MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Secret de femme [fr])

USA 1949
d: Nicholas Ray
Éditions Montparnasse (Region 2 fr)

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Something of an RKO chore for Ray, to be sure. But a nicely structured script by Herman J Mankiewicz (from a novel by Vicki Baum) - repeating the investigative flashback structure of "Citizen Kane" as it examines the events leading up to the death of ex-singer O'Hara's devious and ungrateful protégée (beautifully incarnated by Grahame) - is well served by the civilised direction, which not only turns the Vicki Baum melodrama into a noir-ish mystery, but also stresses, as so often in Ray, the importance of interior space and the way it reflects/influences action. Entertaining, and less routine than it sounds.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz recycles several themes and techniques from his script for "Citizen Kane" in this oddball melodrama about a singer (Maureen O'Hara) who confesses to the killing of her double-dealing protegee (Gloria Grahame). But Kane II it isn't; the the flashbacks here—as Melvyn Douglas leads the inquiry—snarl up into a turgid mess. Nicholas Ray directed it, though his touch is apparent only in the handling of the unstable Grahame character; otherwise, it's probably his stodgiest, driest piece of work. (Mankiewicz's brother Joseph later turned a similar story into "All About Eve".)
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
Drawing on Citizen Kane and prefiguring "All About Eve", Herman J. Mankiewicz's script for "A Woman's Secret" spins a twisty tale, told in a series of overlapping, sometimes contradictory flashbacks so that the past becomes a shifting chimera of unreliable accounts. New York entertainer Marion Washburn (Maureen O'Hara), having lost her singing voice, takes on a young protegée from small-town California and learns to regret it. Sarah Caldwell, whose stage name is Estrellita, proves to be less starry-eyed than unstable, especially around men and Lugers. Ray loathed everything about the project except Gloria Grahame, who plays Sarah with fierce fragility; he met the glorious Grahame on set and later married her. But he managed to bring crackling cynicism to the studio gloss, and this pristine print highlights the noir elegance of George Diskant's crisp black-and-white camerawork.
— James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario

In a Lonely Place

(Ein einsamer Ort [de])

USA 1950
d: Nicholas Ray
Columbia Tristar Home Video (Region 2 uk)

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The place is Hollywood, lonely for scriptwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart), who is suspected of murdering a young woman, until girl-next-door Laurel Gray (Grahame) supplies him with a false alibi. But is he the killer? Under pressure of police interrogation, their tentative relationship threatens to crack - and Dix's sudden, violent temper becomes increasingly evident. Ray's classic thriller remains as fresh and resonant as the day it was released. Nothing is as it seems: the noir atmosphere of deathly paranoia frames one of the screen's most adult and touching love affairs; Bogart's tough-guy insolence is probed to expose a vulnerable, almost psychotic insecurity; while Grahame abandons femme fatale conventions to reveal a character of enormous, subtle complexity. As ever, Ray composes with symbolic precision, confounds audience expectations, and deploys the heightened lyricism of melodrama to produce an achingly poetic meditation on pain, distrust and loss of faith, not to mention an admirably unglamorous portrait of Tinseltown. Never were despair and solitude so romantically alluring.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
LONELY PLACE epitomizes star-crossed lovers incapable of escaping environment and circumstances no matter how hard they try. The entire cast is excellent, with Bogart giving an electrifying portrait of a man in torment. Grahame, never more beautiful, is captivating as a woman who has been kept too many times and now has one last chance for real love. Ray's helmsmanship here is superb as he runs the story to a quick conclusion, dwelling upon loving and frightening scenes with the skilled balance of a master juggler, keeping the viewer doubting and believing in Bogart from scene to scene. Many thought the film's central relationship reflected on Ray's unraveling marriage to Grahame. They split when filming was over, and the offbeat Grahame went on to marry Ray's son by a previous marriage, causing shock-waves in the 50s fanzines.
— TV MovieGuide

On Dangerous Ground

USA 1952
d: Nicholas Ray
Warner Home Video (Region 1 us)

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A superb noir thriller with a difference. Ray's second film with producer John Houseman (the first being "They Live By Night") starts off in the sinister urban jungle, with Ryan's cop increasingly brutalised by the 'garbage' he is forced to deal with. Finally, his methods become so violent that he is sent to cool off in snowy upstate New York, where his search for a sex killer brings him into contact with Lupino's blind woman and her mentally retarded brother (Williams). It's a film about the violence within us all, about the effects of environment and family upon character (Lupino, peaceful and a healing force, even has a tree in her living room), and about the spiritual redemption of a fallen man. If it sometimes seems a little schematic, there is no denying the power of the performances (Ryan in particular is ferociously effective, a true precursor to Siegel's "Dirty Harry"), nor the eloquence of Ray's poetic but tough direction. Aided enormously by George Diskant's high contrast camerawork and by Bernard Herrmann's stunning score, which emphasises the hunt motif in Ryan's quest, it's a film of frequent brilliance.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
One of the loveliest of Nick Ray's movies: this 1952 feature begins as a harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism reminiscent of Frank Borzage. Robert Ryan is the unstable hero, a thuggish cop sent upstate in search of a murderer; he ends up falling in love with the killer's blind sister (Ida Lupino, who took over some of the direction when Ray fell ill). Ray excels both in the portrayal of the corrupt urban environment, a swirl of noirish shadows and violent movements, and in his exalted vision of the snow-covered countryside, filmed as a blindingly white, painfully silent field for moral regeneration. With Ward Bond and an excellent score by Bernard Herrmann.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
Nick Ray's study of the vigilante mentality is here personified in one pent-up, brutalizing cop (Robert Ryan). Ray pegs the impulse toward vengeance, like that of forgiveness, as a personal moment even when it belongs to the crowd. Ryan's Jim Wilson is a particular kind of big-city neurotic, tortured by his cheerless existence. On the streets, he is judge and jury: we are all guilty of being human. Wilson is banished temporarily to Twin Peaks country, where the townsfolk, led by a murdered girl's father (Ward Bond), are out for blood and a mentally disturbed killer is being protected by his sister (Ida Lupino). Lupino, by 1951, needed only to be introduced by her voice; we hear her before we see her-she plays a blind woman-and that deep resonance alters the tone of the film. She becomes seer to Ryan's cop who can't close his eyes. Set to a Bernard Herrmann score, the glistening urban noir gives way to a moody snowscape that looks forward to "Shoot the Piano Player". Understanding and redemption come, as always in these fatalistic films, a few heartbeats too late.
— PFA

Johnny Guitar

(Wenn Frauen hassen [de])

USA 1954
d: Nicholas Ray
Éditions Montparnasse (Region 2 fr)

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Emma (McCambridge) has the hots for The Dancing Kid (Brady). The Kid is wild about Vienna (Crawford). But Vienna can't drive Johnny Guitar (Hayden) out of her head. Ray's film is not a romantic comedy, but a Western. Or is it? Taking a story about two gutsy, gun-totin' matriarchs squabbling over the men they love and the ownership of a gambling saloon, Ray plays havoc with Western conventions, revelling in sexual role-reversals, turning funeral gatherings into lynch mobs, and dwelling on a hero who finds inner peace through giving up pacifism and taking up his pistols. Love and hate, prostitution and frustration, domination and humiliation are woven into a hypnotic Freudian web of shifting relationships, illuminated by the director's precise, symbolic use of colour, and strung together with an unerring sense of pace. The whole thing is weird, hysterical, and quite unlike anything else in the history of the cowboy film: where else can one find a long-expected shootout between two fast and easy killers averted by a woman's insistence that they help her prepare breakfast? Crawford and McCambridge are fallen angel and spinster harpy, while Hayden is admirably ambivalent as the quiet saddletramp with a psychopathic temper. Truffaut called the film 'the Beauty and the Beast of the Western', a description which perfectly sums up Ray's magical, dreamlike emotionalism.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
When it was first released in 1954, most critics dismissed JOHNNY GUITAR as being nothing more than a ridiculous Republic potboiler, which isn't surprising given that it was probably the first western to be set in the land of the imagination. It took critics such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut (who called the film "beautiful and profound") to recognize that Nicholas Ray's film was a dreamlike and deliriously styilized piece masquerading as a typical shoot-em-up. Ray called the novel by Roy Chanslor (who later wrote Cat Ballou) "completely valueless," and he and writer Philip Yordan used the plot's bare bones to create a baroque, operatic and symbolic tale of l'amour fou and Freudian psychology.JOHNNY GUITAR has been called everything from a feminist statement to a gay camp-classic to an anti-McCarthyism allegory. While it certainly is all of these--and more--it's about time it was acclaimed for it what it really is: a genuine western film classic. ...
The much maligned Crawford actually acquits herself quite well--all bulging black eyes, thick red lips and steel jaw. As her nemesis, McCambridge is brilliant, portraying Emma as a sexually frustrated butch lesbian who trembles with orgasmic glee watching Vienna's place burn down. And as the laconic Johnny, Hayden is magnificent, playing the role with tongue in cheek but never condescendingly so. With its twisted sexual dynamics, surreal color photography, expressionistic Frank Lloyd Wright-like sets, and haunting score by Victor Young, JOHNNY GUITAR is a one-of-a-kind experience.
— Michael Scheinfeld, TV MovieGuide

Rebel Without a Cause

(...denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun [de])

USA 1955
d: Nicholas Ray
Warner Home Video (Region 2 uk)

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Dean's finest film, hardly surprisingly in that Ray was one of the great '50s directors. The story, much imitated since, might sound like nothing much - unsettled adolescent from good home can't keep himself out of trouble, and gets involved with bad sorts until tragedy takes over - but what makes the film so powerful is both the sympathy it extends towards all the characters (including the seemingly callous parents) and the precise expressionism of Ray's direction. His use of light, space and motion is continually at the service of the characters' emotions, while the trio that Dean, Wood and Mineo form as a refuge from society is explicitly depicted as an 'alternative family'. Still the best of the youth movies.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The mundane plot is somehow made forceful in this directorial gem. Perfectionist director Ray spent hours researching hundreds of teenage police cases before filming. Transcending what might have been merely a teen exploitation film, REBEL draws heavily upon the presence of the intense and fascinating Dean. The young actor's appearance here electrified audiences, especially teenagers, who identified with this powerful symbol of their alienated generation. There is much of Marlon Brando's character from THE WILD ONE (1953), and critics accused Dean of mimicking Brando's brooding, mumbling delivery, but Dean was later recognized as an actor of singular stature. Wood and Mineo, although fine in their roles, serve mainly as dramatic foils for Dean's brooding. Many adults saw the film as promoting violence; with this picture the clean-cut juvenile ideal of yore moved into the adult world of film noir. Warners executives initially proposed, of all people, Tab Hunter and Jayne Mansfield (it would have been a classic, but of another kind). Ray, however, insisted upon Dean and Wood. He had been impressed by Dean's work in EAST OF EDEN, and drove the actor mercilessly on the set.
The tragedy of the film was relived offscreen, as all three principals died prematurely. Mineo was murdered in West Hollywood. He became one of the stars of a chic gay set and spent money crazily on clothes, fast cars, and even a $250,000 estate for his parents in Long Island. On the eve of the Academy Awards, he was so convinced that he would win for REBEL that he gave a party at which a huge banner was strung across the facade of his home reading: "Congratulations, Sal!" He didn't win, and the banner was yanked down and burned before dawn the next day. When Mineo was murdered in 1976, little was left of his fortune. On the wall, however, in an expensive frame, was a prized possession: a poster for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE ironically captioned: "Teenage terror torn from today's headlines."
Wood drowned in a still-mysterious accident while boating off Catalina Island with her husband, Robert Wagner, and Christopher Walken. Dean himself was killed in a perverse replay of the "chickie run" in REBEL, speeding at more than 100 mph in a racing car on a public highway in California. Besides killing himself, he seriously injured two other people. Only two hours before his death, Dean was given a ticket for driving 75 mph in a 45 mph zone. "So what?" he responded, before gunning his car down the road toward doom.
— TV MovieGuide

Bigger Than Life

(Eine Handvoll Hoffnung / Mensch oder Teufel [de] • Derrière le miroir [fr])

USA 1956
d: Nicholas Ray
Carlotta Films (Region 2 fr)

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Mason's furrowed brow and brooding presence have rarely (never?) been used to better effect: 30 years on, his performance as the mild schoolteacher who is prescribed the wonder drug cortisone and becomes a raving megalomaniac addict remains profoundly disturbing. Suburbia is haunted by psychosis; family life torn apart by Oedipal bloodlust. Ray's direction (in 'Scope and Eastman Colour) is as moving as ever - delicate compositions and fluid camerawork contradicted by the image of weak men locked into obsessive self-destruction. At every level the banal props of '50s prosperity are turned into symbols of suffocation and trauma, from the X-ray machine used to diagnose Mason's 'disease' to the bathroom cabinet mirror shattering under a desperate blow. Trashed on first release, resurrected by Truffaut and Godard, lovingly imitated by Wim Wenders (in "American Friend"): this is "Rebel Without a Cause" for the grown-up world.
— CA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Nicholas Ray's potent 1956 CinemaScope melodrama dealt with the ill effects of cortisone on a frustrated middle-class grammar-school teacher (James Mason) at about the same time that the first wave of "wonder" drugs hit the market. But the true subject of this deeply disturbing picture is middle-class values--about money, education, culture, religion, patriarchy, and "getting ahead." These values are thrown into bold relief by the hero's drug dependency and resulting megalomania, which leads to shocking and tragic results for his family (Barbara Rush and Robert Simon) as well as himself. Ray's use of 'Scope framing and color to delineate the hero's dreams and dissatisfactions has rarely been as purposeful. (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.)
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
•••••
One of Nick Ray's least known films is also acclaimed by many critics as his best. It features James Mason (who also produced the film) in one of his finest performances. Just as Ray's portrait of Hollywood in "In a Lonely Place" was the antithesis of glamor, its small, sunny bungalows like burrows of sadness, his picture of American family life is uncompromisingly bleak. The discombobulation of apron-clad Jim Backus as seen by his teenage son in Rebel Without a Cause is as nothing compared to the compounded confusions of James Mason in "Bigger Than Life". He portrays a small-town schoolteacher who moonlights as a taxi-cab driver to supplement his salary. When he begins taking cortisone to ward off the crippling effects of arthritis, his personality takes on a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. As he becomes increasingly deranged and ineffectual as a husband and father, his sense of failure plays off against delusions of grandeur; he devises grandiose schemes, including one Biblically-inspired plot to sacrifice his young son. Ray's use of CinemaScope photography to frame this intense, close-in psychological drama is even more remarkable than in Rebel; what emerges is a powerful and many-layered vision of the pressures of middle-class life turning its uncomprehending victims into monsters.
— PFA
•••••
The original script for BIGGER THAN LIFE was a fairly straightforward medical case study, which was then expanded on by Mason (who also produced) and Ray, with uncredited help from Gavin Lambert and Clifford Odets, resulting in one of Ray's most penetrating dissections of the American male psyche and the mid-20th-Century nuclear family. Like the X-ray shot of Ed's stomach as he drinks barium, Ray uses his camera to expose the psychological pressures and physical stress of everyday life that lies beneath the surface of a seemingly cheerful suburbia. The worry about money and paying bills, something rarely discussed in films of the 1950s, is immediately established by showing Ed working at a cab company after school, but hiding it from his wife, which exacerbates his physical condition. After he's "cured," the first thing he does is take the family out on an extravagant shopping spree, as if to liberate himself from his economic shackles, screaming "What's the matter with this family" when Lou and Richie tell him they can't afford it. Ed's personality change--the megalomania, grandiose schemes, intellectual snobbery, disgust with petty domesticity, and the manic-depressive mood swings--all of which are attributed to the cortisone's side effects, actually existed already within Ed but were repressed, and are now brought to the surface. His gradual transformation into a zealous ideologue, espousing right-wing doctrine (discipline, self-sacrifice, apocalyptic retribution) reaches its peak at a PTA meeting where he accuses the school of "Breeding a race of moral midgets," with the world on the verge of blowing up.
Ray's metaphorical use of wholesome "All-American" symbols and institutions is particularly striking: a glass of milk triggers one of Ed's tantrums; his college football becomes an object of fear and hypocrisy for Richie; the school is turned into an unstable place after Ed expresses his radical philosophy; and a Sunday at church inspires Ed's final breakdown, as he reads from the Bible and gets the idea to "save" Richie and his family by killing them. As always, Ray's use of architecture and space is nothing less than brilliant, with the Avery house becoming a character in the film. The downstairs dining room is bright and clean, while Ed's study and the upstairs bedrooms are places of ominous shadows and dark secrets, filled with broken mirrors and surreptitious behavior. The backyard becomes a psychological battleground as Ed bullies Richie and screams, "Don't you want to become a man?" when he keeps dropping the football, and appropriately, the violent finale takes place on the staircase which connects the two worlds. The superb widescreen compositions, which are essential to any appreciation of the film, and the symbolic use of color (e.g., Richie's unchanging red, white, and blue outfit, which is virtually identical to James Dean's in Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE), combined with a profoundly disturbing existential story, create one of the most intelligent, adult, and disquieting American films of the 1950s.
— TV MovieGuide