The Romantic Hero: Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray, the director of Rebel Without a Cause, identified with the underdogs and outcasts of this world. At the heart of his work was the question, How do we belong?
Who is the most swooningly romantic of movie directors? A case could be made for Jean Vigo or Wong Kar-Wai, whose poetic-erotic offerings, from L’Atalante to In The Mood For Love, are equally adept at the shimmer and the simmer. But both would surely doff their caps to Nicholas Ray, whose films, according to the Harvard Film Archive, are “among the most heartfelt and disarmingly authentic works of the Hollywood studio era, intimate portraits of indelibly three- dimensional characters and lyrical intimations of loneliness or loss”. Whether bringing a skewed eye to the genre picture, like his 1954 western Johnny Guitar, or practically inventing the troubled teenager in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, Ray’s work foregrounded the wounded underdogs and outcasts he keenly identified with. He was acclaimed as the auteur par excellence by the gunslingers of the French nouvelle vague, with Jean-Luc Godard proclaiming: “Cinema is Nicholas Ray.” You feel, however, that Ray’s credo might come closer to the plaintive cry of James Dean, as Jim Stark, in Rebel, perhaps Ray’s masterpiece: “If I had one day when I didn’t have to be all confused and I didn’t have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. If I felt that I belonged someplace.”
I immersed myself in art that gave voice and dignity to the disenfranchised. That was always where my heart lay.
Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in 1911 in Galesville, Wisconsin. His father was a building contractor and an alcoholic, and, as a student, Ray developed an early taste for drunkenness and delinquency, placing 152nd in a class of 153 at his high school graduation. Always an engaging presence — tall, lean, with piercing blue eyes and a head of unruly curls — he attracted early mentors such as the playwright Thornton Wilder (during a short-lived stint of drama study at the University of Chicago), and fellow Wisconsin native Frank Lloyd Wright, for whom he apprenticed at the architect’s newly founded utopian school of Taliesin (Wright’s influence, Ray later said, could be found in “my liking for the horizontal line, which served me well when shooting in Cinemascope”).
A subsequent move to New York introduced Ray to the Depression-era ferment of agit-prop theatre and its raw, naturalist performance style, which left a mark, as did a friendship with the pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax, whom Ray accompanied through backwoods America, collecting field recordings of folk ballads and blues laments for the Library of Congress. “I immersed myself in art that gave voice and dignity to the disenfranchised and marginalised,” he later said. “That was always where my heart lay.”
Ray was invited to Hollywood in 1944 by his theatre comrade Elia Kazan; he worked as an uncredited assistant on Kazan’s movie debut, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Two years later, John Houseman, another fellow ‘Shock Troupe’ graduate with whom Ray had produced radio propaganda broadcasts during world war II, signed him to RKO just as that studio became subject to the whimsical and ultimately destructive patronage of Howard Hughes. Ray was treated as a protégé of sorts by Hughes, protected from the worst excesses of the communist witch hunts (despite his being given a classification of ‘tentative dangerousness’ by the F.B.I. a few years prior) and encouraged to direct the six features for RKO that would establish his career.
The titles of those features — They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, Hot Blood — give some flavour of the super-heated, quivering noir to be found within, as do cursory glances at their plots: a saloonkeeper fights with the aid of an old flame to survive a lynch mob (Johnny Guitar); a hard-bitten cop falls for a murder suspect’s blind sister (On Dangerous Ground). But Ray further brought what another nouvelle vague alumnus, Jacques Rivette, called “a taste for paroxysm, which imparts something of the feverish and impermanent to the most tranquil of moments”.
Ray embedded himself with James Dean, embarking on what he called a "tempestuous spiritual marriage" with him.
His jittery, cross-cutting editing style and slow dissolves, and his investing of objects with an unsettling psychological charge, from James Dean’s red jacket in Rebel (watch out — smouldering danger about) to Robert Ryan’s football trophies in On Dangerous Ground (symbols of hale and hearty innocence irretrievably lost) led Robert Mitchum, who starred in Ray’s The Lusty Men as a bashed-up rodeo rider, to dub him ‘the Mystic’, and would go on to influence similar saturated-noir masters such as the photographer William Eggleston and the director David Lynch.
There’s an additional charge thrumming throughout Rebel Without a Cause — a sexual one. Much as Larry Clark would do, decades later, with his cast of street hustlers and skate-punks in Kids, Ray embedded himself with Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Dennis Hopper et al in Rebel, to the extent that he embarked on what he called a “tempestuous spiritual marriage” with Dean (Ray always scorned the idea of bisexuality — he was married four times, and had affairs with Shelley Winters, Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford, his star in Johnny Guitar — though he reportedly carried a torch for the sexually omnivorous Dean, and was devastated by his death less than a year after the film wrapped). He carried on an affair with Wood, 27 years his junior, which made things rather problematic with Hopper, her boyfriend at the time. His ‘fatherly’ ministrations also encouraged Mineo to come out — a risky move in the Hollywood of the 1950s, to say the least — thus igniting an amorous vortex that makes other legendary collisions between the professional and the personal — the super- swinging recording sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, say — look Trappist in comparison. It’s a film with perpetual boy-leg — that male-centric jiggling of the limb that bespeaks everything from adolescent impatience to psychologicalturmoil—butis nonetheless powerful for that; any excitable clip could (and has) been isolated as a meme-slash-synecdoche for the hormonal intensity of teenage experience. It was also Ray’s commercial high watermark: though the budgets ballooned — 1961’s King of Kings tackled the life of Christ (with Ray Milland as the voice of Satan) and 1963’s 55 Days at Peking saw Charlton Heston saving the Imperial City from the Boxer Rebellion — the returns diminished, and by the mid sixties Ray had effectively retired from commercial filmmaking.
Ray was an auteur in winter, railing against compromise and advocating for truth and beauty.
The freewheeling sixties, when outsiders began to be extolled if not enshrined, should have been Ray’s decade, but, while the counterculture was finally catching up with him, he’d become, as the Harvard Film Archive wrote, “one of the lonely wanderers who had so captured his imagination”, meandering through Paris, London, Zagreb, Munich, and even Sylt, a German island in the North Sea, and drifting into a hinterland of alcoholism and substance abuse. His personal life was fittingly baroque: he’d discovered his second wife, the actress Gloria Grahame, in bed with his son Tony, from his first marriage, and just 13 at the time (the pair would later marry), and the breadth of his addictions was such that he was banned from sofa-surfing at the New Mexico ranch of Dennis Hopper — no slouch in the self-destructive stakes in his own right — while Hopper was editing The Last Movie. “My father was notorious
for carrying a doctor’s bag full of pharmaceuticals during the height of his career,” wrote Ray’s daughter Nicca, from his third marriage to dancer Betty Utey, who would become an addict herself. “When Nick came to visit us 10 years after my parents’ separation, he brought along his drug dealer, who always carried with him the best Bolivian and Peruvian flake. He was also a fall-down drunk whose doctor prescribed him methamphetamine, believing the speed would keep the alcohol from destroying him.”
As if to manifest his iconoclastic status, Ray had taken to sporting an eyepatch after losing an eye to a blood clot, which, with his leonine mop now turned a brilliant white, caused him to resemble, as one onlooker put it, “a cross between Noah, a pirate and God”.
Ray spent the last decade of his life teaching, notably at the State University of New York in Binghamton; naturally, his methods were unorthodox, with lectures jettisoned in favour of collaborative filmmaking with his students. The result, a baggy but oddly compelling effort called We Can’t Go Home Again, is very much of its time — split-screens, psychedelic washes, nudity, pot-smoking — but, like his studio pictures, is punctuated by grace notes of visionary fervour. “We were flattered and exhilarated that he wanted to put our world on film,” one of his charges said.
Despite being in his diminished dotage, Ray’s charisma still attracted acolytes, among them Jim Jarmusch, who worked for a time as his assistant, and Wim Wenders, who cast Ray (alongside his old mucker Hopper) in 1977’s The American Friend, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, as a glowering forger of Old Masters. Wenders would also co-direct Ray’s last film, Lightning Over Water, which documents Ray’s last weeks before he died of lung cancer in 1979 (he had finally got sober a few years previously). “The film’s ghostly images threaten to disintegrate or fade away,” wrote one reviewer, but not while Ray animates the frame, the auteur in winter, railing against compromise and selling out and advocating for truth and beauty, an incorrigible rebel who may well have been his own most complex, flawed, riveting romantic hero.
Photo Credits: Getty Images
