Nicholas Ray: An American Journey

by Bernard Eisenschitz, Tom Milne (Translator)

This is a biography of Nicholas Ray, who was one of America's most distinctive film directors in the 1950s. Films such as "They Live By Night", "In a Lonely Place", "Johnny Guitar" and "Bigger Than Life" reveal the psychic ills of that decade, and Ray's brooding pessimism and rebellious individualism reached their peak in his most famous film, "Rebel Without a Cause".

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Biography

599 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Jarmusch, 1982: "There's a rock band, Television, whose first single Terry Ork produced. I remember going to see them-in 1975 or 1976, I hadn't met Nick yet--and outside the club where they were playing was a handwritten sign that said 'Four cats with a passion - Nick Ray.' Really passionate...He was always investigating things, things happening in other forms."

[Tom Newth · Rating 3 out of 5]

testimonies and studio archive research make for a fascinating wealth of detail. draw your own conclusions.

[Victor Zatsepin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Сверх-подробная биография в несколько прустианском стиле, много занимательных подробностей о том, как разваливались дела у НР начиная с середины 50-х - студийный капитализм конечно зло, а автор безумен и тут нет и не может быть никакой середины. В конце жизни Рей пытался снять кино с многократной экспозицией в цвете, т.е. герои при такой съёмке в движении выглядят шестирукими и трехголовыми, и в одной из антология американского экспериментального кино 70-х даже можно посмотреть, что у него получилось.

[Andrewh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This overtly critical biography is written by a French [Cahiers du cinema] critic, and makes some rather large assumptions about the reader's prior knowledge of the great director's oeuvre, to be fair. Nick Ray is one of those directors that is often overlooked by the Anglo-American criterati but lauded as a true artist by the French, and those who takes notice of such important elements as mise-en-scene and are less bothered by coherent story-telling, or a decent script. This book does a good job of establishing Ray's interestingly roundabout route to film directing, via radical theatre, folk music (meeting Woody Guthrie and Alan Lomax) and flirting with Communism, and then settles in to a fairly stolid film-by-film account of his chequered career, marred by alcoholism and the usual artistic scraps with the evil producers, who destroyed several of his films in the edits, according to the book. The analysis of the films assumes you know the plots and the style a priori and little time is spent on telling you what the films were 'about' [a jejeune quesion in itself] - and most of the film history logged here is based on the archives relating to Ray's notes on scripts and the ongoing tussles with producers, and on actor's accounts of his working practices, and so on, in often minute detail (with full endnotes). This is very interesting if you know the films very well, but quite difficult to follow if you don't - e.g. for classics such as Johnny Guitar and Bigger than Life this worked great for me but less so for some of his less well-lauded efforts. The decline of Ray into alcoholic self-destruction is very sad and well treated, and can be complemented by Wim Wenders' equally sad film Lightning over Water. In sum, this is for real Ray fans, but probably not for tourists.