Nick Ray

Only the Lonely: A Nicholas Ray Retrospective
by Anthony Lane (the new yorker 3/27/03)
I blame the French. In the nineteen-fifties, the young guns of Cahiers du Cinéma turned their sights upon American film. François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, among others, declared their immortal love for certain American directors. “Cinema is Nicholas Ray,” Godard wrote. Then, as now, French dreaminess about America was nicely entwined with disdain, allowing a critic of the Old World both to laud his master in the New and to sneer at the society that failed to share such reverence. The viewers who stayed away from Ray’s “Johnny Guitar,” say, didn’t know what they were missing.
Poor Nick Ray. No artist should be asked to weather such unmitigated awe. The French were right to honor the convulsive strangeness of “Johnny Guitar” (1954), the tale of a saloonkeeper (Joan Crawford) fighting, with the aid of an old flame (Sterling Hayden), to survive a lynch mob. Only foreign eyes, perhaps, could widen with suitable amazement, and without a tremolo of sniggers, at the movie’s lunging gestures and superheated tones. When our heroine is advised to change out of her milk-white dress to evade pursuit, she sensibly slips into a shirt of blinding red, suggesting that she has also found time to don a radioactive bra. What Godard and his colleagues could not register—and what, as moralists of the pure image, they would dismiss as irrelevant—were the qualities that an American audience would bring to bear. Good sense, the narrative urge, a limited patience for the warped and the whimsical: all would be tested by a film like “Johnny Guitar,” which seems about as clued in to actual cowboys as Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden West.” The movie is majestic, but, like the face of Joan Crawford, which could have been chipped from the buttress of a Gothic cathedral, it is howlingly close to mad.
New Yorkers can now judge how deep the madness went. The film department of the Museum of Modern Art is laying on a retrospective entitled “Nicholas Ray, Writ Large,” which runs through April 12th. “Flying Leathernecks,” his 1951 saga of a Marine Air Corps squadron, will be screened in rare three-strip Technicolor, which should do wonders for the peaches-and-cream complexion of John Wayne. Hunters of oddity will lock on to “High Green Wall,” a 1954 television film adapted from a short story by Evelyn Waugh. (Now there’s an unlikely duo: think of a Joshua Reynolds repainted by van Gogh.) Then, we get new prints of movies like “In a Lonely Place” (1950), “The Lusty Men” (1952), “Hot Blood” (1956), “Bigger Than Life” (1956), and “Bitter Victory” (1958), the very titles of which should serve as an ominous introduction. Ray’s movies, which deal with everything from dancing Gypsies to a middle-class cortisone addict, teem with solitude; one staggers out of them with the dizzying suspicion that men and women are like planets and moons, each following a predestined curve, repeatedly tugged or slung away by the gravity of other bodies. All of Ray can be boiled down to a single word from “In a Lonely Place.” Humphrey Bogart plays a Hollywood screenwriter who is suspected of killing a hat-check girl. The morning after the crime, he is visited by a cop, a friend who fought beside him in the war, and who now comes bearing news:
“You know I got married.”
“Why?”
Nicholas Ray (1911-79) was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, in Galesville, Wisconsin. He studied under Frank Lloyd Wright and later claimed that if Wright could be detected anywhere in his movies it was in “my liking for Cinemascope.” That liking found concrete form in “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955)—think of the tussle that James Dean has with a knife-swiping rival on a platform of land below the planetarium, which they’ve just visited on a class trip. Everything about the scene—the hard blue day, the stabbing of the whitewall tires, the parapet overlooking the city against which the boys sidle and thrust, the bird’s-eye view of the brawl—brands itself on your gaze as smartly as any crisis of your own teen-age years. The silvery motions of youth are staged with enough grace to make you gasp but not so much that they look stage-managed. Ray would have made great musicals; watch “Rebel” again, then wonder what he might have done with “West Side Story.”
As a director, he hit his stride at once, and his career flourished as swiftly as it expired. A mere fifteen years separate his startling début, “They Live by Night” (1948), from “Fifty-five Days at Peking,” in which Charlton Heston saves the Imperial City from marauding hordes. It is common practice to compare Ray’s fluidly personal works, such as “Rebel Without a Cause,” with the cooler, more solidified projects that were entrusted to him by the studios. But it is also a mark of dedication that the visionary—Ray was labelled “the Mystic” by Robert Mitchum—should impose himself, or at least the acute angle at which he sees the world, upon the most stubborn environment. There was a tough-guy challenge in the way epic assignments were handed, like untamable horses, to Hollywood men whose gift for intimacy hinted at a delicate emotional constitution. Thus, the William Wyler of “The Heiress” found himself saddled with “Ben-Hur,” Anthony Mann was given “El Cid” as a reward—or rebuke—for his tense, unhappy Westerns, and Ray shifted from “On Dangerous Ground” and “In a Lonely Place” to juggernauts like “Fifty-five Days at Peking” and “King of Kings.”
Even here, however, a nervy brilliance sneaks through. To current filmgoers, nothing is more Biblically remote than the epoch in which their forerunners sat through “King of Kings” (1961), a retelling of the life of Christ. Certainly, the sight of Robert Ryan, the veteran of three previous Rays, swapping his overcoat and fedora for the fetching sheepskin outfit of John the Baptist is less than spiritually convincing, and a more merciful God would have allowed him to disappear completely into his enormous beard. But, against the odds, the movie comes alive: first, after the slaughter of the innocents, as Herod cracks with remorse—the Jimmy Dean of year zero. Finer still is the healing of the blind man, a brief and wordless sequence played out in patterns of light and dark: a stick taps along a white wall, then touches the shadow cast by Jesus’ head. Thus cured, the man slumps in terrified joy. The film has nothing to tell us about the redemption of sin, but there are moments when it redeems the kitsch of a derided genre.
And so to the question that nags at Ray’s achievement, and that may be answered by moma’s invigorating season: Was he a man of moments, or do the pictures hang together? As early as 1953, Jacques Rivette identified in Ray a “taste for paroxysm, which imparts something of the feverish and impermanent to the most tranquil of moments.” “On Dangerous Ground” (1951), a high point of neurosis in film noir, stars Robert Ryan as a cop so tautened by his calling that the simplest act turns savage; in his apartment, he washes and dries his hands as if wringing the neck of an invisible suspect. As for “Rebel Without a Cause,” it is not just a portrait of adolescence; it breathes haltingly, with adolescent lungs, unable, like so much in Ray, to contain itself under the pressure of the encroaching world. You long, occasionally, for urbanity, for the comic shrug that would lower the temperature of feeling—as you do with Martin Scorsese, who is surely Ray’s most forceful heir, sharing his tendency to switch scale (think of “Mean Streets” ballooning into “Gangs of New York”) and his relief that, in a universe of unstable loyalties, there is always the color red. I love “The Lusty Men,” Ray’s saddest work, and, like every viewer before me, I am felled by the beauty of the shot that finds Mitchum—a rodeo rider—limping amid gusts of trash through a vacant arena, with the sharp, heartbreaking light of late afternoon slicing in from the side. At the same time, I cannot rid myself of an anecdote reported by Mitchum’s biographer, Lee Server. A leading lady was required, and Susan Hayward was brought in, on loan from Twentieth Century Fox, while the script was still being written. She sat and knitted for a while, as Ray spoke of his characters and their various plights. Finally, she put down her knitting and said, “Listen, I’m from Brooklyn. What’s the story?”