“A director when he watches a scene and has what he wants calls out, ‘Cut!’ But sometimes, when the scene is going surprisingly well and is providing some astonishing things, he will whisper to his cameraman, ‘Don’t cut,’ and allow the scene to continue past where he’d rehearsed it. Nick Ray was directing his own last close-up. Toward the end of the shot and of what he had to say in the shot, he called out, ‘Cut!’ Then, ‘Don’t cut!’ What Nick was calling out was something more than an instruction to a cameraman. He was prolonging his life where he’d most lived his life—on film.
“Nick didn’t want to die. He wanted to go on. He didn’t give in, not a minute, not on an inch of film. Even in his last terrible misery, he clung to every ‘foot’ of life, the film on which his living was being preserved. You may call it phony, and I will understand why. But I call it heroic.”
The last take of Wenders’s film was recorded on May 3. A few days later, Ray attended a Museum of Modern Art screening of They Live by Night and On Dangerous Ground, answering audience questions though he stood at death’s door. (“We lifted him on stage in a wheelchair,” wrote Tom Farrell.) He hung on for another month and was in his hospital bed on June 11 when visitors told him that John Wayne had passed away. Wayne’s death struck an unexpected blow: The director tried to tell a fond anecdote about Wayne, but words failed him.
Ray enjoyed telling friends and interviewers that one day his headstone might read “I Was Interrupted.” European cinephiles might prefer “Mr. CinemaScope.” Fans of Johnny Guitar would suggest “I’m a stranger here myself.”
He was two months short of his seventy-eighth year when his life was interrupted in the night of June 16, 1979. According to his last wishes, Ray was interred in section 53, lot 248 of the Oak Grove Cemetery in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the same section as his parents. His grave is only numbered, with no inscription.
Thirty years after his death, as the centennial of Ray’s birth approaches in August 2011, his auteurist mystique endures. Although the older European critics who first trumpeted Ray’s greatness sixty years ago are a dying breed, they have left their mark on Ray’s status in film history and in the renewable ardor of younger critics.
In America, Andrew Sarris is still alive and well and writing about film, and although he has modified his views about many things over the years, his auteurist treatise and early pronouncements were accepted as gospel, sometimes without nuance, by the next generation of American film critics. The best of these include the most constant Ray admirers: Jonathan Rosenbaum—another Francophile—and David Thomson, a transplant from England and Sight and Sound. In his 2009 book Have You Seen . . . ? Thomson lists seven favorite Nick Ray films—more than one-third of Ray’s total output—out of the one thousand he recommends as vital filmgoing experiences.* Rosenbaum and Thomson, prolific and eloquent, alone could hold the Alamo.
In Europe, as in America, Ray’s films have been revived almost nonstop on cable television and in museum and art house retrospectives over the thirty years since the director’s death. Though several of his films remain unavailable in the United States, some have been belatedly restored and made available on DVD: the original, 102-minute version of Bitter Victory was offered to the public in 2005, and a special edition of Bigger Than Life, “now recognized as one of the great American films of the 1950s,” according to company publicity, was released as part of the Criterion Collection in 2010, the first of several Nicholas Ray films Criterion plans to resuscitate and market worldwide.
In death Ray remains very much alive—so much so that in 2011, his centennial year, the Venice Film Festival has announced that will finally unveil a definitive version of We Can’t Go Home Again. Incomplete for thirty years, Ray’s 1976 edition of the student-professor film has undergone a $500,000 restoration and finally been finished by his widow, Susan Schwartz Ray.
This, at long last, is the Nicholas Ray film the purists have been waiting for. Susan Ray is the former Susan Schwartz, who seems never to have been formally married to the director or to have been known as “Mrs. Ray” during his lifetime. But Ray was lucky in love with the college student he met in Chicago nine years before his death. She was steadfast during his last years and kept the flame burning after he passed away, launching a foundation to uphold his legacy and tirelessly raising money to restore his last acheivement. Like so many, she believes in Ray’s greatness, and she believed all along in his student-professor film. The final cut is hers. However it is received, auteurists might well call it “un film de Mr. and Mrs. Ray.”
Filmography
Cast and crew are identified and listed in the order of the original credits, as the names appeared on the screen at the time of the film’s initial release. Various websites—including the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)—feature more complete lists of cast and crew, including “unbilled” players and personnel and spelling variations.
1948
THEY LIVE BY NIGHT
As director. Sc: Charles Schnee, adaptation by Ray based on the novel Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson. Ph: George E. Diskant.
Cast: Cathy O’Donnell (Keechie), Farley Granger (Bowie), Howard Da Silva (Chickamaw), Jay C. Flippen (T-Dub), Helen Craig (Mattie), Will Wright (Mobley), William Phipps (Young Farmer), Ian Wolfe (Hawkins), Harry Harvey (Hagenheimer), Marie Bryant (Singer), Will Lee (Jeweller), Jim Nolan (Schreiber), Charles Meredith (Commissioner Hubbell), Teddy Infuhr (Alvin), Byron Foulger (Lambert), Guy L. Beach (Plumber).
(B & W, John Houseman for RKO Pictures, 95 mins.)
The most romantic and haunting young-criminals-on-the-run movie ever made.
—Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
1949
A WOMAN’S SECRET
As director. Sc: Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on the novel Mortgage on Life by Vicki Baum. Ph: George E. Diskant.
Cast: Maureen O’Hara (Marian Washburn), Melvyn Douglas (Luke Jordan), Gloria Grahame (Susan Caldwell/Estrellita), Bill Williams (Lee Crenshaw), Victor Jory (Brook Matthews), Mary Philips (Mrs. Mary Fowler), Jay C. Flippen (Police Inspector Jim Fowler), Robert Warwick (Assistant District Attorney Roberts), Curt Conway (Doctor), Anne Shoemaker (Mrs. Matthews, Brook’s Mother), Virginia Farmer (Mollie the Washburn Maid), Ellen Corby (Nurse), Emory Parnell (Police Lieutenant).
(B & W, Herman J. Mankiewicz for RKO Pictures, 84 mins.)
Drawing on Citizen Kane and prefiguring All About Eve, Herman J. Mankiewicz’s script for A Woman’s Secret spins a twisty tale, told in a series of overlapping, sometimes contradictory flashbacks so that the past becomes a shifting chimera of unreliable accounts . . . [Ray] managed to bring crackling cynicism to the studio gloss.
—James Quandt, program notes, Pacific Film Archives retrospective
KNOCK ON ANY DOOR
As director. Sc: Daniel Taradash and John Monks Jr., from the novel by Willard Motley. Ph: Burnett Guffey.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Andrew Morton), John Derek (Nick Romano), George Macready (District Attorney Kerman), Allene Roberts (Emma), Susan Perry (Adele), Mickey Knox (Vito), Barry Kelley (Judge Drake).
(B & W, Robert Lord for Santana Productions/Columbia, 100 mins.)
A fascinating, slightly askew mix of social document and romantic agony. The basic material may be determinist melodrama—slum boy with deck stacked against him winds up on Death Row despite the efforts of a liberal lawyer (Bogart, whose Santana company made the film). But it’s hard hitting in its own right, tautly crafted, and repeatedly stabbed through with Ray’s impulsive generosity and anguish towards his characters.
—TP [Tim Pulleine], Time Out Film Guide (UK)
1950
BORN TO BE BAD
As director. Sc: Edith Sommers, adapted by Charles Schnee. Additional dialogue by Robert Soderberg and Charles Oppenheimer. Based on the novel All Kneeling by Anne Parrish. Ph: Nicholas Musuraca.
Cast: Joan Fontaine (Christabel Caine), Robert Ryan (Nick Bradley), Zachary Scott (Curtis Carey), Joan Leslie (Donna Foster), Mel Ferrer (Gabriel
“Gobby” Broome), Harold Vermilyea (John Caine), Virginia Farmer (Aunt Clara Caine), Kathleen Howard (Mrs. Bolton), Dick Ryan (Arthur, Curtis’s Butler), Bess Flowers (Mrs. Worthington), Joy Hallward (Mrs. Porter), Hazel Boyne (Committee Woman), Irving Bacon (Jewelry Salesman), Gordon Oliver (Harrison, the Lawyer).
(B & W, Robert Sparks for RKO, 94 mins.)
A rigorously unsentimental movie (excepting a ludicrous airfield scene both written and directed by studio boss Howard Hughes), beautifully staged and photographed (by Nicholas Musuraca, who also photographed Out of the Past), and with a nice comic tartness, especially in the way it views the Fontaine character’s sweet-kid maneuvers and betrayals.
—James Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties
IN A LONELY PLACE
As director. Sc: Andrew Solt. Adaptation by Edmund H. North from the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. Ph: Burnett Guffey.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Dixon Steele), Gloria Grahame (Laurel Gray), Frank Lovejoy (Brub Nicolai), Carl Benton Reid (Captain Lochner), Art Smith (Mel Lippman), Jeff Donnell (Sylvia Nicolai), Martha Stewart (Mildred Atkinson), Robert Warwick (Charlie Waterman), Morris Ankrum (Lloyd Barnes), William Ching (Ted Barton), Steven Geray (Paul, the Head Waiter), Hadda Brooks (Singer).
(B & W, Robert Lord for Santana Productions/Columbia, 94 mins.)
Hollywood atmosphere, existential malaise, and political subtext combine to inform a sensational love story, played on the edge of the void and strong enough to sustain one of the most shamelessly romantic lines in any movie: “I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me.” The line occurs twice, spoken at different points in the drama by each of the lovers, just to make sure that we never forget it.
—J. Hoberman, the Village Voice
1951
ON DANGEROUS GROUND
As director. Sc: A. I. Bezzerides. Adaptation by Ray and Bezzerides from the novel Mad with Much Heart by Gerald Butler. Ph: George E. Diskant.
Cast: Ida Lupino (Mary Malden), Robert Ryan (Jim Wilson), Ward Bond (Walter Brent), Charles Kemper (Bill Daly), Anthony Ross (Pete Santos), Ed Begley (Captain Brawley), Ian Wolfe (Carrey), Sumner Williams (Danny Malden), Gus Schilling (Lucky), Frank Ferguson (Willows), Cleo Moore (Myrna Bowers), Olive Carey (Mrs. Brent), Richard Irving (Bernie Tucker), Patricia Prest (Julie Brent).
(B & W, John Houseman for RKO Pictures, 82 mins.)
A high point of neurosis in film noir . . . [with] Robert Ryan as a cop so tautened by his calling that the simplest act turns savage.
—Anthony Lane, the New Yorker
FLYING LEATHERNECKS
As director. Sc: James Edward Grant, based on a story by Kenneth Gamet. Ph: William E. Snyder.
Cast: John Wayne (Major Dan Kirby), Robert Ryan (Capt. Carl Griffin), Don Taylor (Lieutenant Vern “Cowboy” Blythe), Janis Carter (Joan Kirby), Jay C. Flippen (Master Sgt. Clancy), William Harrigan (Dr. Curan), James Bell (Colonel), Barry Kelley (Brigadier General), Maurice Jara (Lieut. Shorty Vegay), Adam Williams (Lt. Bert Malotke), James Dobson (Lt. Pudge McCabe), Carleton Young (Col. Riley), Steve Flagg (Capt. Harold Jorgensen), Brett King (First Lt. Ernie Stark), Gordon Gebert (Tommy Kirby).
(Technicolor, Edmund Grainger for RKO Pictures, 102 mins.)
Flying Leathernecks packs a surprising amount of intelligent insight in with its nationalistic rally cry.
—Jeremy Heilman, www.moviemartyr.com
1952
THE LUSTY MEN
As director. Sc: Horace McCoy and David Dortort, suggested by a story by Claude Stanush. Ph: Lee Garmes.
Cast: Susan Hayward (Louise Merritt), Robert Mitchum (Jeff McCloud), Arthur Kennedy (Wes Merritt), Arthur Hunnicutt (Booker Davis), Frank Faylen (Al Dawson), Walter Coy (Buster Burgess), Carol Nugent (Rusty Davis), Maria Hart (Rosemary Maddox), Lorna Thayer (Grace Burgess), Burt Mustin (Jeremiah Watrus) Karen King (Ginny Logan), Jimmy Dodd (Red Logan), Eleanor Todd (Babs).
(B & W, Jerry Wald for Wald-Krasna Productions/RKO Pictures, 113 mins.)
Wim Wenders includes a clip from this scene in Lightning over Water, a semifictional film he made with Ray as Ray was dying of cancer, and he pays homage to it in his film Kings of the Road. It sets the tone for the rest of the picture—the loneliness, the barrenness of the settings, the feeling of disconnection and loss. . . . Ray works from the personalities of his actors—Mitchum’s ease and resignation are an important part of the movie—and from the stark settings and the world of the rodeo riders, the way they dress and speak and interact: They all share an awareness of mortality, the certainty that death or injury could come at any time for the men in the ring (the rodeo sequences themselves are hair-raising), and they talk about it, share their feelings, help each other get through it . . . a powerful picture with a unique mood—autumnal, sad and very soulful.
—Martin Scorsese, “The Scorsese Selection,” www.directv.com
1954
JOHNNY GUITAR
As director. Sc: Philip Yordan, based on the novel by Roy Chanslor. Ph: Harry Stradling.
Cast: Joan Crawford (Vienna), Sterling Hayden (Johnny Guitar), Mercedes McCambridge (Emma Small), Scott Brady (Dancin’ Kid), Ward Bond (John McIvers), Ben Cooper (Turkey Ralston), Ernest Borgnine (Bart Lonergan), John Carradine (Old Tom), Royal Dano (Corey), Frank Ferguson (Marshal Williams), Paul Fix (Eddie), Rhys Williams (Mr. Andrews), Ian MacDonald (Pete).
(Trucolor, Herbert J. Yates for Republic Pictures, 110 mins.)
Many of Ray’s films, including his best, are flawed. And to me, it does not make any difference. Johnny Guitar might well be the best bad film in the history of film.
—Christian Viviani of Positif*
1955
RUN FOR COVER
As director. Sc: Winston Miller, from a story by Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch. Ph: Daniel Fapp.
Cast: James Cagney (Matt Dow), Viveca Lindfors (Helga Swenson), John Derek (Davey Bishop), Jean Hersholt (Mr. Swenson), Grant Withers (Gentry), Jack Lambert (Larsen), Ernest Borgnine (Morgan), Ray Teal (Sheriff), Irving Bacon (Scotty), Trevor Bardette (Paulsen), John Miljan (Mayor Walsh), Gus Schilling (Doc Ridgeway).
(VistaVision and Technicolor, William H. Pine and William C. Thomas for Paramount, 93 mins.)
A curious but important film . . . the generational conflict and the violent path of [James] Cagney and [John] Derek’s journey to self-knowledge echoes the themes of Ray’s undisputed masterpieces, Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause . . . [and] is marvelously directed by Ray, who catches both the repressions of his characters and the violence necessary to break through them.
—Phil Hardy, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Western
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
As director. Sc: Stewart Stern. Adaptation by Irving Shulman from a story by Ray. Ph: Ernest Haller.
Cast: James Dean (Jim Stark), Natalie Wood (Judy), Sal Mineo (John “Plato” Crawford), Jim Backus (Frank Stark, Jim’s Father), Ann Doran (Mrs. Carol Stark, Jim’s Mother), Corey Allen (Buzz Gunderson), William Hopper (Judy’s Father), Rochelle Hudson (Judy’s Mother), Dennis Hopper (Goon), Edward Platt (Ray Fremick), Steffi Sidney (Mil), Marietta Canty (Crawford Family Maid), Virginia Brissac (Mrs. Stark, Jim’s Grandmother), Beverly Long (Helen), Ian Wolfe (Dr. Minton, Lecturer at Planetarium), Frank Mazzola (Crunch), Robert Foulk (Gene), Jack Simmons (Cookie), Tom Bernard (Harry), Nick Adams (Chick), Jack Grinnage (Moose), Clifford Morris (Cliff).
(CinemaScope and WarnerColor, David Weisbart for Warner Bros., 111 mins.)
This is a key moment in American film, poised on the brink of rock ’n’ roll and the kingdom of the American teenager, yet bringing to a close the era of the brooding existential hero, the tradition that had gone from John Garfield to Brando and Clift, and which had suddenly risen up in the untidy life of Nicholas Ray as that ghost-in-waiting James Dean. And for a moment, two nervous wrecks—the actor and the director—were looking in time’s mirror and the result was a film that survives as emotional melodrama, as a portrait of high school and of
the impossible remaking of family in America. There are moments of pretension, of stilted lines and unfulfilled striving. (Why not? It’s about being a teenager.) On the other hand, it’s as perfect an expression of the moment as a great song.
—David Thomson, Have You Seen . . . ?
1956
HOT BLOOD
As director. Sc: Jesse Lasky Jr., based on a story by Jean Evans. Ph: Ray June.
Cast: Jane Russell (Annie Caldash), Cornel Wilde (Stephano Torino), Luther Adler (Marco Torino), Joseph Calleia (Papa Theodore), Jamie Russell (Xano), Nina Koshetz (Nita Johnny), Helen Westcott (Velma), Mikhail Rasumny (Old Johnny), Wally Russell (Bimbo), Nick Dennis (Korka), Richard Deacon (Mr. Swift).
(CinemaScope and Technicolor, Harry Tatelman for Howard Welsch Productions/Columbia Pictures, 85 mins.)
While not really a success, Nicholas Ray’s 1956 film about urban Gypsies, made between two of his masterpieces (Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life), has its share of interesting moments and vibrant energies, many of them tied to Ray’s abiding interest in the folkloric. In some respects this color ’Scope feature comes closer than any of his other movies to the musical that Ray always dreamed of making.
—Jonathan Rosenbaum, www.jonathanrosenbaum.com
BIGGER THAN LIFE
As director. Story and screenplay: Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, based on the article “Ten Feet Tall” by Berton Roueché in the New Yorker. Ph: Joe MacDonald.
Cast: James Mason (Ed Avery), Barbara Rush (Lou Avery), Walter Matthau (Wally Gibbs), Robert Simon (Dr. Norton), Christopher Olsen (Richie Avery), Roland Winters (Dr. Ruric), Rusty Lane (Bob LaPorte), Rachel Stephens (Nurse), Kipp Hamilton (Pat Wade).
(CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color, James Mason for 20th Century-Fox, 95 mins.)
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