Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray: Hollywood's Last Romantic

In 1957 Jean-Luc Godard reviewed a WWII picture shot in the Libyan desert and ended with a sentence that became the most extravagant compliment one filmmaker ever paid another: "...there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray." Two decades later the man who had directed *Rebel Without a Cause* was teaching in a converted farmhouse in upstate New York, wearing a black eye patch, dying of lung cancer, unable to finish the only film he still cared about. Between those two points lies the most self-destructive career in American movies.

Galesville and a Vanished Father

He was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. on 7 August 1911 in Galesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four and the only son of a contractor and builder, Raymond Sr., and Olene "Lena" Toppen. His three sisters were a decade older. His father drank; in 1927 he disappeared, and the sixteen-year-old Ray found him insensate in a hotel room. He died the next day. Ray would spend the rest of his life repeating the pattern with more resources.

He was a gifted orator and an erratic student who failed Latin, physics and geometry and graduated 152nd in a class of 153 from La Crosse Central High in 1929. He studied drama at La Crosse State Teachers College, then lasted a single semester at the University of Chicago before drinking and grades ended it — though not before he attached himself to the dramatist Thornton Wilder.

Taliesin

Wilder's connections got him to Frank Lloyd Wright's home at Spring Green, and Wright invited him into the Fellowship, asking him in late 1933 to run the newly built Hillside Playhouse. There Ray watched foreign films for the first time. By spring 1934 Wright had thrown him out of the compound. But the architecture stayed: decades later Ray explained his love of CinemaScope by saying, "I like the horizontal line, and the horizontal was essential for Wright."

Radio, Folk Music and the FBI

Back in New York he joined the Workers' Laboratory Theatre in 1934, briefly billing himself "Nik Ray," and befriended Elia Kazan. He worked for the Federal Theatre Project and travelled rural America collecting vernacular music with Alan Lomax. In 1940-41 Lomax produced and Ray directed *Back Where I Come From* for CBS, a pioneering folk programme featuring Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Burl Ives and Pete Seeger. During the war he made radio propaganda for the Office of War Information and Voice of America under John Houseman — while the FBI opened a file classifying him as of "tentative dangerousness," with J. Edgar Hoover personally recommending custodial detention. The Justice Department quashed it. In 1946 he directed his only Broadway show, the Ellington–Latouche musical *Beggar's Holiday*.

The RKO Years

His first film, *They Live by Night*, was shot in 1947 but shelved until November 1949 by Howard Hughes's chaotic takeover of RKO, so his second and third pictures reached cinemas first. It is a fugitive-couple story about two young people society has no room for — the template for everything Ray did afterwards, and for a whole subgenre after him.

In 1949 Hughes assigned him *I Married a Communist*, a script used as a loyalty test; the two directors who had refused it, John Cromwell and Joseph Losey, were blacklisted. Ray stepped away and kept his contract. He later claimed Hughes "saved me from blacklisting," though he most likely dealt with HUAC privately — the murkiest episode in his life.

*In a Lonely Place* (1950) gave Humphrey Bogart a screenwriter suspected of murder and capable of it, and gave Ray his own confession by proxy. He told Gavin Lambert of the character: "Will he become a hopeless drunk, or kill himself, or seek psychiatric help? Those have always been my personal options, by the way." *On Dangerous Ground* (1951) and *The Lusty Men* (1952) followed.

Johnny Guitar and Rebel

*Johnny Guitar* (1954) put Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in roles written for men and drenched the frame in colour; François Truffaut called it "the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream." Then came *Rebel Without a Cause* (1955), twenty-four hours in the life of a troubled teenager, released weeks after James Dean died on 30 September 1955. It effectively invented the modern American teenager as a cultural category, and it made Sal Mineo's Plato the first gay teenager on screen. Ray called his working relationship with Dean a "spiritual marriage." He also began an affair with the sixteen-year-old Natalie Wood, twenty-seven years his junior.

*Bigger Than Life* (1956) followed a schoolteacher driven delusional by cortisone. Ray later admitted it tracked his own dependency; his wife Susan told him flatly, "This is your story before you lived it."

The Collapse

The descent was long and documented. *Bitter Victory* (1957) came with a heroin-addicted girlfriend and gambling debts. On *55 Days at Peking* (1963) he was heavily medicated, barely slept, and collapsed with tachycardia; Andrew Marton reckoned he directed sixty-five percent of the film that carries Ray's name. It was his last mainstream picture. He drifted through Paris, London, Zagreb, Munich and Sylt on projects that never happened — a Dylan Thomas script about Burke and Hare, a dystopia to star the Rolling Stones. In a 1976 journal entry he wrote that he had lived in a "continuous blackout between 1957 or earlier until now."

He married four times — Jean Evans, Gloria Grahame, Betty Utey and finally Susan Schwartz, whom he met at eighteen during the Chicago Seven trial. The Grahame marriage ended after Ray found her in bed with his thirteen-year-old son Tony; Grahame later married Tony.

The Farmhouse

He came home in 1969, filmed the aftermath of Fred Hampton's killing in Chicago, lost the sight in one eye in 1970 and took to a black patch that made him look, one student said, "like a cross between Noah, a pirate, and God!" From 1972 he taught at Harpur College, where students rotated through every job on a communal film eventually called *We Can't Go Home Again* — multiple gauges, up to five projectors, video processed through a synthesizer supplied by Nam June Paik. It screened at Cannes in 1973 to no interest and was never finished. His contract was not renewed; the colleague who had hired him called it a "calamitous error." He later taught at the Lee Strasberg Institute and NYU, where a graduate student named Jim Jarmusch became his teaching assistant. Wim Wenders cast him in *The American Friend* (1977), then filmed his dying with him in *Lightning Over Water*. He died of heart failure on 16 June 1979. His grave in La Crosse bears no inscription.

Why Nicholas Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on visual intelligence of a specific and demonstrable kind: Ray thought in composition and colour the way a novelist thinks in sentences. Critics have shown how he deliberately unbalanced the CinemaScope frame to produce displacement, cutting abruptly from the main action to a peripheral face, favouring dissolves over hard cuts because he preferred fluidity to nailed-down meaning. His colour choices were arguments — Dean's red jacket against a red couch for "smoldering danger," green in *Bigger Than Life* for "life, grass, and hospital walls." He worked in nearly every studio genre and bent each one toward the same subject: the outsider whom conformity cannot absorb.

The Cahiers du Cinéma critics made him a founding exhibit of the auteur theory, ranked beside Hitchcock and Hawks, and Godard's line about him is the most famous sentence in that magazine's history. But the counter-case was made by a sympathiser. Andrew Sarris, in 1968, refused to put him in the pantheon: "Nicholas Ray is not the greatest director who ever lived; nor is he a Hollywood hack. The Truth lies somewhere in between." That is fair. Ray's greatness is concentrated in about seven years and perhaps six films; sixteen more years of talent went into blackouts, abandoned scripts and a masterpiece he could not cut. The French adored him partly because his best work was ravishing and partly because the wreckage fit their romantic theory of the artist. He never wrote a screenplay he directed but one.

Legacy

He gave American cinema its language for adolescent alienation and gave the auteur theory its most persuasive martyr. The Harvard Film Archive's description holds: "Hollywood's last romantic," and "one of postwar American cinema's supremely gifted and ultimately tragic filmmakers." Wenders filmed him dying because Ray insisted, and it remains the closest thing cinema has to an artist auditing his own ruin on camera.