Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray

Active - 1945 - 1979 | Born - Aug 7, 1911 in Galesville, WI | Died - Jun 16, 1979 | Genres - Drama, Film, TV & Radio [nf], Adventure

Biography by Lucia Bozzola

The auteurists' favorite, Nicholas Ray made movies for little more than a decade, but his films are among the most incisive, bizarre, and intelligent of the 1950s. A believer that great directors leave distinctive signatures on their work, Ray's eye for setting, color, and kinetic action merged with a socially conscious interest in personal psychology to reveal a darkness at odds with "normalcy" in such films as In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), and his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

Born and raised in Wisconsin, Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. got kicked out of high school numerous times, but he also wrote local radio shows that won him admission to college. Renaming himself Nick Ray in 1931, Ray's eclectic post-high school education included a year at the University of Chicago and several months at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin art colony, where he studied architecture and drama. Moving to New York in 1932, Ray became active in left-wing theater, including acting in Elia Kazan's directorial debut for the Theater of Action, and working on a Joseph Losey production for the Federal Theater Project. Out of the FTP by 1940, Ray worked in radio and was hired by John Houseman to produce radio programs for the Office of War Information.

Ray subsequently earned his first Hollywood experience as an assistant on Kazan's debut film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). After assisting on several other films and directing a Broadway show and a TV show, Ray headed back to Hollywood to work for Houseman at RKO on a film adaptation of Thieves Like Us, retitled They Live By Night (1949). Given the chance to direct, Ray infused the film with an edgy intimacy and sympathy for the young outlaw lovers. Though barely noticed on its first release, They Live By Night was championed by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics and became one of his most highly regarded films. Staying on with RKO after Howard Hughes bought it, Ray directed murder-mystery A Woman's Secret (1949), co-starring his second wife-to-be, Gloria Grahame, and was loaned out to direct Humphrey Bogart as a sympathetic lawyer to delinquent juvenile John Derek in Knock on Any Door (1949). Derek's desire in Knock to "live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse" would effectively sum up the fate of future Rebel star James Dean.

Ray then teamed Bogart and Grahame in the potent noir In a Lonely Place (1950). Centering on a screenwriter who may be a murderer and his starlet lover, In a Lonely Place was both a lacerating examination of Hollywood and male violence, and a diagnosis of Ray and Grahame's failing marriage. Protected by Hughes from the blacklist, Ray churned out several more films for RKO, including a Technicolor combat movie, The Flying Leathernecks (1951), starring John Wayne and Robert Ryan, and the pristinely black, white, and gray rural noir On Dangerous Ground (1951), featuring Ryan as an urban cop redeemed by Ida Lupino. After his skillful rodeo drama, The Lusty Men (1952), featuring Mitchum, Arthur Kennedy, and Susan Hayward in a loaded love triangle, Ray left RKO in 1953. Backed by his agent Lew Wasserman, Ray worked steadily for the rest of the decade.

Ray's first film as a free agent was also his most brilliantly strange. A floridly colored Western, Johnny Guitar (1954) pitted stalwart saloon owner Joan Crawford against twitchy, jealous townswoman Mercedes McCambridge with laconic titular character Sterling Hayden as Crawford's old boyfriend. Though the fight is allegedly about property, and allegorically about the Communist witch hunts, McCambridge's sexual hysteria and Crawford's butch wardrobe of blue jeans, bright shirts, and the best lipstick in the West suggested a kinkier undercurrent. Ray followed his deliriously Freudian oater with Run for Cover (1955), a Western featuring James Cagney and John Derek in an Oedipally fraught relationship.

After his Westerns, Ray set to work on an original story about contemporary youth. Starring James Dean in his definitive performance, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) became one of the decade's most trenchant statements on suburban-bred teen alienation. Suffering from weak and/or negligent parenting, Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo's disaffected trio seethe with frustration and act out with misdirected violence and a pointless, lethal chickie run, while creating an alternative familial world. Ray's widescreen compositions reveal Dean's estrangement at home and the impossibility of the trio's imagined life in an abandoned mansion, while his masterful use of color, particularly Dean's red jacket, speaks to the emotional turmoil. With Dean's death days before its release, Rebel Without a Cause became a hit and earned Oscar nominations for Wood, Mineo, and Ray's story (Dean was nominated for East of Eden instead).

Returning to the underside of suburbia in Bigger Than Life (1956), Ray depicted the extreme results of emphasizing surface achievement, as drug-addled father James Mason's megalomaniacal pursuit of perfection turns into child abuse. More downbeat, Bigger Than Life did not repeat Rebel's success. After another offbeat Western, The True Story of Jesse James (1957), Ray headed to Europe to direct Bitter Victory (1957), a somber war drama starring Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens as Burton's jealous rival. Taking any assignment he could find, Ray returned to the U.S. to direct Budd Schulberg's production Wind Across the Everglades (1958). An odd story about a 19th century Florida gamekeeper, Wind was marred by creative conflicts between Ray and Schulberg. Stylish gangland story Party Girl (1958) was Ray's last Hollywood film.

Settling in Europe after shooting The Savage Innocents (1959) in England and Italy, Ray turned to epics with King of Kings (1961), a handsome widescreen rendering of the life of Christ. While shooting his next epic, 55 Days at Peking (1963), however, Ray suffered a heart attack and was replaced, ending his mainstream career. After kicking around Europe, Ray returned to the U.S. for an aborted documentary on the Chicago Seven in 1969, losing his sight in one eye shortly after. An itinerant film figure in the early '70s, Ray taught, oversaw an experimental film made with his students, and participated in a biographical documentary that drew its title from a line in Johnny Guitar and I'm a Stranger Here Myself (1974). Yet his health declined significantly during his final years and he battled well-publicized amphetamine and alcohol addictions. It was during this same period that Ray also contributed a segment to the quasi-pornographic omnibus film Wet Dreams (1974), alongside the notorious adult film impresario Lasse Braun and others - a decidedly low point for the director who had once helmed Rebel Without a Cause.

Ray rebounded somewhat, however, first by settling in New York City in 1976, then by playing a small role in director/fan Wim Wenders' film The American Friend (1977). Though he was diagnosed with cancer in 1977, Ray appeared in Milos Forman's Hair (1979), and began a collaboration with Wenders on Lightning Over Water (1980), a documentary of Ray's last days. Ray died in 1979, just before he and Wenders stopped production. Including Grahame, Ray was married four times and had four children; his son from his first marriage, Anthony Ray, married Grahame in 1961.

http://www.allmovie.com/artist/nicholas-ray-p107685

Nicholas Ray (August 7, 1911 - June 16, 1979) was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause.

Ray is also appreciated by a smaller audience of cinephiles for a large number of narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963 including Bigger Than Life, Johnny Guitar, They Live by Night, and In a Lonely Place, as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death from lung cancer. Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded. Ray was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of Bitter Victory, "cinema is Nicholas Ray."

He was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in Galesville, Wisconsin and grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin. A popular but erratic student prone to delinquency and alcohol abuse, Ray spent much of his adolescence with his older sister in Chicago, Illinois, where he immersed himself in the Al Capone-era nightlife and attended Waller High School. Upon his return to La Crosse in his senior year of high school, he emerged as a talented orator (winning a contest at local radio station WKBH that included a modest scholarship to "any university in the world") and gravitated toward hanging around a local stock theater. With strong grades in English & 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 the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse) for two years before earning the requisite grades to matriculate at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931. Although he only spent one semester at the institution due to excessive drinking and poor grades, Ray managed to cultivate relationships with Frank Lloyd Wright and dramatist Thornton Wilder, then a professor. Ray received a Taliesin Fellowship from Wright to study under him as an apprentice.

Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington musical Beggar's Holiday, in 1946. One year later, he directed his first film, They Live by Night. It wasn't released for two years because of the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes' takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society’s young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray’s films). Its subject matter, two young lovers running from the law, had an influence on the sporadically popular movie sub-genre often called 'love on the run'. (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman’s 1974 retelling of the novel used forThey Live by Night, Thieves Like Us.)

The New York Times gave the film a positive review (despite calling Ray's 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 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 film noir, most notably the 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie In a Lonely Place, about a troubled screenwriter, and On Dangerous Ground, a police thriller.

Other minor noir films he directed in this period were Born to Be Bad and A Woman's Secret.

Ray's most productive and successful period was the 1950s. In the mid-fifties he made the two films for which he is best remembered: Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The former was a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men. Highly eccentric in its time, it was much loved by French critics. (François Truffaut called it "the beauty and the beast" of the western). In 1955, Ray directed Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean in what proved to be his most famous role. When Rebel was released, soon 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 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 the latent homosexuality of Mineo, through his role as Plato, who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film. During filming it was rumored that 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 directed the melodrama Bigger Than Life starring James Mason as a small-town school teacher driven insane by the misuse of a new wonder-drug, Cortisone. In 1957, he directed The True Story of Jesse James, which was supposed to have featured Dean but starred Robert Wagner instead.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Ray