culture
Highlighting Hollywood’s Resident Anti-Hero
Expect plenty from TIFF's latest career-spanning retrospective, "The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray," featuring 14 of the director's films.
This, according to Jean-Luc Godard, is the personification of cinema.
Hollywood Classics: The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Sunday, October 2, to Tuesday, December 13, selected dates
In contrast to “Spectacular Obsessions,” “Masks and Faces,” or “And Justice for All,” TIFF’s latest directorial retrospective would seem, at a careless first glance, to feature a disappointingly bland title: “The Cinema of Nicholas Ray.” Of course, TIFF’s tribute to the legendary Hollywood iconoclast is actually called “The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray,” translated from the suitably Gallic, baldly hyperbolic proclamation of one Jean-Luc Godard. As such, it is in fact wonderfully apt, suggesting both the profound influence of Ray’s boldly irreverent filmmaking, including his impact on the pioneers of the French New Wave, as well as the manner in which Ray’s personality was inextricably bound up in even his glossiest Technicolor productions.
On now through December 13, the programme features a career-spanning assortment of 14 films, from his RKO-backed, black-and-white productions of the late ’40s, to the CinemaScope landmarks of his mid-’50s Hollywood heyday, to the European co-productions of the early ’60s that heralded the end of his brief but brilliant commercial filmmaking career. The centrepiece of the retrospective, though, is a newly restored version of Ray’s penultimate feature, the experimental, autobiographical We Can’t Go Home Again, which Susan Ray, the director’s widow, fourth wife, and collaborator, will introduce.
The eccentric Ray in conversation with an eccentric young protégé in We Can't Go Home Again.
Speaking from her home in New York, Susan Ray insisted that there remains “a tremendous amount of life” in the long-abandoned project, which originally debuted as a working print at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. Likening the unfinished film to “a child crying in a closet, screaming to be let out,” she explained that she felt compelled to complete the work that consumed the final years of her husband’s life, before he succumbed to cancer in 1979.
Touted as a kaleidoscopic, countercultural look at American youth in the Vietnam era, We Can’t Go Home Again is the product of Ray’s close collaboration with his students as an instructor at Binghampton University. Aided by the EYE Film Institute in Netherlands and the Academy Film Archive, Susan set about restoring the film to combat the “misunderstandings, conjecture, and schadenfreude” that characterized the initial responses to what was a radical departure from her husband’s audacious but accessible studio filmography. In addition, TIFF’s retrospective will feature Susan’s own film, Don’t Expect Too Much, a candid companion documentary to We Can’t Go Home Again, detailing both its making and restoration.
Though you wouldn't know it from this still, Richard Burton plays a courageous Allied Captain in Bitter Victory.
In what Susan describes as a gesture of indulgence from TIFF, she will also offer some introductory remarks on what she says is perhaps her favourite of her husband’s films, the unsung 1957 Second World War classic Bitter Victory (
). Essentially a Shakespearean tragedy disguised as a bombastic commando flick, it stars Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens as, respectively, Captain Leith and Major Brand, Allied officers dropped behind Nazi lines in North Africa, tasked with recovering vital strategic intelligence. Ostensibly on the same side, the duo become embroiled in a silent battle of wits and wills when the duplicitous Brand learns that his wife (Ruth Roman) is Leith’s ex. Consumed by jealousy, and concerned that Leith will expose his moment of mid-mission cowardice, Brand plots a sandy demise for his brave but war-weary second-in-command.
If Bitter Victory is Susan Ray’s top pick, we’re opting for Ray’s masterfully self-reflexive murder-mystery-slash-matrimonial-noir, 1950’s In a Lonely Place (
). Humphrey Bogart stars as the magnificently named Dixon Steele, a successful but stagnant Hollywood screenwriter with a reputation for being both quick-witted and quick to anger. Falsely suspected of killing a young woman, Steele’s alluring new neighbour, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), first provides him with an alibi and then a muse as the pair quickly fall in love. An obdurate police captain (Carl Benton Reid) remains convinced of Steele’s guilt and seeds Laurel with doubt by revealing his history of violence. Shockingly once considered one of Bogart’s lesser roles, his performance as the sardonic, hot-headed Steele has rightly grown to be regarded as among his finest. Grahame, too, is excellent, while her strained real-life relationship with then-husband Ray lends the film a fascinating autobiographical subtext.
Bogie cozies up to In a Lonely Place co-star, and Ray's ex-wife, Gloria Grahame.
Ray’s 1951 follow-up, On Dangerous Ground (
) revisits the combination of hardboiled noir and tender love story seen in In a Lonely Place, albeit with a far more hopeful conclusion (a rarity in Ray’s often brooding body of work). The film opens as cynical big city detective Jim Wilson (a menacing Robert Ryan) trails two thugs sought in connection with the murder of a police officer. In short order, he collars a known associate and extracts the location of the suspects’ hideout, demonstrating a violent disdain for due process. So as not to jeopardize the case, he’s reassigned to a snowy upstate homicide investigation, where it’s hoped he’ll cool his heels. As it happens, Wilson is provided with an opportunity for redemption and romance when he encounters Mary Malden (Ida Lupino), a warm-spirited blind woman whose rural isolation mirrors his urban alienation and who may be sheltering a fugitive.
Speaking of which, Ray practically invented the cinematic tradition of the “couple on the run” with his debut feature, They Live By Night (
), a clear precursor to Arthur Penn’s better-known Bonnie and Clyde. Shot in 1947 but released in 1949, Ray’s feature debut predates Penn’s classic by a full two decades and easily outstrips it for genuine tragedy. Farley Granger and Catherine O’Donnell are Bowie and Keechie, Depression-era teens who become the subjects of an inter-state manhunt thanks to Bowie’s links to a pair of hardened bank robbers. While the naïve lovebirds are determined to live honest lives (as honest as can be lived on stolen proceeds, anyway), Bowie’s pals inevitably oblige him to perform another job, effectively sealing his demise. Alongside Citizen Kane, They Live by Night is regularly cited as one of the most influential debuts in cinema history, laying the groundwork not only for similar efforts from Penn, Godard, and Terrence Malick, but also establishing Ray’s own fixation with ill-fated young outsiders.
'Squint like me and be cool forever.' Ray directs Dean on the set of Rebel Without a Cause.
Which brings us neatly to a little film called Rebel Without a Cause (), among the most iconic motion pictures of all time, and, unequivocally, Ray’s greatest commercial success. Certainly, that success owed considerably to the proximity of the film’s release, in autumn 1955, to the death of its star, James Dean, in a car accident, eerily echoed by Rebel‘s famous “chickie run” scene. But Ray’s film was a landmark in its own right, and much of Dean’s posthumous legacy was intertwined with the characterization and costumes of Jim Stark, one of pop culture’s earliest emblems of teen angst. In truth, Rebel‘s portrait of adolescent alienation is a triptych, also encompassing Jim’s schoolmates Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo), who, like Jim, experience intractable daddy issues, and who, with Jim, find short-lived solace in a synthetic surrogate family. Thanks to Ray’s empathy and honesty, Rebel continues to feel relevant, while, thanks to his flair for Technicolor mise-en-scène, it also continues to dazzle.
Our final selection from TIFF’s retrospective programme is 1956’s Bigger than Life (), which, when it comes to traumatic depictions of paternal dysfunction, makes Rebel look like child’s play. In an operatic slice of ’50s domestic paranoia, James Mason plays Ed Avery, a mild-mannered teacher whose addiction to an experimental drug (the now-commonplace cortisone) turns him into a violent megalomaniac. The increasingly stringent demands he places on his young son culminate in a terrifying psychotic episode. The film shocked audiences on its release and duly flopped but has been belatedly recognized as a caustic, Eisenhower-era classic and a scathing take on mid-century suburban mores. Ray, who had a troubled relationship with his own father and a general distaste for authority, gives both impulses full voice, and extends his criticism to all manner of cherished American institutions. Thankfully, he spares us the worst possible outcome, but like the cleaver Avery brandishes at the height of his ravings, Ray’s points are sharply made.
They Live By Night
Bigger than Life
Don’t Expect Too Much
We Can’t Go Home Again
Bitter Victory
Rebel Without a Cause
On Dangerous Ground
In a Lonely Place
Images courtesy of TIFF. For tickets and a complete programme schedule, visit Tiff.net