “ready to work twenty-four hours a day,” remembered cinematographer Tonti, and exulted in the extreme conditions. A Canadian journalist visiting the location reported that he was impressed to see Hollywood folks roughing it as if they were natives. “The cameramen are constantly on the move,” he wrote in his chronicle, “disregarding wind and cold. Once during a minor blizzard they took shelter behind a canvas windbreak, but only until Mr. Ray decided it was a good opportunity to catch a storm scene. Then they shot film.”

  The director stayed up all night, making notes and sketching shots. By day he raced ahead of the camera crew across sheets of ice. “The landscape, truth to tell,” recalled Tonti, “looked much the same all over, but the director went on rambling imperturbably around, as though strolling through summer meadows. . . . He used to stride around on the ice as though he’d done it all his life.”

  One day, as he marched around, Ray suddenly dropped from sight. Everyone thought he’d fallen through the ice. The cameraman rushed forward, calling out his name. “I found him,” Tonti remembered, “kneeling on the ground. He had one hand held to his brow, staring intently off into the infinite. Thinking he was praying, I was going to withdraw, but my modest shadow made him turn around. He looked at me with an air of inspiration. ‘I want the camera always to be this high!’ he decreed, getting up and casting a shadow twice the length of mine. I remained puzzled. ‘The important thing is to get out of here alive,’ I stammered. And we went on.”

  Early on, Ray’s young wife came along for the adventure. Eventually, though, she was sent ahead to London, and for good reason: The third Mrs. Ray was pregnant with the couple’s first child. The director gave Hedda Hopper the exclusive on the story, sending her a telegram from the northern clime. A month later, Betty Utey rejoined her husband and the crew in London for soundstage scenes at Pinewood Studios.

  Yet the director was still Joe Btfsplk, trailed too often by a little cloud of bad luck. Disaster struck The Savage Innocents when a Beechcraft airplane leaving the Canadian location belly-dived into an ice heap during takeoff; no one was killed, but much of Ray’s hard-won documentary footage was destroyed. In London, Ray had to scramble to rent circus animals and conjure up seal fights, blinding snowstorms, and plausible igloos and icy terrain inside studio soundstages. Special effects matte shots would complete the half-real, half-fake Arctic.

  The script had originally included a third act set in the courtroom, just like Reusch’s novel. But time and budget forced Ray to sacrifice those scenes in London. In interviews at the time, the director professed high spirits over the many challenges. “I suppose I should be tired,” Ray told the Times of London, “but I don’t feel at all tired. I always find working hard on a film which interests me has a tonic effect. Since we started location shooting, I’ve lost two stone and seldom felt better.”

  After the London interiors he was off to Rome, where postproduction would take most of his time until the end of the year. There Ray would have inevitable disagreements with Maleno Malenotti, however. The Italian producer felt that the film belonged to him, financially and otherwise; behind Ray’s back he ordered recutting and the dubbing of Peter O’Toole’s English voice with an Italian actor’s—a particularly bitter pill for the director, as Ray had bonded with O’Toole during the filming in London. (Together they had gone to see Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus at Stratford-on-Avon.) O’Toole took it badly; unhappy with the whole business, he insisted on removing his name from the English prints.

  The Italian market, where the film was called Ombre bianche (literally, “White Shadows”), took precedence over all others. As Ray later bitterly told Sight and Sound, “The score had an Italian flavor; the jokes were a bit broader than they need be, to meet the Italian sense of humor; there was rather more emphasis on blood and slaughter in the cutting.” Malenotti struck the final blow, in Italy, giving Baccio Bandini equal billing as “co-director.”

  After filming was completed in London, nearly a year would pass before The Savage Innocents was unveiled to audiences. In June 1960, the Eskimo film competed unsuccessfully for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, once again sharply dividing general attendees and the sophisticated critics who awaited the latest film from Nicholas Ray.

  Even admirers had to concede that The Savage Innocents was stubbornly peculiar—an acquired taste, like the blubber devoured by the Eskimos in the picture. Quinn’s central performance was dubious, and in any case the director had sublimated the human drama to the spectacularly harsh vistas and wilderness imagery—some of it real, some of it not. Ray’s Disney True-Life Adventures–style narration encouraged unflattering comparisons to Robert Flaherty.

  Never widely released in the United States, The Savage Innocents would not be shown in New York until one year after its screening at Cannes, and only then in “badly cut form as a neighborhood theatre second feature,” in the words of Eugene Archer, the New York Times’s second-string critic. Yet Archer liked the film, hailing Ray’s “highly individualistic preoccupation with moral tensions,” and praising the filmmaker’s visual style, “emphasizing violent eruptive motion rather than smoother, more gra
ceful techniques.” Archer apprised viewers that the director had concealed “symbolic meanings beneath the bewildering surface level of his plot.”

  Archer was uniquely positioned to view the latest Ray film sympathetically. Fluent in French, he’d studied film at the Sorbonne; he was friendly with Truffaut and Godard and shared the general Cahiers du Cinema reverence for Ray. (Godard again listed The Savage Innocents among his top ten films of the year.) Along with Andrew Sarris, who had just started writing regularly for the Village Voice, and Peter Bogdanovich, just beginning to line up films and write program notes for the New Yorker Theater, Archer represented the first real stirrings of American auteurism.

  In favoring symbolism over plot, Archer wrote, Ray had “simultaneously sacrificed his chances for popular acceptance and allied himself with such difficult and controversial European filmmakers” as Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy and Godard in France. Just as The Savage Innocents split Cannes sophisticates into camps, Ray’s film would divide its prospective audience in the United States, Archer predicted. “His strange, disturbing drama will leave most of its viewers dissatisfied and some outraged,” Archer wrote.

  Most people would never have the chance to see the Eskimo drama, however, to be dissatisfied or outraged by Ray’s film. Even today, The Savage Innocents is probably the director’s least-seen film in the United States, unavailable at this writing on videotape or DVD (though parts can be viewed on YouTube). In Europe, where it’s more readily available, it is regarded by Ray enthusiasts as probably his last pure film, the defining testament to his questing artistry, a film in which he succeeded in bending a stubborn cast, a ticklish script, and harsh external elements to his glorious vision, rebounding from banishment to thumb his nose at Hollywood, triumphing over daunting obstacles to create a sublimely personal work.