Sabato’s Reviews > Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave > Status Update

"For those who need more proofs than those offered on the screen: it is not our custom in Cahiers to pay any attention to the tittle-tattle circulated in the Hollywood gossip columns, but it is important to bear in mind — Bazin agrees with me here — how much Ray's life resembles his films. First a long idyll with Joan Crawford whom he meets again several years later to film Johnny Guitar, -

"Nicholas Ray is to some extent the Rossellini of Hollywood; in the kingdom of mechanization he is the craftsman, lovingly fashioning small objects out of holly wood. Hence a hue and cry against the amateur! There is not one of Ray's films without nightfall. He is the poet of nightfall, and in Hollywood everything is permissible, except poetry. Hawks, for example, keeps it at arm's length, -

"Nicholas Ray is to some extent the Rossellini of Hollywood; in the kingdom of mechanization he is the craftsman, lovingly fashioning small objects out of holly wood. Hence a hue and cry against the amateur! There is not one of Ray's films without nightfall. He is the poet of nightfall, and in Hollywood everything is permissible, except poetry. Hawks, for example, keeps it at arm's length, -

- The Bogart man is not defined by his accidental respect, or his contempt, for bourgeois virtues, by his courage or his cowardice, but above all by this existential maturity which gradually transforms life into a stubborn irony at the expense of death.

But is not this precisely the proof that our sympathy went out, beyond even the imaginary biographies and moral virtues or their absence, to some profounder wisdom, to a certain way of accepting the human condition which may be shared by the rogue and by the honourable man, by the failure as well as by the hero. -