WAKE UP, THE UNIVERSE HAS ENDED: NICHOLAS RAY IN CINEMASCOPE
"If it were all in the script, why make the film?" - Nicholas Ray
Canonized as one of postwar American cinema’s supremely gifted and ultimately tragic filmmakers, Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) was an artist whose candle burned from both ends with furious energy and inspiration. Ray’s films 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 and loss. Above all, Ray’s cinema glows with an ardent humanism, a passionate sympathy for the most vulnerable underdogs, those wounded loners and outcasts who stumble nobly across his films. First appreciated by the French directors and critics affiliated with Cahiers du cinema – and especially revered by a young Jean-Luc Godard – Ray was embraced as a cult director, crowned as auteur and celebrated for the searing romanticism, eccentric visual style and single-mindedness which would force him into one conflict too many with the Hollywood establishment. Each of Ray’s films became increasingly hard won victories until finally he was banished from the studios’ kingdom to become himself one of the lonely wanderers who had so captured his imagination. (Harvard Film Archive)
Films in this Program
Nicholas Ray
111 min
Director Nicholas Ray transforms a potentially routine exposé of teenage rebellion into one of the great humanistic documents of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Three teenagers (James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood), all in juvenile detention for various misdeeds, are briefly drawn together as an elective family unit, but their bond is threatened by the intrusion of straight society. James Dean died behind the wheel of a Porsche Spyder less than one month before the release of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, ensuring that the film would forever come wrapped in a shroud of tragic mystique. But more than just the film that launched its star (and his iconic red jacket) into the pop culture pantheon, REBEL is a deeply affecting exploration of teenage discontent, queer longing and the power of chosen families. Setting a vividly raging template for generations of cinematic rebels, loaners and outcasts, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE is Nicholas Ray’s first CinemaScope explosion and he fills every inch of the frame with passion.
“An unmissable film, made with a delirious compassion.” - Dave Kehr
“The sincerity of Nicholas Ray's cinema is almost operatic, surprisingly simple yet totally profound, almost holy.” - Neil Bahadur
“An unmissable film, made with a delirious compassion.” - Dave Kehr
“The sincerity of Nicholas Ray's cinema is almost operatic, surprisingly simple yet totally profound, almost holy.” - Neil Bahadur
Nicholas Ray
95 min
When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father (James Mason, in one of his most indelible roles) is prescribed cortisone for a painful, possibly fatal affliction, he grows dangerously addicted to the experimental drug, resulting in his transformation into a psychotic and ultimately violent household despot. Nicholas Ray’s BIGGER THAN LIFE is among the most radical examples of what may be the most radical genre in American cinema: the small-town melodrama. Though long considered unworthy of serious attention – aimed as it was at the disregarded female audience – this genre is single-mindedly concerned with the nightmare world of compulsory heterosexuality and capitalist striving. And BIGGER THAN LIFE, one of Ray’s best and most overlooked films, brilliantly distorts the American dream.
James Mason brings a smoldering intensity to his portrayal of a modest man suddenly transformed by a manic, medically-induced hunger for success and for all the trappings of the “good life”– money, status, power – that seem within his grasp, although for a terrible price. And for director Ray, the drugs in the film are simply a way of bringing to the surface tendencies that already exist within both Mason and the world he inhabits. Seldom has the idea of the bourgeois home as prison been pursued with such remorseless logic. BIGGER THAN LIFE casts a long shadow over America’s cinema.
“It’s hard to think of another Hollywood picture with more to say about the sheer awfulness of normal American family life during the 50s. BIGGER THAN LIFE is a profoundly upsetting exposure of middle-class aspirations because it virtually defines madness as taking those values seriously.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum
“The cosmic scope of the film’s blasphemy has yet to be fully appreciated. Somewhere in suburbia, the order of creation is turning over.” - B. Kite
James Mason brings a smoldering intensity to his portrayal of a modest man suddenly transformed by a manic, medically-induced hunger for success and for all the trappings of the “good life”– money, status, power – that seem within his grasp, although for a terrible price. And for director Ray, the drugs in the film are simply a way of bringing to the surface tendencies that already exist within both Mason and the world he inhabits. Seldom has the idea of the bourgeois home as prison been pursued with such remorseless logic. BIGGER THAN LIFE casts a long shadow over America’s cinema.
“It’s hard to think of another Hollywood picture with more to say about the sheer awfulness of normal American family life during the 50s. BIGGER THAN LIFE is a profoundly upsetting exposure of middle-class aspirations because it virtually defines madness as taking those values seriously.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum
“The cosmic scope of the film’s blasphemy has yet to be fully appreciated. Somewhere in suburbia, the order of creation is turning over.” - B. Kite
Nicholas Ray
99 min
A gangland lawyer and a lounge singer/call girl rebel against their underworld ‘family’ in this stunningly stylized film noir. A film that might be regarded as Nicholas Ray’s farewell to Hollywood (if not commercial filmmaking), PARTY GIRL is a flamboyant poem in delirious color and CinemaScope treated with a sort of lyricism unique to Ray. This is the only movie he made at MGM and he makes the most of the production resources available transforming a commissioned piece with an imposed screenplay into a baroquely stylized love story exploding with exoticism and violence.
PARTY GIRL was a cause celebre at Cahiers du Cinéma during that magazine’s golden age. When less enlightened critics focused on the formulaic aspects of the film, writer Fereydoun Hoveyda unleashed one of the most glorious panegyrics of Cahiers auteurism:
“Ray's new film proves the mastery of its author and reveals the very essence of an art which is stilI unrecognized. PARTY GIRL has an idiotic story. So what? If the substratum of cinematic work was made up simply of plot convolutions unraveling on the screen, then we could just annex the Seventh Art to literature and hand over Cahiers to literary critics.
There are torrents of inventiveness here. Every sequence is a cascade of ideas. And if people insist on thinking that PARTY GIRL is rubbish, then I proclaim, 'Long live this rubbish which so dazzles my eyes, fascinates my heart and gives me a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.' What indeed could be more beautiful than two people struggling against themselves and breaking down the barriers they had ingeniously constructed to shut themselves off from the world (or to dominate it, which comes to the same thing)? ‘Strangers here on earth.’ For in the last analysis Nicholas Ray's authority is such that he can shape an anecdote which is no better or worse than any other so that it conforms to his own view of the world, his own conception of human relationships.
The beauty of PARTY GIRL exists only through cinema, a particularly modern cinema which brushes aside all conventions as if they were just the icy perfection sought for by those who have no heart. A cinema which is not afraid of exaggerating, of sacrificing everything to expression and to the effectiveness of a reflex or a look. To remain insensitive to the thousand beauties of Nicholas Ray’s PARTY GIRL is to turn one’s back resolutely on the modern cinema, to reject the cinema as autonomous art.”
Forty-five years later, the critics who dismissed the film are forgotten and the cult of Ray’s sleek, eruptively colorful tale of gangsterland amour fou lives on.
PARTY GIRL was a cause celebre at Cahiers du Cinéma during that magazine’s golden age. When less enlightened critics focused on the formulaic aspects of the film, writer Fereydoun Hoveyda unleashed one of the most glorious panegyrics of Cahiers auteurism:
“Ray's new film proves the mastery of its author and reveals the very essence of an art which is stilI unrecognized. PARTY GIRL has an idiotic story. So what? If the substratum of cinematic work was made up simply of plot convolutions unraveling on the screen, then we could just annex the Seventh Art to literature and hand over Cahiers to literary critics.
There are torrents of inventiveness here. Every sequence is a cascade of ideas. And if people insist on thinking that PARTY GIRL is rubbish, then I proclaim, 'Long live this rubbish which so dazzles my eyes, fascinates my heart and gives me a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.' What indeed could be more beautiful than two people struggling against themselves and breaking down the barriers they had ingeniously constructed to shut themselves off from the world (or to dominate it, which comes to the same thing)? ‘Strangers here on earth.’ For in the last analysis Nicholas Ray's authority is such that he can shape an anecdote which is no better or worse than any other so that it conforms to his own view of the world, his own conception of human relationships.
The beauty of PARTY GIRL exists only through cinema, a particularly modern cinema which brushes aside all conventions as if they were just the icy perfection sought for by those who have no heart. A cinema which is not afraid of exaggerating, of sacrificing everything to expression and to the effectiveness of a reflex or a look. To remain insensitive to the thousand beauties of Nicholas Ray’s PARTY GIRL is to turn one’s back resolutely on the modern cinema, to reject the cinema as autonomous art.”
Forty-five years later, the critics who dismissed the film are forgotten and the cult of Ray’s sleek, eruptively colorful tale of gangsterland amour fou lives on.
Nicholas Ray
110 min
Director Nicholas Ray’s lifelong interest in isolated cultures and outsider souls finds full expression in every frame of this fascinating late film about an Inuit hunter. When Inuk (Anthony Quinn), who has had little contact with white men, goes to a trading post he accidentally kills a missionary and finds himself being pursued by the police. Assigned to bring him to justice is a naïve lawman, played by Peter O’Toole in an early screen appearance, who is pulled dangerously deep into the Arctic winter.
A return to Ray’s perennial theme of a search for home, THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS represents his first - and, in many ways, most ambitious - attempt to break free from the Hollywood studios and forge an independent route. The CinemaScope frame throws up images of an often startling, even surreal beauty: polar bears diving from the ice-flows become a rhapsody in blinding whites and brilliant blues, and the sound of a jukebox screaming out over the empty, snowy wastes is a withering, wicked symbol of man's destructive influence on nature.
“An outsider's view of outsiders, harsh and enchanted. Cinematic coups abound: A colony of walruses disbands as the camera bobs toward them in an unbroken take, one trooper is propped up soaking wet in the middle of the blizzard-swept widescreen and morphs into a gelid statue in under a minute. NANOOK OF THE NORTH is the mandatory starting point, but this is actually Ray’s THE RIVER.” - Fernando F. Croce
A return to Ray’s perennial theme of a search for home, THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS represents his first - and, in many ways, most ambitious - attempt to break free from the Hollywood studios and forge an independent route. The CinemaScope frame throws up images of an often startling, even surreal beauty: polar bears diving from the ice-flows become a rhapsody in blinding whites and brilliant blues, and the sound of a jukebox screaming out over the empty, snowy wastes is a withering, wicked symbol of man's destructive influence on nature.
“An outsider's view of outsiders, harsh and enchanted. Cinematic coups abound: A colony of walruses disbands as the camera bobs toward them in an unbroken take, one trooper is propped up soaking wet in the middle of the blizzard-swept widescreen and morphs into a gelid statue in under a minute. NANOOK OF THE NORTH is the mandatory starting point, but this is actually Ray’s THE RIVER.” - Fernando F. Croce
