The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall (review)

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"If the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to." When Jean-Luc Godard wrote those words in the Cahiers du Cinema of February 1957, he was expressing the intense enthusiasm that he and his fellow cineastes felt for the director of They Live by Night and Rebel Without a Cause. For the average viewer, however, the excitement seems misplaced. After all, Ray's misses are as numerous as his hits; for every In a Lonely Place or The Lusty Men, there is a dull epic like King of Kings, or a deranged eccentricity such as Johnny Guitar. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that this book is one of only two studies of Ray in English (the other is a biography, translated from the German). Perhaps, in this case, Noel Coward was right when he claimed that there is always something fishy about the French.

Certainly, that was your reviewer's attitude before he began Geoff Andrew's film-by-film critical study, updated from its first publication in 1991. After a few pages, though, it became apparent that this snootiness was plain wrong. For Ray is a very special case in the gallery of auteurs; his significance lies not so much in his individual films or his cumulative achievement, as in his overall intent. As the book takes each work in turn, the reader begins to see that these twenty-three films are pieces in a mosaic. Until you have seen every single one, as Andrew has, it is impossible to discern the pattern.

The reason why this grand design is so hard to detect is because Ray's achievement is less important than his context. As Andrew implies throughout, the director was a kind of premature independent, even new Hollywood film maker; unfortunately, he was trapped inside the studio system (mainly at RKO, where he laboured for seven years), so his career was an endless battle with obtuse producers, studio muddle and compromise. The problem was made worse by the fact that, in the Forties and Fifties, few viewers in the United States wanted films that mirrored their anxieties, and, as Andrew demonstrates, Ray's working life was dedicated to uncovering the loneliness, alienation and destructive hypocrisy that lurked beneath the post-war dream. Therefore, if so much of his work falls short of what critics like to call "full achievement," then it may be because America muffled him. Only Europeans like Godard and Francois Truffaut could hear his personal music and understand its wider implications for "cinema".

Andrew does not say any of this, but it is inherent in everything he writes. Ray's unique vision is encapsulated in the subtitle, "the poet of nightfall", a phrase of Truffaut's. On one level, the nightfall stands for difficult and complex subject matter, for all the director's haunted male outsiders, who struggle with their inner darkness, rebel against an oppressive society, and who wander through America in search of redemptive light. On another level, "nightfall" suggests Ray's genius at telling a story wholly in terms of picture (along with sound and editing). Time and again, Andrew shows this specifically film eloquence, for example in the use of space. Downstairs rooms often indicate the uneasy social world; upstairs is the place of privacy and dream. Stairways are, on the other hand, sites of conflict; think of the argument between James Dean and his father, Jim Backus, in Rebel Without a Cause.

In fact, Andrew sees many of Ray's films as Oedipal battles in which father and sons, surrogate or otherwise, struggle for self-realisation. Although he is sceptical about the gay interpretations of some of these relationships, he makes a convincing case for Ray as...