Sabato’s Reviews > Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave > Status Update
Sabato
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"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, -
— Mar 20, 2026 06:05PM
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Sabato
is on page 123 of 328
"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, -
— Mar 20, 2026 06:24PM
Sabato
is on page 122 of 328
"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, -
— Mar 20, 2026 05:51PM
Sabato
is on page 115 of 328
- 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.
— Mar 17, 2026 07:48AM
Sabato
is on page 115 of 328
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. -
— Mar 17, 2026 07:47AM
Hawks and Ray form an opposition rather like Castellani and Rossellini. With Hawks we witness a triumph of the mind, with Nick Ray it is a triumph of the heart. You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I make so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don't watch any more films, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty."
François Truffaut: A Wonderful
Certainty ('L'Admirable Certitude', Cahiers du Cinema 46, April 1955, written under the pseudonym Robert Lachenay)