Nicholas Ray facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Nicholas Ray
Ray c. 1950
Born	Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. (1911-08-07)August 7, 1911 Galesville, Wisconsin, U.S.
Died	June 16, 1979(1979-06-16) (aged 67) New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter, actor
Years active	1946–1979
Spouse(s)	Jean (Abrams) Evans ​ ​ (m. 1936; div. 1942)​ Gloria Grahame ​ ​ (m. 1948; div. 1952)​ Betty Utey ​ ​ (m. 1958; div. 1970)​ Susan Schwartz ​ (m. 1971)​
Children	4, including Anthony Ray

Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr., August 7, 1911 – June 16, 1979) was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor best known for the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. He is appreciated for many narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963 including They Live By Night, In A Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and Bigger Than Life, 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.

Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded and he was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of Bitter Victory, "... there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray."

Early life and career

Ray was born in Galesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children and only son of Olene "Lena" (Toppen) and Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, a contractor and builder. His paternal grandparents were German and his maternal grandparents were Norwegian. He grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, also the home town of future fellow director Joseph Losey. A popular but erratic student, at age sixteen Ray was sent to live with his older, married sister in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended Waller High School and immersed himself in the Al Capone-era nightlife. Upon his return to La Crosse in his senior year, he emerged as a talented orator, winning a contest at local radio station WKBH (now WIZM) while also hanging around a local stock theater.

With strong grades in English and 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 apply for admission to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931. Although he spent only one semester at the institution because of excessive drinking and poor grades, Ray managed to cultivate a relationship with dramatist Thornton Wilder, then a professor.

Having been active in the Student Dramatic Association during his time in Chicago, Ray returned to his hometown and started the La Crosse Little Theatre Group, which presented several productions in 1932. He also briefly re-enrolled at the State Teachers College in the fall of that year. Before his stint at Chicago, he had contributed a regular column of musings, called "The Bullshevist," to the Racquet, the college's weekly publication, and resumed writing for it when he returned, but, according to biographer Patrick McGilligan, Ray, with friend Clarence Hiskey, also arranged meetings to organize a La Crosse chapter of the Communist Party USA. By early 1933, he had left the State Teachers College and began to employ the moniker of "Nicholas Ray" in his correspondence.

Through his connections with Thornton Wilder and others in Chicago, Ray met Frank Lloyd Wright at Wright's home, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. He cultivated a relationship with Wright in order to win an invitation to join "the Fellowship," as the community of Wright "apprentices" was known. In late 1933 Wright asked Ray to organize the newly built Hillside Playhouse, a room at Taliesin dedicated to musical and dramatic performances. There, at regular film screenings often encompassing foreign productions, Ray likely had his first exposure to non-Hollywood cinema. However he and his mentor had a falling-out in spring 1934 with Wright directing him to leave the compound immediately.

While negotiating with Wright, Ray visited New York City, where he had his first encounters with the political theatre growing in response to the Great Depression. Returning after his ejection from Taliesin, Ray joined the Workers' Laboratory Theatre, a communal troupe formed in 1929, which had recently changed its name to the Theatre of Action. Briefly billing himself as Nik Ray, he acted in several productions, collaborating with a number of performers, some of whom he later cast in his films, including Will Lee and Curt Conway, and some who became friends for life, including Elia Kazan. He was subsequently employed by the Federal Theatre Project, part of the Works Progress Administration. He befriended folklorist Alan Lomax and traveled with him through rural America, collecting traditional vernacular music. In 1940–41, Lomax produced and Ray directed Back Where I Come From, a pioneering folk music radio program featuring such artists as Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, the Golden Gate Quartet, and Pete Seeger, for CBS. American folk songs would later figure prominently in several of his films.

During the early years of World War II, Ray directed and supervised radio propaganda programs for the United States Office of War Information and the Voice of America broadcasting service under the aegis of John Houseman. In the summer of 1942 Ray was investigated by the FBI, and was given its B-2 classification of "tentative dangerousness." Additionally, Director J. Edgar Hoover personally recommended "Custodial Detention." Though Hoover's scheme was later quashed by the Justice Department, in autumn 1943 Ray was among more than twenty OWI employees identified publicly as having Communist affiliations or sympathies, noting that he was "discharged from the WPA community service of Washington DC for Communist activities." The FBI soon determined the case of "Nicholas K. Ray," however, "as not warranting investigation." At the OWI, Ray renewed his acquaintance with Molly Day Thatcher, Houseman's assistant, and her husband, Elia Kazan, from the New York theatre days. In 1944, heading to Hollywood to direct A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kazan suggested Ray go west, too, and hired him as an assistant on the production.

Returning east, Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington-John Latouche musical Beggar's Holiday, in 1946. Earlier that year he was assistant director, under director Houseman, of another Broadway musical, Lute Song, with music by Raymond Scott. Also through Houseman, Ray had the opportunity to work in television, one of his few forays into the new medium. Houseman had agreed to direct an adaption of Lucille Fletcher's radio thriller, Sorry, Wrong Number, for CBS, and took Ray on as his collaborator. They cast Mildred Natwick as the invalid woman who thinks that she's the object of a murder scheme she overhears on her phone. When Lute Song called on Houseman's time and attention, Ray took over the task of staging the broadcast, which aired on January 30, 1946. The next year, Ray directed his first film, They Live by Night (1949), for RKO Pictures.

Hollywood

They Live By Night was reviewed (under one of its working titles, The Twisted Road) as early as June 1948, but not released until November 1949, due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes's takeover of RKO Pictures. As a result of the delay, the second and third pictures Ray directed, RKO's A Woman's Secret (1949) and Knock On Any Door (1949), a loan-out to Humphrey Bogart's Santana Productions and Columbia, were released before his first.

Almost an impressionistic take on film noir, starring Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as a thief and his newlywed wife, They Live By Night was notable for its empathy for society's young outsiders, a recurring motif in Ray's oeuvre. Its subject matter, two young lovers running from the law, had an influence on the sporadically popular movie subgenre involving a fugitive criminal couple, including Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1950), Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973), and Robert Altman's 1974 adaptation of the Edward Anderson novel that had also served as the basis for Ray's film, Thieves Like Us.

The New York Times gave They Live By Night a positive review and acclaimed Ray for "good, realistic production and sharp direction.

Ray made several more contributions to the noir genre.

While at RKO, Ray also directed A Woman's Secret, co-starring his wife-to-be Gloria Grahame as a singer who becomes the subject of a crime and an investigation of her past, and Born to Be Bad (1950), with Joan Fontaine as a San Francisco social climber.

In January 1949, Ray was announced as set to direct I Married a Communist, a litmus test that RKO head Howard Hughes had concocted to weed out Communists at the studio. John Cromwell and Joseph Losey had previously turned it down, and both were punished by the studio and subsequently blacklisted. Soon after the public announcement, and prior to the start of production, Ray stepped away from the project. While the studio considered dismissing him or suspending him, instead it extended his contract, evidently with Hughes's consent. As late as 1979, Ray insisted that Hughes "saved me from blacklisting," although Ray also likely wrote to the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his political past or testified in private, in order to protect himself.

His final film at the studio, The Lusty Men (1952), starred Robert Mitchum as a champion bronco rider who tutors a younger man in the ways of rodeoing while becoming emotionally involved with the younger cowpoke's wife. At a March 1979 college appearance documented in the first sequence of Lightning Over Water (1980) to be shot, Ray talks about The Lusty Men as a film about "a man who wants to bring himself all together before he dies."

After leaving RKO, Ray signed with a new agent, MCA's Lew Wasserman, a major Hollywood force, who steered the director's career through the 1950s. During that time, Ray directed one or two films for most of the major studios, and one generally considered to be a minor, Republic Pictures. He made films in conventionalized genres, including Westerns and melodramas, as well as others that resisted easy categorization.

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, made at Republic, was a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men. Stylized, and highly eccentric in its time, it was much loved by French critics. (François Truffaut called it "the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream.")

Between feature-length projects, and after shooting another Western, Run For Cover (1955), starring James Cagney, Ray was asked to take on a television film for G. E. Theater. The anthology series was produced by MCA-Revue, a subsidiary of the agency to which the director was signed, and aired on CBS. High Green Wall was an adaptation, by Charles Jackson, of an Evelyn Waugh story, "The Man Who Liked Dickens," about an illiterate man, played by Thomas Gomez, who holds captive a stranded traveller, played by Joseph Cotten, in the jungle, forcing him to read aloud from Dickens novels. Shot on film over a few days, after a week's rehearsal, the half-hour drama was broadcast on October 3, 1954. Ray did not work in broadcast television after, and rarely spoke of the program, later expressing his disappointment: "I was hoping for something new, accidental or planned, to happen. But it didn't."

In 1955, at Warner Bros., Ray directed Rebel Without a Cause, twenty-four hours in the life of a troubled teenager, starring James Dean in what proved to be his most famous role. When Rebel was released, only a few weeks 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 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 was chosen to direct the melodrama Bigger Than Life at Twentieth Century-Fox by the film's star and producer, James Mason. In 1957, completing a two-picture deal, Ray reluctantly directed The True Story of Jesse James, a remake of the 1939 Fox release, Jesse James. Ray wanted to cast Elvis Presley as the legendary bandit, and Presley had made his first film, Love Me Tender (1956), at the studio. Fox demurred, however, and Presley moved to Paramount, leaving contract players Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter to play the James brothers.

Warner's commitment to Rebel Without a Cause led the studio to send Ray on his first overseas trip, in September 1955, to publicize the film, while it was still in previews in the US. He visited Paris, where he met some of the French critics, eager to talk with the director of Johnny Guitar, one of whom, he later remarked, "almost persuaded me it was a great movie." He was in London when he received the call telling him of James Dean's death, on the last day of the month, and then travelled to Germany, to drink and mourn. Nonetheless, this moment marked a professional change for Ray, most of whose remaining mainstream films were produced outside Hollywood. He returned to Warner Bros. for Wind Across the Everglades (1958), an ecologically themed period drama about plume poachers, written by Budd Schulberg and produced by his brother, Stuart Schulberg, and at MGM he directed Party Girl (1958), which harked back to Ray's youth in Chicago, a Roaring Twenties gangster drama that included musical numbers performed by star Cyd Charisse.

Prior to those projects, however, Ray returned to France to direct Bitter Victory (1957), a World War II drama starring Richard Burton and Curd Jürgens as Leith and Brand, British army officers on a mission to raid a Nazi station in Benghazi. Shot on location in the Libyan desert, with some sequences in a studio in Nice, it was by all accounts an arduous production. As much an art film as a conventional war picture, Bitter Victory confused many while enthusing Ray's continental supporters, such as Godard and Éric Rohmer.

While for the first decade of his career Ray's films had been studio pictures, and relatively small in scale, by the late 1950s, they were increasing in logistical complexity and difficulty, and cost. As well, the studio system that had both challenged and supported him was changing, making Hollywood less viable for him as a professional base.

Though he contributed to the writing of most of his films—perhaps most extensively The Lusty Men, which started production with only a handful of pages—The Savage Innocents (1960) was the only screenplay of a film he directed for which he received credit. Adapting a novel about Inuit life by Hans Ruesch, Top of the World, Ray also drew on the writing of explorer Peter Freuchen, and the 1933 film based on one of Freuchen's books, Eskimo. An epic-scale production, with Italian backing and distribution by Paramount, Ray began shooting the film, with lead Anthony Quinn, in the brutal cold of northern Manitoba and on Baffin Island, but much of the footage was lost in a plane crash. He had to use process photography to replace the lost location scenes, when the production moved to Rome, as planned, for studio work.

Now largely based in Europe, Ray signed on to direct producer Samuel Bronston's life of Christ as a replacement for the original director, John Farrow. Shooting in Spain, Ray cast Jeffrey Hunter, who had played Jesse James's brother Frank for the director a few years before, as Jesus. A vast undertaking by any account, the production endured intervention by backing studio MGM, logistical challenges (the Sermon on the Mount sequence required five cameras and employed 5,400 extras), and the project grew in ways that Ray was not strong enough to control. Perhaps predictably, King of Kings (1961) was received with hostility by the US press, the Catholic periodical America, in a review titled "Christ or Credit Card?" calling it "disedifying and antireligious."

Screenwriter Philip Yordan, Ray's collaborator on several projects, back to Johnny Guitar and including King of Kings, looking at an extremely lucrative prospect, persuaded the director to sign again with Bronston for another epic, this one about the Boxer Rebellion. With an international cast, including Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, David Niven, and most of the staff of Madrid's Chinese restaurants (as extras, not the Chinese principals), again for Ray, the project was being rewritten on the fly, and he was directing with little preparation. By habit and because of the pressures of the job, he slept little, and finally, he collapsed on the set, according to his wife suffering a tachycardia. He was replaced by Andrew Marton, a highly regarded second-unit director fresh off another runaway spectacle, Cleopatra (1963), with some of Heston's final scenes with Gardner directed by Guy Green, at Heston's request. Released from hospital, Ray tried to participate in the editing process, but, according to Marton, "was so critical of the first part of the picture, which was my part," that Bronston forbade Ray from viewing any more of the assembled scenes. Though Marton estimated that sixty-five per cent of the picture was his, and though he wanted the directing credit, he accepted a financial settlement from Bronston. Ray was credited as director, and represented the film, his last mainstream motion picture, at its May 1963 premiere in London.

Later career

Ray with Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1953

Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s, and after 55 Days at Peking, he did not direct again until the 1970s, though he continued to try to develop projects while in Europe.

He attempted an adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea, first with Ingrid Bergman in mind, and later Romy Schneider. He optioned a novel, Next Stop—Paradise, by the Polish writer Marek Hlasko. In late 1963, in Paris, he worked with novelist James Jones on a Western titled Under Western Skies, drawing on Hamlet.

Moving to London, he formed a production company, Emerald Films, under which two projects were developed. The Doctor and the Devils was a screenplay written by Dylan Thomas. Ray struck up a deal with Avala Film, the largest production company in Yugoslavia, to back that film and three others, leading him from London to Zagreb. Production was announced as starting on September 1, 1965, amended to October 21, with Maximilian Schell, Susannah York, and Geraldine Chaplin in the cast, but Ray insisted on rewrites, asking, among others, John Fowles, who declined, and Gore Vidal, who in retrospect wondered why he agreed. Ray tried in vain to enlist US investment, by Seven Arts and Warner Bros., on a budget that was mounting, to upwards of $2.5 million. Accounts of the productions failure vary, including the assertion that on the first day of shooting, Ray was out of the country, and the conclusion that he was paralysed by doubt and indecision. Whatever the case, prospects for a new, major Nicholas Ray film dissolved.

Dave Wallis's novel, Only Lovers Left Alive, was the second property that Ray tried to develop as an Emerald Films venture. As a dystopian parable, in which adults have abandoned society and adolescents have formed gangs to take charge, it might have seemed perfect for the director of Rebel Without A Cause, and, announced in spring 1966, it was to star the Rolling Stones. According to Cooper, the Stones' US manager Allen Klein treated him and Ray to lavish visits to New York, and then Los Angeles, for meetings, then "conned" Ray into giving up his rights to the property, with a "lucrative director's contract," and evidently nothing to direct. (Jim Jarmusch, who befriended Ray a few years before Ray died, later made a film titled Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

While in Europe, Ray attracted some of the current generation of filmmakers. He had been introduced to Volker Schlöndorff by Hanne Axmann, who had starred in Schlöndorff's first film, and Ray brokered a deal to sell his second, Mord und Totschlag (1969), to Universal Pictures, pocketing about one-third of the money as his fee and for expenses. When in Paris, he sometimes stayed with Barbet Schroeder, whose production company tried to find backing for one or another of Ray's projects. There, in the wake of the May 1968 demonstrations, he collaborated with Jean-Pierre Bastid and producer Henry Lange to shoot a three-part, one-hour film, which he later titled Wha-a-at?, one of several projects, concerning contemporary young people during a time of questioning, rebellion, and revolt, that never came to be. Similarly, Ray enticed Schroeder's friend Stéphane Tchalgadjieff to raise funding for L'Evadé (The Substitute), a story about mixed and assumed identities, and Tchalgadjieff raised a half-million dollars, only for Ray to manoeuvre him out, and for nothing to emerge from the enterprise.

Migrating from Chicago to New York City, and then, at Dennis Hopper's invitation, New Mexico, in 1971 Ray landed in upstate New York, and started a new career as a teacher, accepting an appointment at Harpur College, in Binghamton. There he found a cast and crew, students who were eager and imaginative, but also inexperienced. Devoted to the idea of learning by doing, Ray and his class embarked on a major, feature-length project. Rather than the strict division of labour characteristic of his Hollywood career, Ray devised a rotation in which a student would take on different roles behind or in front of the camera. Similar to the Chicago Seven project—some footage from which he incorporated into the new film—the Harpur film, which came to be titled We Can't Go Home Again, used material shot on numerous gauges of film, as well as video that was later processed and manipulated with a synthesizer provided by Nam June Paik. The pictures were combined into multiple-image constructions using as many as five projectors, and refilming the images in 35mm from a screen. Two documentaries provide records of Ray's methods and the work of his class: the near-contemporary biography, I'm A Stranger Here Myself: A Portrait of Nicholas Ray (1975), directed by David Helpern Jr., and Susan Ray's retrospective account, Don't Expect Too Much (2011).

In the spring of 1973, Ray's contract at Binghamton was not renewed. Over the next couple of years, he relocated several times, trying to raise money and continue work on the film, before he returned to New York City. There, he continued to prepare script materials and try to develop film projects, the most viable of which was City Blues, before the production collapsed. He was also able to continue teaching acting and directing, at the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University, where his teaching assistant was graduate student Jim Jarmusch.

Having contracted cancer and facing mortality, Ray and his son Tim conceived a documentary about a father-son relationship. That idea, and Ray's hunger to continue working, led to the involvement of German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who had previously employed Ray as an actor, in a small but notable role in The American Friend (1977). Their collaboration, Lightning Over Water (1980), also known as Nick's Film, uses documentary footage and dramatic constructions, juxtaposing film and video. It charts their passage in making a film, as well as recording events of Ray's last months, including directing a stage scene with actor Gerry Bamman, and directing and acting a scene with Ronee Blakley (then married to Wenders), inspired by King Lear. The film was completed after Ray's death, in June 1979.

Death

Ray was diagnosed with lung cancer in November 1977, though he may have contracted the disease several years earlier. He was treated with cobalt therapy, and in April 1978 radioactive particles were implanted as treatment. The next month, he had surgery to remove a brain tumour. He survived another year, dying of heart failure on June 16, 1979, in New York City. His ashes were buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Directing techniques

Ray's directorial style and preoccupations evident in his films have led critics to consider him an auteur. Further, Ray is considered a central figure in the development of auteur theory itself. He was often singled out by Cahiers du cinéma critics who coined the term to designate exemplars (alongside such major figures as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks) of film directors who worked in Hollywood, and whose work had a recognizable and distinctive stamp seen to transcend the standardized industrial system in which they were produced. Still, critic Andrew Sarris, among the first to popularize auteurism in the United States, placed Ray below his "Pantheon," and in his second-rung category "The Far Side of Paradise," in his 1968 assessment of sound-era American directors: "Nicholas Ray is not the greatest director who ever lived; nor is he a Hollywood hack. The Truth lies somewhere in between."

Acting

Like many US theatre practitioners of the 1930s, Ray was strongly influenced by the theories and practices of early-twentieth century Russian dramatists, and the system of actor training that evolved into "Method acting." Late in life, he told students, "My first orientation to the theatre was more toward Meyerholdt, then Vakhtangov, than Stanislavsky," citing Vakhtangov's notion of "agitation from the essence" as being "a principal guideline for me in my directing career." On a few occasions, he was able to work with actors who were so trained, notably James Dean, but as a director working in the Hollywood studio system, most of his performers were trained classically, on stage, or in the studios themselves. Some found Ray agreeable as a director, while others resisted his methods. On Born To Be Bad, for example, Ray started rehearsals with a "table read," then customary in a stage production but less so for a film, and star Joan Fontaine found the exercise discomfiting, tainting her relationship with the director, whom she thought "not right for this kind of picture." On the same film, Joan Leslie appreciated Ray's hands-on direction, even though they differed in their interpretation of a scene. Their co-star, the Reinhardt-trained Robert Ryan, remembered favourably his second Ray project, On Dangerous Ground, "He directs very little.... Right from the start of our collaboration, he offered me a very few suggestions. ... He never told me what to do. He was never specific about anything at all."

Themes and stories

Most of Ray's films take place in the United States, and biographer Bernard Eisenschitz stresses the distinctively American themes that run through his motion pictures, and Ray's life. His early work alongside Alan Lomax, as a WPA folklorist and then in radio, and his acquaintance with musicians including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and Josh White, informed his approach to American society in his films, and the interest in ethnography evident in his films. Ray frequently made films characterized by their examination of outsider figures, and most of his movies implicitly or explicitly critique conformity. With examples including They Live By Night and Rebel Without a Cause, he has been cited for his sympathetic treatment of contemporary youth, but other films of his adeptly deal with the crises of more experienced and older characters, among them In A Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and Bigger Than Life. The stories and themes explored in his films stood out in their time for being non-conformist and sympathetic to or even encouraging of instability and the adoption of then-questionable morals. His work has been singled out for the unique way in which it "define[s] the peculiar anxieties and contradictions of America in the ’50s."

Visual style

While he started working in Hollywood on film noir and other black-and-white pictures, in the standard Academy ratio, Ray later became better known for his vivid use of color and widescreen. His films have also been noted for their stylized mise en scène with carefully choregraphed blocking and composition that often emphasizes architecture. Ray himself credited his affection for widescreen formats to Frank Lloyd Wright: "I like the horizontal line, and the horizontal was essential for Wright." As V. F. Perkins observes, however, many of Ray's compositions "are deliberately, sometimes startlingly, unbalanced to give an effect of displacement," further noting his use of "static masses with bold lines ... which intrude into the frame and at the same time disrupt and unify his compositions." Bernard Eisenschitz also links Wright to Ray's desire to "destroy the rectangular frame" (as the filmmaker said, adding, "I couldn't stand the formality of it"), through the multiple-image techniques he used in We Can't Go Home Again. He had envisioned using split-screen techniques as early as Rebel Without a Cause, and proposed, unsuccessfully, that The True Story of Jesse James be "stylized in every respect, all of it shot on the stage, including the horses, the chases, everything, and do it in areas of light."

Ray's editing style was described by V. F. Perkins as "dislocated ... [reflecting] the dislocated lives which many of his characters live," citing as a characteristic feature the use of camera movements that are in process at the start of the shot and not yet at rest at the end. Frequently, as well, Ray cuts abruptly, and disruptively, from the main action of a scene to the response, in close-up, of "a character who is, to all appearances, only peripherally involved." Another distinctive trait is the frequent use of dissolves for scene transitions, "more than most Hollywood directors of his time."

Genre

Ray distinguished himself by working in nearly every conventionalised Hollywood genre, infusing them with distinctive stylistic and thematic approaches: Crime films, within the film noir cycle: They Live By Night, In A Lonely Place, and On Dangerous Ground; the social problem film Knock On Any Door; Westerns: Run For Cover, Johnny Guitar, and The True Story of Jesse James; Women's pictures: A Woman's Secret and Born To Be Bad; World War II dramas: Flying Leathernecks and Bitter Victory; the family melodrama: Rebel Without A Cause and Bigger Than Life: Epic spectacles: King of Kings and 55 Days at Peking. Yet he also applied himself to films that fell between genres, such as the gangster film, punctuated by dance numbers but not quite a musical, Party Girl, and others of more marginalised categories—the ethnographic dramas Hot Blood and The Savage Innocents—or which even predicted more significant, later concerns, such as the ecologically themed drama Wind Across the Everglades.

Personal life

Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. was the youngest child in his family, and the only boy, called "Ray" or "Junior." His three sisters were significantly older than he: Alice, born 1900; Ruth, born 1903; and Helen, born 1905. (He had two half-sisters, from his father's first marriage. They had both married, but continued to live near their father.) Raymond Sr. was a building contractor, age forty-eight when his son was born. After World War I, he retired and moved his family from the small town of Galesville to his own hometown, the larger community of La Crosse, where they would be nearer his mother. Raymond Sr. loved to read, and he loved music, and so did son Ray, who remembered hearing Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin, playing on the banks of the Mississippi River, around 1920. His father died when Ray was sixteen.

As the youngest, Ray had been indulged by his mother and sisters, and now he was the only male in the family. One by one, though, his sisters left home. By 1924, Alice had completed training as a nurse, married, and moved to Madison, and, by the time her father died, Oshkosh. Middle sister Ruth had taken Ray to his first movie, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and she was the first in the family with theatrical ambitions—"stagestruck," as he later characterized her—but they were foiled by the family. She moved to Chicago and married a scientist, but indulged her love of the arts as an avid audience member. Helen too had performance in her veins, working awhile reading stories on a children's radio broadcast, then becoming a teacher.

Increasingly unmanageable after his father's death, Ray was sent to Chicago to live with his sister Ruth and enrol in Robert A. Waller High, returning to La Crosse Central midway through his final year. According to school newspapers and yearbooks, he was popular, with a good sense of humour about himself. He played football and basketball, and was a cheerleader, perhaps more social activities than athletic commitments. Debate was a greater interest, and he took elocution lessons, and then joined "Falstaff Club," the school's drama group, though not as an onstage presence. According to biographer Patrick McGilligan, as an adolescent he was "fundamentally restless and lonely," and "prone to long, ambiguous silences." This was characteristic of conversations with Ray for the rest of his life. Gifted with a mellifluous, deep voice, however, Ray won a scholarship to be an announcer at the local radio station, WKBH, for a year, while he was enrolled in La Crosse Teachers College. (Later, he would describe this award as "a scholarship to any university in the world"—a narrative embellishment typical of him. He reported that the summer following, he joined a troupe of stunt fliers, but also of working with an airborne bootlegger.)

As in high school, he joined the drama society, the Buskin Club, where he also found a girlfriend, Kathryn Snodgrass, daughter of the school president. They also collaborated as editors on the Racquet, the school newspaper, she on features, and he on sports, and as co-writers of a stage revue revolving around a college student who goes to Hollywood. The couple was known around campus as "Ray and Kay." For the revue, titled February Follies, Ray took the stage, as compere. In April 1930, he advanced to play the lead in the school's major production, of The New Poor, a 1924 comedy by Cosmo Hamilton. In due course, Ray led the Buskins, and started dressing the role of an early twentieth-century aesthete. As well, he started to offer more left-leaning political commentary in the college paper.

A hometown friend studying at the University of Chicago had pitched the benefits of his school, especially his classes with Thornton Wilder, who had already impressed Ray when he had seen the writer in La Crosse. Ray had improved his record and was eligible to transfer in Fall 1931. He was pledged to a fraternity and played some football, but by his own account he was more committed to the elements of college life that included drinking and pursuing college girls. As well, he later recounted a homosexual experience, when he was approached by the university's Director of Drama, Frank Hurburt O'Hara (whom Ray does not name), reflecting that his own attitude, more tolerant than usual at that time, "became very helpful to me in understanding and directing some of the actors with whom I've worked." Ray spent only one quarter at the University of Chicago, and returned to La Crosse in December, resuming enrolment at Teachers College in autumn 1932, where he announced to readers of the school paper that he was "apparently free of amorous entanglements," but also, "I have been known to like a party." That same year, he and his friend Clarence Hiskey also agitated to start a chapter of the US Communist Party.

As 1932 ended, Ray left college, and, now calling himself Nicholas Ray, sought new opportunities, including, with the help of Thornton Wilder, meeting Frank Lloyd Wright, with the hope of joining Wright's Fellowship at Taliesin. Lacking the tuition fee, in 1933 Ray ventured to New York City, where, staying in Greenwich Village, he had his first encounters with the city's bohemia. There, shortly before his stint at Taliesin, Ray met young writer Jean Evans (born Jean Abrahams, later Abrams), and they started a relationship. After he returned east, they lived together, and married in 1936. When Ray took a position at the WPA in Washington, by January 1937 they had moved to Arlington, Virginia. They had one son, Anthony Nicholas (born November 24, 1937), known as Tony. Evans filed for divorce in December 1941, and the process was finalized the next summer.

Ray had been rejected for military service on medical grounds, but worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), under John Houseman. There Ray met Connie Ernst, the daughter of lawyer Morris L. Ernst, and a producer of The Voice of America. After his divorce, she and Ray lived together, in New York, from 1942 to 1944.

Relocating to Los Angeles to work with Elia Kazan, Ray first lived in a flat at the Villa Primavera, on the corner of Harper and Fountain, that became the model for the apartment building in In A Lonely Place, before moving into a house in Santa Monica.

While directing A Woman's Secret, he became involved with the film's co-star, Gloria Grahame. They married in Las Vegas on June 1, 1948, just five hours after her divorce from her first husband was granted, and five months before the birth of their son, Timothy, on November 12. Tensions in their marriage were known early on, and by autumn 1949, while shooting In A Lonely Place, they had separated for the first time, keeping the split a secret from studio executives. At the end of the year, they announced that they planned to travel to Wisconsin, to spend the holidays with Ray's family there, but he went alone, reuniting with his mother and three sisters, and then on to New York and Boston, to prepare his next project, On Dangerous Ground, and to see his ex-wife and firstborn. In 1950, as that project was ending and as In A Lonely Place was opening, Ray and Grahame were reported to have reconciled, living in Malibu, though their marriage remained dysfunctional. The couple divorced on August 15, 1952.

Seventeen year-old Betty Utey first crossed paths with Nick Ray in 1951, at RKO, when he was assigned to direct some additional scenes for Androcles and the Lion (1952). Some weeks after shooting the scene, in which he featured her, he asked her out to the ballet and dinner. At the end of their evening, like In A Lonely Place, he called a cab and sent her home. She subsequently did not hear from him for almost three years, when he called her to come to his Chateau Marmont bungalow for an assignation. He then disappeared again, until 1956, when he called again. In 1958, she won a place as one of the chorines in Party Girl, and after shooting ended they eloped to Maine, where Ray hoped to start his third marriage. The couple spent several weeks in Kennebunkport, before marrying on October 13, 1958. They had two daughters, both born in Rome: Julie Christina, on January 10, 1960, and Nicca, October 1, 1961. Ray's mother Lena had died in March 1959.

In early 1963, the family moved from Rome to Madrid, where Ray used money from his Samuel Bronston contract to try to develop projects, which never came to fruition. With a partner, he opened a restaurant and cocktail lounge called Nicca's, after his younger daughter, and it became the hangout for film people working in Madrid, but also a place for Ray to sink a fortune, reportedly a quarter-million of his dollars in its first year. To manage it, he hired his nephew, Sumner Williams. Ray and his wife separated in 1964, and she returned to the US with their children, while he remained in Europe. They remained married until January 1, 1970, when their divorce was finalised and Betty Ray remarried.

Through the middle of the 1960s, Ray lived peripatetically, setting up in Paris, London, Zagreb, Munich, and, for a while, Sylt, a German island in the North Sea.

He returned to the United States on November 14, 1969 where he met Susan Schwartz, an eighteen year-old newly arrived to study at the University of Chicago. They became companions, and the adventure lasted until the end of Ray's life, and beyond.

They relocated to New York City, where Schwartz worked, in real estate and then publishing, to make a living for both of them while Ray sought money to continue work on the film and start other projects. In Taos, Ray asked Susan to marry him, giving her his ring, and in return she gave him a pearl.

Ray died in hospital, of heart failure, on June 16, 1979. A memorial was held at Lincoln Center shortly after. Among the attendees were all four of his wives and all four of his children. He was survived by two sisters, Helen and Alice (Ruth had died in a fire, in 1965), and his ashes were returned to La Crosse, Wisconsin, his hometown, and interred in the same section of Oak Grove Cemetery as his parents. His grave bears no inscription.

Filmography (director)

Films

Other work

Filmography (actor)

See also

In Spanish: Nicholas Ray para niños