Sabato’s Reviews > Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave > Status Update
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Nicholas Ray is one of those who fight it out to the finish, and can exhaust the possibilities of a development. Everything always proceeds from a simple situation where two or three people encounter some elementary and fundamental concepts of life. And the real struggle takes place in only one of them, against the interior demon of violence, or of a more secret sin, which seems linked to man and his solitude. -
— Jun 09, 2026 04:00PM
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Sabato
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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, and Hitchcock cautiously ventures four or five shots each time, in small doses. While a Hawks settles down in Hollywood — in reality he spends most of the year in Switzerland — and takes things easy, -
— Jun 09, 2026 04:14PM
Sabato
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The hallmark of Ray's very great talent resides in his absolute sincerity, his acute sensitivity. He is not of great stature as a technician. All his films are very disjointed, but it is obvious that Ray is aiming less for the traditional and all-round success of a film than at giving each shot a certain emotional quality. Johnny Guitar is 'composed', rather hurriedly, of very long takes divided into four. -
— Jun 09, 2026 04:11PM
Sabato
is on page 121 of 328
Nick Ray is an auteur in our sense of the word. All his films tell the same story, the story of a violent man who wants to stop being violent, and his relationship with a woman who has more moral strength than himself. For Ray's hero is invariably a man lashing out, weak, a child-man when he is not simply a child. There is always moral solitude, there are always hunters, sometimes lynchers.
— Jun 09, 2026 04:08PM
Sabato
is on page 119 of 328
When François Truffaut compares Nicholas Ray with Bresson, really do see two film-makers who are obsessed with the abstract and whose sole concern is always to reach this ideal countenance by the shortest road, and let clumsiness be the road if it is the shortest one. -
— Jun 09, 2026 03:55PM
Sabato
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"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 06:05PM
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
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Jacques Rivette, On Imagination (De l'invention, Cahiers du Cinéma 27, October 1953)
Nicholas Ray has always offered us the story of a moral dilemma where man emerges as either victor or vanquished, but ultimately lucid: the futility of violence, of all that is not happiness and which diverts man from his innermost purpose.
If art must reveal 'the heroism of modern life', there are few works that better accomplish this purpose. We note, however, that the characters quickly withdraw, that, when all is said and done, the world hardly interferes at all, or if it does, it is only to harm them. Salvation is a private affair. Perhaps we will be sorry to see these heroes withdraw to their tents with so little ceremony; we can also suppose that it is not without bequeathing their fate to the world, or sometimes prolonging the ordeal unnecessarily. But for modern society is not solitude, if not scorn, often the most fitting homage?