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92-535: Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. , August 7, 1911 – June 16, 1979) was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor. Described by the Harvard Film Archive as "Hollywood's last romantic" and "one of postwar American cinema’s supremely gifted and ultimately tragic filmmakers," Ray was considered an iconoclastic auteur director who often clashed with the Hollywood studio system of

184-455: A Roaring Twenties gangster drama that included musical numbers performed by star Cyd Charisse . Prior to those projects, however, Ray returned to France to direct Bitter Victory (1957), a World War II drama starring Richard Burton and Curd Jürgens as Leith and Brand, British army officers on a mission to raid a Nazi station in Benghazi, and Ruth Roman as Brand's wife and, before

276-401: A Cause is the purest example of Ray's cinematic style and vision, with an expressionistic use of colour, dramatic use of architecture and an empathy for social misfits. Rebel Without a Cause was Ray's biggest commercial success, and marked a breakthrough in the careers of child actors Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo . Ray engaged in a tempestuous "spiritual marriage" with Dean, and awakened

368-415: A Cause , he has been cited for his sympathetic treatment of contemporary youth, but other films of his adeptly deal with the crises of more experienced and older characters, among them In A Lonely Place , The Lusty Men , Johnny Guitar and Bigger Than Life . The stories and themes explored in his films stood out in their time for being non-conformist and sympathetic to or even encouraging of instability and

460-488: A Cause , twenty-four hours in the life of a troubled teenager, starring James Dean in what proved to be his most famous role. When Rebel was released, only a few weeks after Dean's early death in an automobile crash, it had a revolutionary impact on movie-making and youth culture, virtually giving birth to the contemporary concept of the American teenager. Looking past its social and pop-culture significance, Rebel Without

552-754: A La Crosse chapter of the Communist Party USA . By early 1933, he had left the State Teachers College and began to employ the moniker of "Nicholas Ray" in his correspondence. Through his connections with Thornton Wilder and others in Chicago, Ray met Frank Lloyd Wright at Wright's home, Taliesin , in Spring Green, Wisconsin . He cultivated a relationship with Wright in order to win an invitation to join "the Fellowship," as

644-520: A Western dream.") Between feature-length projects, and after shooting another Western, Run For Cover (1955), starring James Cagney , Ray was asked to take on a television film for G. E. Theater . The anthology series was produced by MCA-Revue, a subsidiary of the agency to which the director was signed, and aired on CBS. High Green Wall was an adaptation, by Charles Jackson , of an Evelyn Waugh story, " The Man Who Liked Dickens ," about an illiterate man, played by Thomas Gomez , who holds captive

736-558: A brain tumour. He survived another year, dying of heart failure on June 16, 1979, in New York City . His ashes were buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Ray's directorial style and preoccupations evident in his films have led critics to consider him an auteur . Further, Ray is considered a central figure in the development of auteur theory itself. He was often singled out by Cahiers du cinéma critics who coined

828-586: A contractor and builder. His paternal grandparents were German and his maternal grandparents were Norwegian. He grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin , also the home town of future fellow director Joseph Losey . A popular but erratic student prone to delinquency and alcohol abuse , with his alcoholic father as an example, at age sixteen Ray was sent to live with his older, married sister in Chicago, Illinois , where he attended Waller High School and immersed himself in

920-524: A deal to sell his second, Mord und Totschlag (1969), to Universal Pictures , pocketing about one-third of the money as his fee and for expenses. When in Paris, he sometimes stayed with Barbet Schroeder , whose production company tried to find backing for one or another of Ray's projects. There, in the wake of the May 1968 demonstrations, he collaborated with Jean-Pierre Bastid and producer Henry Lange to shoot

1012-486: A distributor in 1976. It remained uncompleted and without distribution at Ray's death, in 1979, but some prints of the 1973 version were made and screened at festivals and retrospectives through the 1980s. A restored version, based on the 1973 cut, was released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2011, by Oscilloscope Films. In the spring of 1973, Ray's contract at Binghamton was not renewed. Over the next couple of years, he relocated several times, trying to raise money and continue work on

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1104-454: A few years before Ray died, later made a film titled Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). The story of a young vampire couple — who of course are not young at all — its only connection with the Wallis novel or Ray's project is its title.) While working with Dr. Cooper, and after, Ray maintained some degree of cash flow by developing and editing scripts, but for films that never came to be. He made

1196-423: A new agent, MCA 's Lew Wasserman , a major Hollywood force, who steered the director's career through the 1950s. During that time, Ray directed one or two films for most of the major studios, and one generally considered to be a minor, Republic Pictures . He made films in conventionalized genres, including Westerns and melodramas , as well as others that resisted easy categorization. In the mid-fifties, he made

1288-462: A new career as a teacher, accepting an appointment at Harpur College , in Binghamton. There he found a cast and crew, students who were eager and imaginative, but also inexperienced. Devoted to the idea of learning by doing, Ray and his class embarked on a major, feature-length project. Rather than the strict division of labour characteristic of his Hollywood career, Ray devised a rotation in which

1380-534: A novel, Next Stop—Paradise , by the Polish writer Marek Hlasko . In late 1963, in Paris, he worked with novelist James Jones on a Western titled Under Western Skies , drawing on Hamlet . Moving to London, urged to treat his alcohol and drug abuse, he consulted the physician and psychiatrist, Barrington Cooper, who prescribed script work as "occupational therapy." They formed a production company, Emerald Films, under which they developed two projects that were among

1472-629: A number of performers, some of whom he later cast in his films, including Will Lee and Curt Conway , and some who became friends for life, including Elia Kazan . He was subsequently employed by the Federal Theatre Project , part of the Works Progress Administration . He befriended folklorist Alan Lomax and traveled with him through rural America, collecting traditional vernacular music . In 1940–41, Lomax produced and Ray directed Back Where I Come From ,

1564-632: A pioneering folk music radio program featuring such artists as Woody Guthrie , Burl Ives , Lead Belly , the Golden Gate Quartet , and Pete Seeger , for CBS. American folk songs would later figure prominently in several of his films. During the early years of World War II , Ray directed and supervised radio propaganda programs for the United States Office of War Information and the Voice of America broadcasting service under

1656-460: A professional change for Ray, most of whose remaining mainstream films were produced outside Hollywood. He returned to Warner Bros. for Wind Across the Everglades (1958), an ecologically themed period drama about plume poachers, written by Budd Schulberg and produced by his brother, Stuart Schulberg; and, at MGM, he directed Party Girl (1958), which harked back to Ray's youth in Chicago,

1748-650: A red couch, in Rebel Without a Cause , as "smoldering danger," while the same arrangement of Charisse's gown and sofa "was an entirely different value" (which he did not specify). In Party Girl , he says, green was "sinister and jealous," while in Bigger Than Life it was "life, grass, and hospital walls," and, referring to the use of color in Johnny Guitar , he cites the costuming of the posse in stark black and white. Implicitly their dress befits

1840-565: A scene with Ronee Blakley (then married to Wenders), inspired by King Lear . The film was completed after Ray's death, in June 1979. Ray was diagnosed with lung cancer in November 1977, though he may have contracted the disease several years earlier. He was treated with cobalt therapy, and in April 1978 radioactive particles were implanted as treatment. The next month, he had surgery to remove

1932-535: A scene. Their co-star, the Reinhardt -trained Robert Ryan, remembered favourably his second Ray project, On Dangerous Ground : "He directs very little.... Right from the start of our collaboration, he offered me a very few suggestions. ... He never told me what to do. He was never specific about anything at all." Most of Ray's films take place in the United States, and biographer Bernard Eisenschitz stresses

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2024-470: A small but notable role in The American Friend (1977). Their collaboration, Lightning Over Water (1980), also known as Nick's Film , uses documentary footage and dramatic constructions, juxtaposing film and video. It charts their passage in making a film, as well as recording events of Ray's last months, including directing a stage scene with actor Gerry Bamman , and directing and acting

2116-481: A stranded traveller, played by Joseph Cotten , in the jungle, forcing him to read aloud from Dickens novels. Shot on film over a few days, after a week's rehearsal, the half-hour drama was broadcast on October 3, 1954. Ray did not work in broadcast television after, and rarely spoke of the program, later expressing his disappointment: "I was hoping for something new, accidental or planned, to happen. But it didn't." In 1955, at Warner Bros. , Ray directed Rebel Without

2208-617: A student would take on different roles behind or in front of the camera. Similar to the Chicago Seven project — some footage from which he incorporated into the new film — the Harpur film, which came to be titled We Can't Go Home Again , used material shot on numerous gauges of film, as well as video that was later processed and manipulated with a synthesizer provided by Nam June Paik . The pictures were combined into multiple-image constructions using as many as five projectors, and refilming

2300-533: A thief and his newlywed wife, They Live By Night was notable for its empathy for society's young outsiders, a recurring motif in Ray's oeuvre. Its subject matter, two young lovers running from the law, had an influence on the sporadically popular movie sub-genre involving a fugitive criminal couple, including Joseph H. Lewis 's Gun Crazy (1950), Arthur Penn 's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Terrence Malick 's Badlands (1973), and Robert Altman 's 1974 adaptation of

2392-476: A three-part, one-hour film, which he later titled Wha-a-at? , one of several projects, concerning contemporary young people during a time of questioning, rebellion and revolt that never came to be. Similarly, Ray enticed Schroeder's friend Stéphane Tchalgadjieff to raise funding for L'Evadé ( The Substitute ), a story about mixed and assumed identities, and Tchalgadjieff raised a half-million dollars, only for Ray to manoeuvre him out, and for nothing to emerge from

2484-400: A troubled screenwriter suspected of a violent murder, and On Dangerous Ground (1951), in which Robert Ryan plays an alienated, brutally violent detective on a city police force who finds redemption, and love, after he is sent to investigate a murder in a rural community. While at RKO, Ray also directed A Woman's Secret , co-starring his wife-to-be Gloria Grahame as a singer who becomes

2576-405: Is not the greatest director who ever lived; nor is he a Hollywood hack. The Truth lies somewhere in between." Like many US theatre practitioners of the 1930s, Ray was strongly influenced by the theories and practices of early-twentieth century Russian dramatists, and the system of actor training that evolved into " Method acting ." Late in life, he told students, "My first orientation to the theatre

2668-663: The Al Capone -era nightlife. Upon his return to La Crosse in his senior year, he emerged as a talented orator, winning a contest at local radio station WKBH (now WIZM ) while also hanging around a local stock theater. With strong grades in English and public speaking and failures in Latin , physics , and geometry , he graduated at the bottom (ranked 152nd in a class of 153) of his class at La Crosse Central High School in 1929. He studied drama at La Crosse State Teachers College (now

2760-724: The Chicago Seven , forming a production company called Leo Seven, and drawing some financial interest from Michael Butler , producer of the hit stage musical Hair . Shooting material for Conspiracy on almost every current gauge of film stock, from 35mm to Super 8, he accumulated documentary sequences, dramatized reconstructions of the trial, and collage-like multiple-image footage. In order to continue, he financed production by selling paintings that he owned, and sought backing from anyone he could. Migrating from Chicago to New York City, and then, at Dennis Hopper's invitation, New Mexico, in 1971 Ray landed in upstate New York, and started

2852-585: The CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well regarded and he was an important influence on the French New Wave , with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of Bitter Victory , "... there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray." Ray was born in Galesville, Wisconsin , the youngest of four children and only son of Olene "Lena" (Toppen) and Raymond Nicholas Kienzle,

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2944-626: The University of Wisconsin–La Crosse ) for two years before earning the requisite grades to apply for admission to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931. Although he spent only one semester at the institution because of excessive drinking and poor grades, Ray managed to cultivate a relationship with dramatist Thornton Wilder , then a professor. Having been active in the Student Dramatic Association during his time in Chicago, Ray returned to his hometown and started

3036-540: The 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again , which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death. During his lifetime, Ray was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Rebel Without a Cause , twice for the Golden Lion , for Bigger Than Life (1956) and Bitter Victory (1957), and a Palme d'Or for The Savage Innocents (1960). Three of his films were ranked by Cahiers du Cinéma in their Annual Top 10 Lists . Ray's compositions within

3128-456: The 1970s. One, The Janitor , was a segment of the feature-length Wet Dreams , also known as Dreams of Thirteen (1974). Within a collection of shorts, most of which satirized pornography, Ray's was also a very personal film in which he cast himself in the double role of a caretaker and a preacher, and used visual techniques comparable to those in his previous film. The second, Marco (1978), derived from one of his Strasberg Institute classes and

3220-593: The Catholic periodical America , in a review titled "Christ or Credit Card?", calling it "disedifying and antireligious." Screenwriter Philip Yordan , Ray's collaborator on several projects, back to Johnny Guitar and including King of Kings , looking at an extremely lucrative prospect, persuaded the director to sign again with Bronston for another epic, this one about the Boxer Rebellion . As biographer Bernard Eisenschitz observes: "Accounts of Ray during

3312-475: The Edward Anderson novel that had also served as the basis for Ray's film, Thieves Like Us . The New York Times gave They Live By Night a positive review (despite calling his trademark sympathetic eye to rebels and criminals "misguided") and acclaimed Ray for "good, realistic production and sharp direction...Mr. Ray has an eye for action details. His staging of the robbery of a bank, all seen by

3404-613: The German island Sylt his base of operations and imagined projects that might be shot there, including one to star Jane Fonda and Paul Newman , titled Go Where You Want, Die As You Must , a production that would also demand 2,000 extras. While in Europe, he attracted some of the current generation of filmmakers. He had been introduced to Volker Schlöndorff by Hanne Axmann, who had starred in Schlöndorff's first film, and Ray brokered

3496-693: The Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities . It opened on March 16, 1979, with a screening of Ernst Lubitsch ’s silent film, Lady Windermere's Fan . Film programmer Amos Vogel 's extensive Cinema 16 film collection, originally sold to Barney Rosset and Grove Press circa 1966–1967, served as the founding collection for the Harvard Film Archive. The archive's first curator

3588-623: The La Crosse Little Theatre Group, which presented several productions in 1932. He also briefly re-enrolled at the State Teachers College in the fall of that year. Before his stint at Chicago, he had contributed a regular column of musings, called "The Bullshevist," to the Racquet , the college's weekly publication, and resumed writing for it when he returned, but, according to biographer Patrick McGilligan , Ray, with friend Clarence Hiskey, also arranged meetings to organize

3680-621: The adoption of then-questionable morals. His work has been singled out for the unique way in which it "define[s] the peculiar anxieties and contradictions of America in the ’50s." While he started working in Hollywood on film noir and other black-and-white pictures, in the standard Academy ratio , Ray later became better known for his vivid use of color and widescreen. His films have also been noted for their stylized mise en scène with carefully choreographed blocking and composition that often emphasizes architecture. Ray himself credited his affection for widescreen formats to Frank Lloyd Wright: "I like

3772-571: The aegis of John Houseman . In the summer of 1942 Ray was investigated by the FBI , and was given its B-2 classification of "tentative dangerousness." Additionally, Director J. Edgar Hoover personally recommended " Custodial Detention ." Though Hoover's scheme was later quashed by the Justice Department , in autumn 1943 Ray was among more than twenty OWI employees identified publicly as having Communist affiliations or sympathies, noting that he

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3864-606: The brutal cold of northern Manitoba and on Baffin Island , but much of the footage was lost in a plane crash. He had to use process photography to replace the lost location scenes, when the production moved to Rome, as planned, for studio work. Now largely based in Europe, Ray signed on to direct producer Samuel Bronston 's life of Christ as a replacement for the original director, John Farrow . Shooting in Spain, Ray cast Jeffrey Hunter, who had played Jesse James's brother Frank for

3956-417: The chases, everything, and do it in areas of light." Ray uses color boldly — Jonathan Rosenbaum , for example, has referred to the "vibrant color-coding" of Johnny Guitar , and the "delirious color" of Party Girl —but meaningfully, determined by the circumstances of the film's story and its characters. As V. F. Perkins points out, he uses colors "for their emotional effect," but more characteristically "for

4048-421: The community of Wright "apprentices" was known. In late 1933 Wright asked Ray to organize the newly built Hillside Playhouse, a room at Taliesin dedicated to musical and dramatic performances. There, at regular film screenings often encompassing foreign productions, Ray likely had his first exposure to non-Hollywood cinema. However he and his mentor had a falling-out in spring 1934 with Wright directing him to leave

4140-643: The compound immediately. While negotiating with Wright, Ray visited New York City , where he had his first encounters with the political theatre growing in response to the Great Depression . Returning after his ejection from Taliesin, Ray joined the Workers' Laboratory Theatre, a communal troupe formed in 1929, which had recently changed its name to the Theatre of Action. Briefly billing himself as Nik Ray, he acted in several productions, collaborating with

4232-562: The death of Karen Aqua , the archive was given more than 300 of her works, both completed and unfinished. The Archive's mission includes to conserve, restore, and exhibit the collection's prints. It prioritizes film-to-film preservation for archival stability, authenticity, and aesthetics. It may also perform film-to-digital transfers. 42°22′25.15″N 71°06′53.06″W  /  42.3736528°N 71.1147389°W  / 42.3736528; -71.1147389 Patrick McGilligan (biographer) Too Many Requests If you report this error to

4324-558: The director a few years before, as Jesus. A vast undertaking by any account, the production endured intervention by backing studio MGM, logistical challenges (the Sermon on the Mount sequence required five cameras and employed 5,400 extras), and the project grew in ways that Ray was not strong enough to control. Perhaps predictably, King of Kings (1961) was received with hostility by the US press,

4416-537: The director of Rebel Without A Cause , and, announced in spring 1966, it was to star the Rolling Stones . According to Cooper, the Stones' US manager Allen Klein treated him and Ray to lavish visits to New York, and then Los Angeles, for meetings, then "conned" Ray into giving up his rights to the property, with a "lucrative director's contract," and evidently nothing to direct. (Jim Jarmusch, who befriended Ray

4508-593: The distinctively American themes that run through his motion pictures, and Ray's life. His early work alongside Alan Lomax, as a WPA folklorist and then in radio, and his acquaintance with musicians including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger and Josh White , informed his approach to American society in his films, and the interest in ethnography evident in his films. Ray frequently made films characterized by their examination of outsider figures, and most of his movies implicitly or explicitly critique conformity. With examples including They Live By Night and Rebel Without

4600-417: The editing process, but, according to Marton, "was so abusive and so critical of the first part of the picture, which was my part," that Bronston forbade Ray from viewing any more of the assembled scenes. Though Marton estimated that sixty-five per cent of the picture was his, and though he wanted the directing credit, he accepted a financial settlement from Bronston. Ray was credited as director, and represented

4692-475: The enterprise. Ray's reputation for youth-oriented films led Ellen Ray (unrelated to him) and her partners in Dome Films to solicit him to direct her screenplay about a young man on trial for possession of marijuana, which became the reason for Ray's return to the United States in November 1969. Instead of The Defendant , however, Ray embarked on projects concerning young Americans in turbulent times, notably

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4784-482: The extent to which they blend or clash with background." The reds that Cyd Charisse wears in Party Girl , for instance, "have an autonomous emotional value," but also have impact measured against the "somber browns of a courtroom" or against "the darker red of a sofa on which she sleeps." Ray himself used the latter example to discuss the varying meaning of color, referring to the red-on-red of James Dean's jacket on

4876-609: The few in Ray's European sojourn to come anywhere near fruition. The Doctor and the Devils was a screenplay written by Dylan Thomas (whom Cooper had also treated), inspired by the 1828 case of Dr. Robert Knox and murderers Burke and Hare , who supplied him with corpses for dissection, to be used during medical lessons. Ray struck up a deal with Avala Film , the largest production company in Yugoslavia, to back that film and three others, leading him from London to Zagreb. Production

4968-557: The film noir cycle: They Live By Night , In A Lonely Place , and On Dangerous Ground ; the social problem film Knock On Any Door ; Westerns : Run For Cover , Johnny Guitar , and The True Story of Jesse James ; Women's pictures : A Woman's Secret and Born To Be Bad ; World War II dramas : Flying Leathernecks and Bitter Victory ; the family melodrama : Rebel Without A Cause and Bigger Than Life : Epic spectacles : King of Kings and 55 Days at Peking . Yet he also applied himself to films that fell between genres, such as

5060-500: The film, before he returned to New York City. There, he continued to prepare script materials and try to develop film projects, the most viable of which was City Blues , before the production collapsed. He was also able to continue teaching acting and directing, at the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University , where his teaching assistant was graduate student Jim Jarmusch . Ray directed two short films in

5152-558: The film, his last mainstream motion picture, at its May 1963 premiere in London. Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s, and after 55 Days at Peking , he did not direct again until the 1970s, though he continued to try to develop projects while in Europe. He attempted an adaptation of Ibsen 's The Lady From the Sea , first with Ingrid Bergman in mind, and later Romy Schneider . He optioned

5244-552: The future of the archive and its programming. Jenkins resigned soon after the announcement. In September 2006 film scholar Haden Guest became the new director of the archive. He addressed worries that the archives' absorption in the Library would affect its public film screenings. The collection spans the history of film-making from the silent film era to today, and includes Hollywood films , documentaries , animation , short films , B-movies and feature films from all over

5336-609: The gangster film, punctuated by dance numbers but not quite a musical , Party Girl , and others of more marginalised categories—the rodeo film The Lusty Men , the ethnographic dramas Hot Blood and The Savage Innocents —or which even predicted more significant, later concerns, such as the ecologically themed drama Wind Across the Everglades . Harvard Film Archive The archive was founded in 1979 by Robert Gardner , Vlada K. Petric and Stanley Cavell in Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, with grants from

5428-436: The horizontal line, and the horizontal was essential for Wright." As V. F. Perkins observes, however, many of Ray's compositions "are deliberately, sometimes startlingly, unbalanced to give an effect of displacement," further noting his use of "static masses with bold lines ... which intrude into the frame and at the same time disrupt and unify his compositions." Bernard Eisenschitz also links Wright to Ray's desire to "destroy

5520-416: The images in 35mm from a screen. Two documentaries provide records of Ray's methods and the work of his class: the near-contemporary biography, I'm A Stranger Here Myself: A Portrait of Nicholas Ray (1975), directed by David Helpern Jr., and Susan Ray's retrospective account, Don't Expect Too Much (2011). In the spring of 1972, Ray was asked to show some footage from the film at a conference. The audience

5612-414: The lad in the pick-up car, makes a fine clip of agitating film. And his sensitive juxtaposing of his actors against highways, tourist camps and bleak motels makes for a vivid comprehension of an intimate personal drama in hopeless flight." Ray made several more contributions to the noir genre, most notably the 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie, also for Santana and released by Columbia, In a Lonely Place , about

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5704-426: The late 1950s, they were increasing in logistical complexity and difficulty, and cost. As well, the studio system that had both challenged and supported him was changing, making Hollywood less viable for him as a professional base. Though he contributed to the writing of most of his films — perhaps most extensively The Lusty Men , which started production with only a handful of pages — The Savage Innocents (1960)

5796-399: The latent homosexuality of Mineo, through his role as Plato, who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film. During filming, Ray began a short-lived affair with Wood, who, at age 16, was 27 years his junior. This created a tense atmosphere between Ray and Dennis Hopper , who was also involved with Wood at the time, but they were reconciled later. In 1956, Ray was chosen to direct

5888-512: The legendary bandit, and Presley had made his first film, Love Me Tender (1956), at the studio. Fox demurred, however, and Presley moved to Paramount , leaving contract players Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter to play the James brothers . Warner's commitment to Rebel Without a Cause led the studio to send Ray on his first overseas trip, in September 1955, to publicize the film, while it

5980-483: The making of 55 Days at Peking portray, not a man who was drinking (the rationale often advanced), but a film-maker who couldn't make up his mind, seeking refuge in frenzied activity and loading himself with unnecessary burdens." With an international cast, including Charlton Heston , Ava Gardner , David Niven and most of the staff of Madrid's Chinese restaurants (as extras, not the Chinese principals), again for Ray,

6072-449: The melodrama Bigger Than Life at Twentieth Century-Fox by the film's star and producer, James Mason , who played an elementary-school teacher, stricken with a rare circulatory ailment, and driven delusional by his abuse of a new wonder drug, Cortisone . In 1957, completing a two-picture deal, Ray reluctantly directed The True Story of Jesse James , a remake of the 1939 Fox release, Jesse James . Ray wanted to cast Elvis Presley as

6164-515: The most conventional Hollywood editing. He also remembered that when shooting his first film, the editor (Sherman Todd) encouraged him to "shoot double reverses" (that is, to violate the 180-degree rule ), which he did, strategically, in several sequences of They Live By Night , In A Lonely Place , and other of his Hollywood films. Ray distinguished himself by working in nearly every conventionalised Hollywood genre, infusing them with distinctive stylistic and thematic approaches: Crime films , within

6256-556: The new medium. Houseman had agreed to direct an adaption of Lucille Fletcher 's radio thriller, Sorry, Wrong Number , for CBS , and took Ray on as his collaborator. They cast Mildred Natwick as the invalid woman who thinks that she's the object of a murder scheme she overhears on her phone. When Lute Song called on Houseman's time and attention, Ray took over the task of staging the broadcast, which aired on January 30, 1946. The next year, Ray directed his first film, They Live by Night (1949), for RKO Pictures . They Live By Night

6348-471: The production. Returning east, Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington - John Latouche musical Beggar's Holiday , in 1946. Earlier that year he was assistant director, under director Houseman, of another Broadway musical, Lute Song , with music by Raymond Scott . Also through Houseman, Ray had the opportunity to work in television, one of his few forays into

6440-535: The productions failure vary, including the assertion that on the first day of shooting, Ray was out of the country, and the conclusion that he was paralysed by doubt and indecision. Whatever the case, prospects for a new, major Nicholas Ray film dissolved. Dave Wallis 's novel, Only Lovers Left Alive , was the second property that Ray tried to develop as an Emerald Films venture. As a dystopian parable, in which adults have abandoned society and adolescents have formed gangs to take charge, it might have seemed perfect for

6532-551: The project was being rewritten on the fly, and he was directing with little preparation. By habit, and because of the pressures of the job, he was heavily medicated and slept little, and finally, he collapsed on the set, according to his wife, suffering a tachycardia . He was replaced by Andrew Marton , a highly regarded second-unit director fresh off another runaway spectacle, Cleopatra (1963), with some of Heston's final scenes with Gardner directed by Guy Green , at Heston's request. Released from hospital, Ray tried to participate in

6624-457: The rectangular frame" (as the filmmaker said, adding, "I couldn't stand the formality of it"), through the multiple-image techniques he used in We Can't Go Home Again . He had envisioned using split-screen techniques as early as Rebel Without a Cause , and proposed, unsuccessfully, that The True Story of Jesse James be "stylized in every respect, all of it shot on the stage, including the horses,

6716-423: The situation—they have come directly from a funeral—but also situates them in stark contrast to Joan Crawford's Vienna, the character they are persecuting, who changes her wardrobe, in a wide range of vivid colors, from one scene to the next. About Ray's editing style, V. F. Perkins describes it as "dislocated ... [reflecting] the dislocated lives which many of his characters live," citing as a characteristic feature

6808-597: The studio and subsequently blacklisted . Soon after the public announcement, and prior to the start of production, Ray stepped away from the project. While the studio considered dismissing him or suspending him, instead it extended his contract, evidently with Hughes's consent. As late as 1979, Ray insisted that Hughes "saved me from blacklisting," although Ray also likely wrote to the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his political past or testified in private, in order to protect himself. His final film at

6900-472: The studio, The Lusty Men (1952), starred Robert Mitchum as a champion bronco rider who tutors a younger man in the ways of rodeoing while becoming emotionally involved with the younger cowpoke's wife. At a March 1979 college appearance, documented in the first sequence of Lightning Over Water (1980) to be shot, Ray talks about The Lusty Men as a film about "a man who wants to bring himself all together before he dies." After leaving RKO, Ray signed with

6992-516: The studios themselves. Some found Ray agreeable as a director, while others resisted his methods. On Born To Be Bad , for example, Ray started rehearsals with a table read , then customary in a stage production but less so for a film, and star Joan Fontaine found the exercise discomfiting, tainting her relationship with the director, whom she thought "not right for this kind of picture." On the same film, Joan Leslie appreciated Ray's hands-on direction, even though they differed in their interpretation of

7084-410: The subject of a crime and an investigation of her past, and Born to Be Bad (1950), with Joan Fontaine as a San Francisco social climber. In January 1949, Ray was announced as set to direct I Married a Communist , a litmus test that RKO head Howard Hughes had concocted to weed out Communists at the studio. John Cromwell and Joseph Losey had previously turned it down, and both were punished by

7176-540: The term to designate exemplars (alongside such major figures as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks ) of film directors who worked in Hollywood, and whose work had a recognizable and distinctive stamp seen to transcend the standardized industrial system in which they were produced. Still, critic Andrew Sarris , among the first to popularize auteurism in the United States, placed Ray below his "Pantheon," and in his second-rung category "The Far Side of Paradise," in his 1968 assessment of sound-era American directors: "Nicholas Ray

7268-461: The time, but would prove highly influential to future generations of filmmakers. His best-known work is the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause , starring James Dean . He is appreciated for many narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963, including They Live By Night (1948), In A Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), Bigger Than Life (1956), and King of Kings (1961), as well as an experimental work produced throughout

7360-518: The two films for which he is best remembered: Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The former, made at Republic, was a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men. Stylized, and highly eccentric in its time, it was much loved by French critics. ( François Truffaut called it "the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns,

7452-700: The use of camera movements that are in process at the start of the shot and not yet at rest at the end. Frequently, as well, Ray cuts abruptly, and disruptively, from the main action of a scene to the response, in close-up, of "a character who is, to all appearances, only peripherally involved." Another distinctive trait is the frequent use of dissolves for scene transitions, "more than most Hollywood directors of his time," as Terrence Rafferty points out, inferring from this, "perhaps an indication of his general preference for fluidity over hard, nailed-down meanings." Ray himself cited comic strips as instructive, when he started in pictures, as providing examples that deviated from

7544-583: The war, Leith's lover. Shot on location in the Libyan desert, with some sequences in a studio in Nice, it was by all accounts an arduous production, exacerbated for Ray by his drinking and drug use. As much an art film as a conventional war picture , Bitter Victory confused many, while enthusing Ray's continental supporters, such as Godard and Éric Rohmer . While for the first decade of his career Ray's films had been studio pictures, and relatively small in scale, by

7636-533: The world . It is the largest collection of 35mm film in New England. The collection grows by an average of 15 to 20 films a year and contains some rarities, such as some of the only prints in the United States of several films by Serbian director Dusan Makavejev . It also features a large collection of German cinema and the Bavarian Film Fund donates prints of any films that it finances. After

7728-501: Was Vlada K. Petric , who expanded the collection and established the year-round regular screenings. He retired in 1995 and in 1999 Bruce Jenkins assumed the post. In January 2005, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean William C. Kirby announced that the archive would be absorbed by the Harvard College Library and managed by the Library of Fine Arts. This caused some concern within the Harvard community about

7820-689: Was "discharged from the WPA community service of Washington DC for Communist activities." The FBI soon determined the case of "Nicholas K. Ray," however, "as not warranting investigation." At the OWI, Ray renewed his acquaintance with Molly Day Thatcher , Houseman's assistant, and her husband, Elia Kazan, from the New York theatre days. In 1944, heading to Hollywood to direct A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , Kazan suggested Ray go west, too, and hired him as an assistant on

7912-438: Was announced as starting on September 1, 1965, amended to October 21, with Maximilian Schell , Susannah York and Geraldine Chaplin in the cast, but Ray insisted on rewrites, asking, among others, John Fowles , who declined, and Gore Vidal , who in retrospect wondered why he agreed. Ray tried in vain to enlist US investment, by Seven Arts and Warner Bros., on a budget that was mounting, to upwards of $ 2.5 million. Accounts of

8004-459: Was based on the first few pages of a recent novel of the same name, by Curtis Bill Pepper . Ray's film was included in the 2011 DVD/Blu-ray release of We Can't Go Home Again . Having contracted cancer and facing mortality, Ray and his son Tim conceived a documentary about a father-son relationship. That idea, and Ray's hunger to continue working, led to the involvement of German filmmaker Wim Wenders , who had previously employed Ray as an actor, in

8096-409: Was more toward Meyerholdt , then Vakhtangov , than Stanislavsky ," citing Vakhtangov's notion of "agitation from the essence" as being "a principal guideline for me in my directing career." On a few occasions, he was able to work with actors who were so trained, notably James Dean, but as a director working in the Hollywood studio system, most of his performers were trained classically, on stage, or in

8188-558: Was reviewed (under one of its working titles, The Twisted Road ) as early as June 1948, but not released until November 1949, due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes 's takeover of RKO Pictures . As a result of the delay, the second and third pictures Ray directed, RKO's A Woman's Secret (1949) and Knock On Any Door (1949), a loan-out to Humphrey Bogart 's Santana Productions and Columbia , were released before his first. Almost an impressionistic take on film noir , starring Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as

8280-708: Was shocked to see footage of Ray and his students smoking marijuana together. An early version of We Can't Go Home Again was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, to an abiding lack of interest. Ray shot additional scenes in Amsterdam, shortly after the Cannes screening, in New York in January 1974, and two months later in San Francisco, and edited a second version, with the hopes of attracting

8372-463: Was still in previews in the US. He visited Paris, where he met some of the French critics, eager to talk with the director of Johnny Guitar , one of whom, he later remarked, "almost persuaded me it was a great movie." He was in London when he received the call telling him of James Dean's death, on the last day of the month, and then travelled to Germany, to drink and mourn. Nonetheless, this moment marked

8464-462: Was the only screenplay of a film he directed for which he received credit. Adapting a novel about Inuit life by Hans Ruesch , Top of the World , Ray also drew on the writing of explorer Peter Freuchen , and the 1933 film based on one of Freuchen's books, Eskimo . An epic-scale production, with Italian backing and distribution by Paramount, Ray began shooting the film, with lead Anthony Quinn , in

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