Ray was hardly alone in pursuing Heston. The Oscar winner was arguably the most bankable actor in the world, and Bronston and Yordan wanted him to star in all of their next pictures. Bronston could raise money purely on Heston’s name, which was gold at the box office. Yordan and Ray spent a lot of time together in Rome and Paris, and although Yordan was faintly encouraging about Ray’s quixotic projects, their conversations inevitably swirled around the subjects that would be most appealing to Heston.
Yordan had a catchphrase—“The Fall of the Roman Empire”—and he and Ray began to brainstorm another superspectacle with that title and Ray as the director. Bronston liked the phrase enough to authorize a little money for a script and preliminary planning. The script was farmed out to one of Los Negroes, Joseph Losey’s close collaborator Ben Barzman, who was living in Paris, where Yordan and Ray could easily confer with him. Barzman had written the bulk of El Cid (although Yordan got the credit). Heston was initially noncommittal about “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” but Yordan felt increasingly confident about its allurement. He thought that the star would eventually succumb to any good script involving the Roman Empire, with its obvious overlap with Ben-Hur.
Regardless of how the director or broader public might have felt about them, Ray’s recent, problem-plagued films had been greeted with rapturous praise by French cinephiles. The French were not monolithic: The Paris-based Cahiers du Cinéma group was arguably more fervent than its left-wing rival Positif, based in Lyons, which had published its first issue in 1952. But in general Bitter Victory, Party Girl, The Savage Innocents, and even Hot Blood and Wind Across the Everglades were seen in France as personal artistic triumphs over the Hollywood factory system. “To remain insensitive to the thousand beauties of Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl,” read the famously extravagant verdict of Cahiers’s Fereydoun Hoveyda, “is to turn one’s back resolutely on the modern cinema, to reject the cinema as an autonomous art.”
Around this time, a new generation of Oxonians emerged to ratchet up the “egghead praise” of Ray, as it was dubbed in London’s Guardian. Ray reached out to the new Oxonians, as he had to Gavin Lambert and the earliest proponents of auteurism in France. The director believed in meeting and “educating the critics” about the “dark ways of the film industry,” as W. J. Weatherby wrote in the Guardian. Ray liked to discuss with his admirers their theories about his films, mingling his ideas with theirs and cross-fertilizing. At one point Ray even proposed “a mammoth conference at which about ten leading directors,” himself included, “would show what they thought was their best film,” according to Weatherby, “then would argue over it with a group of leading critics.”
On one trip to London, the director accepted a speaking engagement at the Oxford Film Society, meeting one of his leading admirers among the new generation of English critics, V. F. Perkins, who exchanged “a few over-awed fan-like words” with the director, according to Perkins. Perkins’s subsequent encomium in the Oxford Opinion compared Ray favorably with Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, extolling his “quest for lucidity” in storytelling, his brilliance with actors, and his “outstandingly beautiful” use of design and camerawork. The director’s methods, Perkins wrote, resulted in “the subjection of a frequently banal narrative to an idiosyncratic mise-en-scene.”
Penelope Houston, editor of the older, wiser Sight and Sound, was one of the original Oxonians, along with Lambert, to have discovered Ray with They Live by Night, and she reminded readers of those credentials while taking exception to the Oxford Opinion’s “extreme” new brand of auteurism, which carried with it “vague hints and indications” that anyone who disputed their criteria was some kind of fuddy-duddy. Citing cult Oxonian films directed by Sam Fuller and Douglas Sirk, as well as the Cyd Charisse–Robert Taylor film of Ray’s that was such a French favorite, she wrote, “A theory of criticism constructed around an appreciation of Crimson Kimono [Fuller] or Party Girl [Ray], or Written on the Wind [Sirk], seems to me a distinctly barren one.”
Richard Roud, an American serving as the London correspondent for Cahiers, weighed in on Houston’s side but tried to occupy a thoughtful middle ground with an essay explaining why “old fogies” preferred pictures that evince “a fusion of significant form with literary or humanistic content.” Roud made light of the French adoration of Party Girl and the emerging critique des beautés, a critical approach concentrating “entirely on the beauties of a work of art rather than attempting impartially to point out both the good and the bad elements.” The critique des beautés, Roud wrote, increasingly formed a questionable adjunct to the politique des auteurs, with its guiding principle of choosing “those you are for and those you are against.”
This argument preoccupied important English and French film critics alike—that is, primarily Sight and Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma, and Positif—and, although it is hard to explain why exactly, Ray more than any other director found himself positioned at its center. In part this was because, earlier than most American filmmakers, Ray had taken an activist role in forming alliances with young adherents and in making appearances at film festivals and retrospectives of his films in Europe.
For the first time, during the long postproduction of King of Kings, Ray was a guest of honor at a major festival, screening Rebel Without a Cause and The Savage Innocents in Barcelona, Spain. In March of the same year, 1961, the director was on hand for his first en bloc retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, in Paris, with cofounder Henri Langlois introducing Bitter Victory as a masterwork. Bronston’s publicity apparatus also helped to organize a mini-retrospective of Ray’s films at the National Film Theatre (NFT) in London still later in 1961, coinciding with the British premiere of King of Kings. ( Joseph Losey shared the program, but the pairing had nothing to do with their La Crosse connection. According to the program director, “We were planning to do a series on Losey anyway and decided to give the other half to Ray when we found out he was coming through London.”) The NFT program opened with They Live by Night, the Ray film that had been rescued from oblivion by local critics more than a decade before.
Wherever Ray traveled, he encouraged the enthusiasm of young critics and influenced the “reading” of his films. These days Philip Yordan often accompanied him, adding his own voice to the mix. Yordan’s body of work gave him an independent cachet with the French, and Yordan too hobnobbed with auteurists, giving interviews that tended to echo, complement, or augment Ray’s. For example, the writer spoke at length to Bertrand Tavernier for Cahiers du Cinéma, explaining Johnny Guitar as a conscious attack on puritanism and McCarthyism. Yordan said almost nothing about Ray’s contribution to the script, yet this was the first time anyone had defined the Joan Crawford Western in an anti-McCarthyist vein. No one, when Johnny Guitar was initially released, had written about the lynch mob as stand-ins for the House Un-American Activities Committee, or Ward Bond as a caricature of an anti-Communist vigilante, or Joan Crawford as a falsely fingered Red. Yordan’s anti-McCarthyist explanation stuck, however, and is routinely cited by many contemporary critics writing about Johnny Guitar. “I was gullible and told what I wanted to hear,” Tavernier now says decades later, although he isn’t certain the film isn’t an anti-McCarthyist parable anyway.
Similarly, when In a Lonely Place was first shown, the French described the film as an allegory treating Ray’s marriage to Gloria Grahame; only later would some describe it as a political parable depicting Dix (Bogart), the wrongly accused screenwriter, as a sort of blacklist victim. Ray himself, speaking to V. F. Perkins for his new magazine Movie in 1961, described Dix as being “under the pressure of society,” while saying nothing specific about those pressures, nothing about the blacklist. Yet, as his films were revived in the early 1960s, as Ray traveled throughout Europe and gave interviews, these dubious ideas about his films would grow and solidify.
Ray benefited from his proximity to the European auteurists, just as their reverential view of him was bolstered by the fact that he lived
in Europe. They saw him as a filmmaker, like D. W. Griffith or Orson Welles, whose instincts were too “arty” for the Hollywood system. In their view, after all, Hollywood tried to kill many of its greatest artists. Ray, Griffith, Welles, and a few others belonged to Hollywood’s long shameful “martyrlogue”—a word coined by Serge Daney, an assertive French critic who later became an editor of Cahiers du Cinéma.
At least one who shared that category resented the fact that Ray had risen so fast and high in the French martyrlogue. Gore Vidal savored the punch line of this anecdote, which he told often: “Orson Welles, a very funny man, once said to me, ‘You know the French ruin everything. They come up to you and say, “You are one of the three great directors of the cinema.” I nod, I nod. “There is D. W. Griffith. There is Orson Welles. And there is Nicholas Ray.” ’ He said, ‘There is always that third name that crushes you.’ ”
In common with Welles, however, Ray saw the “egghead praise” as free publicity and salve to his wounds. Not always lucky in life or career, Ray recognized his status among auteurists as a rare stroke of good fortune. The adoration of English and French critics—now spreading to America—not only rescued the director at low points in his career, but increasingly posited a munificent view of his career that brooked no argument. Appreciation for Nicholas Ray became a cornerstone of auteurist film criticism, from which there was no backing down.
Thinking highly of Ray’s salesmanship, Samuel Bronston dispatched the director to premieres and events launching King of Kings in cities around the world. In Hollywood, Ray was all smiles at a bountiful press luncheon hosted by MGM at Perino’s. Afterward he traveled with the film’s Salome, Brigid Bazlen, to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Manila. Everywhere he went, regardless of the fact that MGM had kept him at arm’s length while crafting the film’s final form, Ray fiercely defended his life of Christ against skeptical or negative reviews.
Major U.S. theaters welcomed King of Kings in early November 1961, well in advance of the religious holiday season that was approaching. A number of the American reviews were scornful, but the notices in Hollywood, where multimillion-dollar products of the hometown industry were generally supported on principle, were not as harsh as those in New York.
Ray had a “belligerent” reaction, in his own words, to Bosley Crowther’s harsh pan in the New York Times, which derided King of Kings as an “illustrated lecture” that was “peculiarly impersonal” and sluggish and tedious besides. The director told a friendlier journalist from the Los Angeles Mirror that Crowther’s review “was generated by areas of ill-meaning and of questionable motivation. It was not genuine film criticism.”
Then Ray was asked about Moira Walsh, who had described King of Kings, in the Catholic national weekly America, as “a gigantic fraud perpetrated by the film industry on the movie going public” without “substantial religious or at least edifying qualities.”
Ray pulled out a clipping from L’osservatore romano, the Vatican newspaper, extolling the director’s courage, his careful portrait of Jesus, his commendable objectives, “even if his picture is . . . much more impressive from a point of form, than contents.”
Again and again in similar interviews the director hit on a theme that had preoccupied much of his career, from They Live by Night through to Rebel Without a Cause and The True Story of Jesse James. “I have always been concerned with youth and their struggle for belief and understanding,” the director told the press. “And I will be personally satisfied if our film can establish the fact that the story of Jesus and the men and women who were first attracted to His teachings is essentially a story about, and for, young people.”
Although King of Kings opened with all the promotional hoopla MGM could muster, the 168-minute superspectacle was slow to attract an audience—and at first appeared to sell a disappointing number of tickets. But the Bronston organization files confirm that Ray’s life of Christ steadily built a following in America and throughout the world. “The wild expectations that were dreamt up by publicity men should never have been taken too seriously,” writer-producer Yordan wrote to reassure one nervous Bronston investor. “But by solid theatre men, Kings is a hit film. The picture will not only recoup its negative, but remain and continue its exhibition for the remainder of our life span.”
In terms of dollars earned, King of Kings was actually more successful than Rebel Without a Cause. It scored higher in the annual box-office ratings, ending up in the top ten of 1962. Not only that: If the Ray cult was initially fazed by the picture, which was unlike any other the director had made—a stately biblical epic targeting all religions and audiences—many gradually swung around. In 2002, Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the elder statesmen of American auteurism, pointed out “potent stretches” in one of Ray’s least-praised pictures. Indeed, Rosenbaum said that all of Ray’s twenty completed features “could plausibly be called masterpieces of one kind or another.” King of Kings was the nineteenth.
By the time Betty Utey gave birth to their second daughter, Nicca, on October 1, 1961, just before the King of Kings premiere, Ray knew what his twentieth film would be. After signing a new contract with Samuel Bronston and Philip Yordan to direct three pictures for an aggregate of $1 million, Ray boasted of being “the highest paid director in the American cinema.” However, the aggregate included unearned bonuses and profit percentages. (Perhaps he should have added “living in Europe.”)
After El Cid moved on to postproduction, Yordan and Ray were able to spend concerted time together, sifting through all the potential projects and lining them up in future order for the Bronston organization and Security Pictures.
Ray probably wasn’t surprised when Yordan definitively passed on The Tribe That Lost Its Head, The Road to the Snail, the Children’s Crusade film, and the other “moon talk” that had occupied his time in the six months since completing King of Kings. More to Yordan’s taste was Ray’s ambition to craft a blockbuster about circus life—another borrowing from Cecil B. DeMille. Caught up in the superspectacle mania, Ray pitched a big-top film that would out-DeMille DeMille. It would be a travelogue of world circuses, hopping from location to location in Europe and the Far East. Major international stars would play key as well as cameo roles, à la Around the World in 80 Days. The all-encompassing script would offer “an accurate and penetrating panorama of circus life, its people and the traditional trained animals in both historic and modern perspective,” according to advance publicity. Ray’s circus-world extravaganza was penciled in for Security Pictures somewhere down the line—after he directed everybody’s first choice, “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” for Bronston.
Between Ray, Yordan, Paris blacklistee Ben Barzman, and Italian writer-director Basilio Franchina, a “Roman Empire” script had been rushed into existence that numbered about one hundred pages. But after reading this first draft, Charlton Heston couldn’t get very excited about the prospects. Heston had been unhappy with his experience on El Cid, where he had been beguiled by Yordan and his smooth talk, but never got the “honest script” he was promised, in Heston’s words. The actor was flooded with offers these days and thought perhaps he should make his next vehicle a contemporary drama, for variety’s sake, not another sweeping historical saga like Ben-Hur or El Cid. But Ray as his director continued to intrigue him. Heston refused to say yes or no; he kept bouncing the project back to his agent—Ray’s old agent Herman Citron—demanding various guarantees.
Meanwhile, for several months over the summer of 1961, the script writing and preproduction moved along. Trying to stay one step ahead of Heston’s psychology, Yordan decided it would be good to have a fallback project to offer to the star if he kept stonewalling them on “The Fall of the Roman Empire.” Bernard Gordon, toiling away in Yordan’s cubicles in Paris, pitched the idea of a superspectacle involving the Boxer Rebellion in Peking in 1900, telling Yordan about an “unusual, pictorial and filmic” stage play he recalled on the subject from his days as a lowly reader at Paramount back in the 194
0s. Stuck in Paris, Gordon couldn’t recall the title or author, and Yordan “never sparked” to his idea anyway.
Not, at least, until one day when Yordan took a trip to London, where he went cruising the book stalls with his wife. Mrs. Yordan picked up one of the books for sale and opened it to a chapter titled “Fifty-five Days at Peking.” “That clicked,” Yordan told Gordon.
Nothing better than a snappy title. Right then and there at the book stalls, Yordan told Gordon, he’d been inspired to make a film about the 1900 uprising in Peking, with the anti-Christian, anti-imperialist Boxers, egged on by the royal dynasty in the imperial palace of the Forbidden City, declaring war on foreign nationals. Americans—Charlton Heston!—could ride to the rescue for fifty-five days, heroically defending men and women from eleven foreign legations occupying a few acres of a walled compound. In short, “a Chinese Alamo.” Gordon tried reminding Yordan that he’d been pushing the Boxer Rebellion for months, but Yordan insisted it was the London book stalls, and his wife’s stumbling upon the chapter title, that galvanized him.
With a great title—but “no story, no plot ideas, no characters and only the sketchiest notion of what the Boxer Rebellion had ever been about,” in Gordon’s words—Yordan and Gordon dove into crafting a “presentable” story treatment to hook Heston. At the Madrid preview of El Cid in late November, while touring the elaborate sets for the Roman Empire film that a gung-ho Bronston was busily erecting, Heston stood his ground: He would not be starring in Bronston’s Roman Empire epic. He was surprised by how unfazed everyone was.
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