| Nicholas Ray | |
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| Born | August 7, 1911 Galesville, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Died | June 16, 1979 (aged 67) New York City, NY, U.S. |
| Occupation | Film director |
Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle) (7 August 1911 – 16 June 1979) was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause.
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He was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in Galesville, Wisconsin. In his early years, he went to school and did a brief stay at the University of Wisconsin: here he got exposed to the world of the media by way of learning radio. He also met two men who inspired his jump to film: Frank Lloyd Wright and dramatist Thornton Wilder, then a professor. Ray received a Taliesin Fellowship from Wright to study under him as an apprentice.[1]
Coming from a radio background, 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 was released two years later due to 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). It was influential on the sporadically popular sub-genre often called 'love on the run' movies, concerning as it does two young fugitive lovers on the run from the law. (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman’s 1974 remake of They 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."[2]
Ray made several more contributions to the film noir genre, most notably the 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie In A Lonely Place about a troubled screenwriter and On Dangerous Ground, a police thriller.
Other minor film noirs 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) 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 second and most famous role. When Rebel was released, soon after Dean's early death in an automobile crash, it had a revolutionary impact on moviemaking and youth culture, virtually giving birth to the contemporary concept of the American teenager. Looking past its social and pop-cultural 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 of 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 younger than him. 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 life.
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.[3][4]
Bisexual[1] and a heavy user of drugs and alcohol, Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s. He kept on working, but the later films did not get the attention he needed, and films like The Savage Innocents and the story of Jesus of Nazareth, King of Kings, got panned by critics. After collapsing on the set of 55 Days at Peking (1963), he would not direct again until the mid-1970s. In 1970 at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore East, Ray ran into Dennis Hopper, who asked Ray to join him at his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where he was editing his new film, The Last Movie. Hopper helped Ray secure a position at Harper College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton University in upstate New York.[5] From 1971 to 1973, Ray taught filmmaking where he and his students produced We Can't Go Home Again, an autobiographical film employing multiple superimpositions. In the spring of 1972, Ray was asked to show some footage from the film at a conference. The audience was shocked to see footage of Ray and his students smoking marijuana together.[5] An early version of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray, never satisfied with the project, continued editing it until his death in 1979. He secured teaching positions at the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University with the help of old friends.[5]
Shortly before his death he collaborated on the direction of Lightning Over Water (also known as Nick’s Film) with German director Wim Wenders. He died of lung cancer on June 16, 1979 in New York City after a two-year illness.[5]
Ray was married to:
Certain French New Wave directors and critics (most notably Jean-Luc Godard) held Ray in high regard. Wim Wenders' films are indebted to Ray, from the casting of Rebel Without a Cause's Dennis Hopper and the expressionistic use of colour in his own film The American Friend, to the title of his sci-fi film Until the End of the World (which were the last spoken words in Ray’s biblical epic King of Kings).
A film about Ray, Interrupted, was announced for 2007, to be directed by Philip Kaufman.
In the decades after his professional peak, Ray continues to influence directors to this day:
   | ''Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause'' - Live Fast, Die Young - The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause |
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