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334 Nicholas Ray Raymond Nicholas Kienzle b. August π, ∞Ω∞∞, Galesville, Wisconsin d. June ∞∏, ∞ΩπΩ, New York City That Nicholas Ray’s professional name was derived from an inversion of his first two names seems fitting for a filmmaking career that proceeded backward by conventional standards, beginning in relative conformity and ending in rebellious independence. Like Jacques Tati and Samuel Fuller, Ray did a lot of living before he ever got around to filmmaking—pursuing a life largely rooted in the radical dreams and activities of the Depression years, which we mainly know about thanks to Bernard Eisenschitz’s extensive and invaluable biography, one of the best-researched factual accounts we have of any director’s career. In a sense, the celebrations of alternative lifestyles (such as those of rodeo people in The Lusty Men [1952], Gypsies in Hot Blood [1956], and Eskimos in The Savage Innocents [1960]) and passionately symmetrical relationships (such as the evenly balanced romantic couples of In a Lonely Place [1950] and Johnny Guitar [1954] and the evenly matched male antagonists of Wind Across the Everglades [1958] and Bitter Victory [1957]), as well as a sense of tragedy underlining their loss or betrayal, can largely be traced back to his political and populist roots. A creature of both the 30s and 60s, he was ahead of his time during both decades. After writing and producing radio programs in his teens, Ray was invited by Frank Lloyd Wright to join his newly created and utopian Taliesin Fellowship in 1931—an encounter that lasted only a few months but that yielded a respect for the horizontal line that was central to Ray’s subsequent affinity for CinemaScope. He also developed a feeling for architectural balance in both character construction and mise en scène that was fundamental to the almost mystical symmetries and equivalences between heterosexual couples as well as male antagonists in most of his major features. (Bisexual for much of his life, Ray was arguably a director who invested both kinds of pairings with similar erotic as well as romantic dynamics.) Settling in New York in 1934, Ray became immersed in the left-wing Theatre of Action—which brought him in touch with Elia Kazan as well as various federal theater programs. He also became a devotee of Southern folk music, which led FILMMAKERS 335 to close associations with Alan Lomax and such singers as Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White and to a weekly radio show for CBS in the early 40s that developed into wartime work for the Voice of America under John Houseman. Houseman would later produce Ray’s first feature, They Live by Night (1947), along with the subsequent On Dangerous Ground (1951), after Ray taught himself filmmaking in 1944 by following the production of Kazan’s first feature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, from beginning to end, at Kazan’s own invitation. He was thus in his mid-thirties by the time he made They Live by Night—a film that wouldn’t be released until more than two years later, in 1949, owing to the shifting agendas of Howard Hughes, who bought RKO in 1948. Thanks to Ray’s protracted work for Hughes between 1949 and 1953—doing patch-up and piecemeal work on Roseanna McCoy (Irving Reis, 1949), The Racket (John Cromwell, 1951), Macao (Josef von Sternberg, 1952), and Androcles and the Lion (Chester Erskine, 1952) as well as directing six other RKO features— he was effectively protected from being blacklisted in spite of his political radicalism . This enabled him—while seeking to become an independent producer of his own work and collaborating on a script with Philip Yordan, a celebrated front for blacklisted screenwriters—to make Johnny Guitar, arguably the only film of the period to speak about the blacklist (albeit covertly, within the conventions of a western). It was also his first color feature over which he had some creative control, and he took advantage of this opportunity to make it one of his most poetic works—and arguably the first of many with a stylized mise en scène that often seems on the verge of breaking into the choreography of a musical. (Though this freedom in playing with genre conventions characterizes most of his work, Johnny Guitar is perhaps his only film to exhibit a similar freedom in relation to gender: positing two women as the strongest characters in a group consisting mainly of outlaws and the members of a lynch mob.) By showing how one could...

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