Best Known As: The director of the movie Rebel Without A Cause
Name at birth: Raymond Nicholas Kienzle
Film director Nicholas Ray's biggest hit was 1955's Rebel Without A Cause, a melodramatic classic of alienated American youth that starred James Dean and Natalie Wood. Ray grew up in Wisconsin, and before he started making movies he studied architecture (with Frank Lloyd Wright) and traveled the U.S. studying folk music. He went to New York in the early 1930s and got involved in the theater. With the help of Elia Kazan and John Houseman he got work in the movies and made his directorial debut with They Live By Night (made in 1947 but shelved for two years). Ray made a variety of movies, always managing to put his own mark on otherwise benign studio features, including In a Lonely Place (1950, starring Humphrey Bogart), Flying Leathernecks (1951, starring John Wayne) and Johnny Guitar (1954, starring Joan Crawford). The critics and filmmakers of France's New Wave, especially Jean-Luc Godard, hailed Ray as an under-appreciated genius, and by the 1960s American critics who adhered to the auteur theory of filmmaking were in agreement. But after 1963's 55 Days at Peking (starring Charlton Heston), Ray couldn't get another film project off the ground. He turned to teaching in New York in 1971, and his last years were measured out in booze, drugs and cancer. Ray's public persona, the reckless, macho and emotionally wounded artist, is usually part of any discussion about his films.
He lost the vision in one eye while making a film with students in the '70s and in his later years wore an eye patch... Ray appears in his friend Wim Wenders's film The American Friend (1977, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith and starring Dennis Hopper)... Ray was once married to actress Gloria Grahame -- she sings "I Cain't Say No" in the movie Oklahoma!; they were married from 1948 to 1952, and in 1961 Grahame married Anthony Ray, Nicholas's son from a previous marriage.
(born Aug. 7, 1911, Galesville, Wis., U.S. — died June 16, 1979, New York, N.Y.) U.S. film director. He studied architecture and drama and began directing plays in the mid-1930s. After working in New York with John Houseman and Elia Kazan, he followed them to Hollywood, where he directed They Live by Night (1948). Ray was praised for demonstrating a personal style in movies such as In a Lonely Place (1950), The Lusty Men (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), and the landmark film of youthful rebellion, Rebel Without a Cause (1955). He also directed Bigger Than Life (1956), Bitter Victory (1958), and 55 Days at Peking (1963). He later tried directing in Yugoslavia and taught at the State University of New York.
American-born film director Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) rose to prominence in the 1950s with such films as "Johnny Guitar, They Live by Night", and his best-known work, "Rebel Without a Cause", which transformed leading man James Dean into an American icon. He often portrayed the sensitive, troubled outsider, a heroic figure thwarted by life and love in a dysfunctional postwar society. Although he directed more than 20 feature films between 1948 and his death in 1979, Ray's most critically acclaimed works were made between 1952 and 1955.
Trained in Theater
Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle on August 7, 1911, in the Wisconsin town of Galesville, near La Crosse. Suspended from high school on several occasions, he nonetheless showed himself to be a gifted and intelligent teen and was accepted to the University of Chicago in 1930, the same year he married a young woman named Jean Evans.
Reconfiguring his name as Nicholas Ray, he attended college for less than a year. An interest in visual design prompted him to spend several months under the wing of noted architect and arts supporter Frank Lloyd Wright; a move to New York in 1932 drew him into the left-wing theater community. Involved in Elia Kazan's Theater of Action from 1935 to 1937, he made his acting debut on the New York stage before transferring to director John Houseman's Phoenix Theatre troupe. Ray gained technical experience in a production by Joseph Losey for the Depression-era Federal Theater Project. In 1942, following the start of World War II, Ray became involved in radio when Houseman found him a job as program director for the Office of War Information. He also continued his work with theatre and directed his first play in 1943.
Ray's work in New York provided him with the connections into film, and by 1944 he was living in Hollywood. His first movie job was as an assistant on Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Assisting on several other films and in early television, Ray also directed a play on Broadway. Houseman gave him the chance to direct his first solo film, and Ray signed a contract with RKO Studios. Ray's They Live by Night was based on the novel Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson and released in Great Britain as The Twisted Road. Filmed in grainy black and white, it is an outlaw film infused with sympathy for its main characters, a bank robber duo played by Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell. The criminal lovers flee across the rural Midwest, the law hot on their trail, and desperately grasp for fleeting moments of peace as their destiny spirals out of control. In a review of the film for the Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington noted that They Live by Night is "permeated with a sweetness and vulnerability unusual for any crime movie."
Days with RKO
Ray's directorial debut was not a success at the box office. His next production for RKO was the 1949 murder mystery A Woman's Secret, which starred noir actress Gloria Grahame. During the film Ray, who had divorced his first wife, married his leading lady. Grahame divorced her own husband and married Ray later that same day. The couple survived four tumultuous years of marriage - years made more difficult because of Ray's lifelong battle with alcoholism - before divorcing in 1952. Ray would marry twice more, to dancer Betty Schwab and finally to Susan Ray, with whom he would have four children. In 1961 Grahame married Ray's oldest son, Anthony Ray.
In 1949 Ray was hired to direct popular actor Humphrey Bogart in Knock on Any Door, a drama about an attorney hired to defend a juvenile delinquent played by John Derek. Bogart and Grahame starred in Ray's next movie, In a Lonely Place, a 1950 noir film that focuses on a successful screenwriter charged with murder. Through Bogart's troubled, violent protagonist, Ray showed the ill effects of nonconformity, as the screenwriter, by nature a loner, found himself branded as an outsider by the police, by colleagues, and even by former friends.
The theme of In a Lonely Place, which Ray explored again in later works such as On Dangerous Ground and Johnny Guitar, reflected Ray's attitude about the McCarthyism of the 1940s and 1950s. While RKO owner Howard Hughes sheltered his stable of directors from the blacklist sparked by Senator Joseph P. McCarthy's efforts to purge the nation of what he believed was a Communist menace, Ray watched the destruction of the careers of many talented Hollywood actors and directors, including his former mentor Elia Kazan.
In appreciation for Hughes's protection, Ray directed several films for RKO in quick succession: Born to Be Bad, about two ruthless women who stop at nothing to win a battle over a man; the John Wayne vehicle The Flying Leathernecks (1951); the highly praised 1951 noir On Dangerous Ground starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino as a troubled young outcast and the woman who shelters him; and The Lusty Men, a western about the competing affections of rodeo riders Robert Mitchum and Arthur Kennedy for the beautiful Susan Hayward. After all this work for RKO, Ray decided to leave the studio in 1953, a year after The Lusty Men was released.
Championed the Outsider
Out from under Hughes's thumb, Ray found himself free to expand on his developing noir vision. The result was 1954's Johnny Guitar, a stylish western produced by Republic Pictures that starred Sterling Hayden. With its somewhat stiff, stylized approach, subversive sexual undercurrents, and quasi-melodramatic story line, Johnny Guitar also introduced the symbolic use of color that characterized many subsequent Ray films. Even more so than In a Lonely Place, the film is considered to be a strong cinematic statement condemning the injustices of the McCarthy-era witch hunts.
The quality of Ray's films during the mid-to late 1950s - particularly those made after the release of Johnny Guitar - prompted critics to reexamine his early work, and he gained cult status in the United States and also in Europe, especially among Jean-Luc Godard and other France New Wave directors and critics. Well-known actors continued to appear in his films. His 1955 father-and-son drama Run for Cover featured young John Derek alongside veteran actor James Cagney. While considered a good film, Run for Cover would be quickly eclipsed by the notoriety surrounding Ray's next film.
Rebel Without a Cause
Ray's eye for color, movement, and setting that was so apparent to audiences of Johnny Guitar - and which would become even more pronounced in 1958's Party Girl - meshed seamlessly with the director's fascination with the psychology of loneliness in his landmark film Rebel Without a Cause. Released in 1955 and shot in vivid color in a wide-screen format, the film starred James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, three of the most popular young actors of the era. As portrayed by the leather-jacketed Dean, protagonist Jim Stark enters adulthood in suburban Los Angeles, the little guidance he receives from his distant father supplemented by his supportive but equally estranged and futureless friends. Stark is the epitome of teenage rebellion, and the movie culminates in classic 1950s fashion: in a deadly game of chicken behind the wheel of a souped-up hot-rod. Dean's tragically similar death a month before the film's release helped transform Ray's motion picture into an immediate classic. Rebel Without a Cause earned three Academy Award nominations, including one for Ray's screenplay.
Rebel Without a Cause was, for Ray, an impossible act to follow, but he continued on undaunted, filming Bigger than Life (1956), Bitter Victory (1957), and other motion pictures of less renown. For several years he worked in Europe but returned to the United States to film the garish 1958 gangland flick Party Girl, his last Hollywood film. Ray returned to Europe after making 1959's The Savage Innocents and tackled the life of Jesus in the popular 1961 epic drama King of Kings. Although his stature in the United States was diminished, European critics continued to praise Ray's work.
Ill Health Ended Career
Ray returned to the epic format of King of Kings for 1963's 55 Days at Peking. A story about the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, the big-budget film was shot in Madrid, where noted opera designers Veniero Colasani and John Moore created the city of Peking in the suburb of Las Matas. The Oscar-nominated score by Dimitri Tiomkin was equally lavish.
The pressure of directing the epic took its toll on the 52-year-old director. Although he made a brief appearance in the film as a wheelchair-bound foreign ambassador, Ray suffered a heart attack and left the set before the film was completed, leaving director Andrew Marton to shoot the battle scenes. Many critics panned 55 Days at Peking as confusing, and Ray realized his mainstream career was at an end. He remained in Europe, where he was still well known, until an offer to shoot a documentary drew him back into the United States. The documentary was never completed, and financial circumstances forced Ray to remain in the United States.
During the 1970s Ray taught courses on film at the State University of New York at Binghamton, worked with students on film productions, and cooperated with German director Wim Wenders in the making of a 1974 documentary, I'm a Stranger Here Myself. The title was taken from a line in Johnny Guitar. In 1977, Ray was diagnosed with lung cancer. As the illness took its toll, he managed small acting roles in films such as Wenders's Der Amerikanische Freund and Milos Forman's 1979 production Hair. Guardian reviewer Derek Malcolm described Ray as "a tragic, neglected figure surrounded by obsequious young acolytes." Wenders, a tremendous fan of Ray, made a documentary about him, Lightning over Water (Nick's Movie), that contained interviews with the director in his last days. It was released in 1980, a year after Ray's death. Containing lectures, interviews, and other writings, Ray's autobiography, I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies, was edited by his widow Susan Ray and released in 1993.
Books
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 3rd edition, Volume 2: Directors, St. James Press, 1996.
Kreidl, John Francis, Nicholas Ray, Twayne, 1977.
Ray, Nicholas, I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies, University of California Press, 1993.
Career Highlights: They Live by Night, The American Friend, On Dangerous Ground
First Major Screen Credit: The Caribbean Mystery (1945)
Biography
The auteurists' favorite, Nicholas Ray made movies for little more than a decade, but his films are among the most incisive, bizarre, and intelligent of the 1950s. A believer that great directors leave distinctive signatures on their work, Ray's eye for setting, color, and kinetic action merged with a socially conscious interest in personal psychology to reveal a darkness at odds with "normalcy" in such films as In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), and his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
Born and raised in Wisconsin, Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. got kicked out of high school numerous times, but he also wrote local radio shows that won him admission to college. Renaming himself Nick Ray in 1931, Ray's eclectic post-high school education included a year at the University of Chicago and several months at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin art colony, where he studied architecture and drama. Moving to New York in 1932, Ray became active in left-wing theater, including acting in Elia Kazan's directorial debut for the Theater of Action, and working on a Joseph Losey production for the Federal Theater Project. Out of the FTP by 1940, Ray worked in radio and was hired by John Houseman to produce radio programs for the Office of War Information.
Ray subsequently earned his first Hollywood experience as an assistant on Kazan's debut film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). After assisting on several other films and directing a Broadway show and a TV show, Ray headed back to Hollywood to work for Houseman at RKO on a film adaptation of Thieves Like Us, retitled They Live By Night (1949). Given the chance to direct, Ray infused the film with an edgy intimacy and sympathy for the young outlaw lovers. Though barely noticed on its first release, They Live By Night was championed by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics and became one of his most highly regarded films. Staying on with RKO after Howard Hughes bought it, Ray directed murder-mystery A Woman's Secret (1949), co-starring his second wife-to-be, Gloria Grahame, and was loaned out to direct Humphrey Bogart as a sympathetic lawyer to delinquent juvenile John Derek in Knock on Any Door (1949). Derek's desire in Knock to "live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse" would effectively sum up the fate of future Rebel star James Dean.
Ray then teamed Bogart and Grahame in the potent noir In a Lonely Place (1950). Centering on a screenwriter who may be a murderer and his starlet lover, In a Lonely Place was both a lacerating examination of Hollywood and male violence, and a diagnosis of Ray and Grahame's failing marriage. Protected by Hughes from the blacklist, Ray churned out several more films for RKO, including a Technicolor combat movie, The Flying Leathernecks (1951), starring John Wayne and Robert Ryan, and the pristinely black, white, and gray rural noir On Dangerous Ground (1951), featuring Ryan as an urban cop redeemed by Ida Lupino. After his skillful rodeo drama, The Lusty Men (1952), featuring Mitchum, Arthur Kennedy, and Susan Hayward in a loaded love triangle, Ray left RKO in 1953. Backed by his agent Lew Wasserman, Ray worked steadily for the rest of the decade.
Ray's first film as a free agent was also his most brilliantly strange. A floridly colored Western, Johnny Guitar (1954) pitted stalwart saloon owner Joan Crawford against twitchy, jealous townswoman Mercedes McCambridge with laconic titular character Sterling Hayden as Crawford's old boyfriend. Though the fight is allegedly about property, and allegorically about the Communist witch hunts, McCambridge's sexual hysteria and Crawford's butch wardrobe of blue jeans, bright shirts, and the best lipstick in the West suggested a kinkier undercurrent. Ray followed his deliriously Freudian oater with Run for Cover (1955), a Western featuring James Cagney and John Derek in an Oedipally fraught relationship.
After his Westerns, Ray set to work on an original story about contemporary youth. Starring James Dean in his definitive performance, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) became one of the decade's most trenchant statements on suburban-bred teen alienation. Suffering from weak and/or negligent parenting, Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo's disaffected trio seethe with frustration and act out with misdirected violence and a pointless, lethal chickie run, while creating an alternative familial world. Ray's widescreen compositions reveal Dean's estrangement at home and the impossibility of the trio's imagined life in an abandoned mansion, while his masterful use of color, particularly Dean's red jacket, speaks to the emotional turmoil. With Dean's death days before its release, Rebel Without a Cause became a hit and earned Oscar nominations for Wood, Mineo, and Ray's story (Dean was nominated for East of Eden [1955] instead).
Returning to the underside of suburbia in Bigger Than Life (1956), Ray depicted the extreme results of emphasizing surface achievement, as drug-addled father James Mason's megalomaniacal pursuit of perfection turns into child abuse. More downbeat, Bigger Than Life did not repeat Rebel's success. After another offbeat Western, The True Story of Jesse James (1957), Ray headed to Europe to direct Bitter Victory (1957), a somber war drama starring Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens as Burton's jealous rival. Taking any assignment he could find, Ray returned to the U.S. to direct Budd Schulberg's production Wind Across the Everglades (1958). An odd story about a 19th century Florida gamekeeper, Wind was marred by creative conflicts between Ray and Schulberg. Stylish gangland story Party Girl (1958) was Ray's last Hollywood film.
Settling in Europe after shooting The Savage Innocents (1959) in England and Italy, Ray turned to epics with King of Kings (1961), a handsome widescreen rendering of the life of Christ. While shooting his next epic, 55 Days at Peking (1963), however, Ray suffered a heart attack and was replaced, ending his mainstream career. After kicking around Europe, Ray returned to the U.S. for an aborted documentary on the Chicago Seven in 1969, losing his sight in one eye shortly after. An itinerant film figure in the early '70s, Ray taught, oversaw an experimental film made with his students, and participated in a biographical documentary that drew its title from a line in Johnny Guitar and I'm a Stranger Here Myself (1974). Yet his health declined significantly during his final years and he battled well-publicized amphetamine and alcohol addictions. It was during this same period that Ray also contributed a segment to the quasi-pornographic omnibus film Wet Dreams (1974), alongside the notorious adult film impresario Lasse Braun and others - a decidedly low point for the director who had once helmed Rebel Without a Cause.
Ray rebounded somewhat, however, first by settling in New York City in 1976, then by playing a small role in director/fan Wim Wenders' film The American Friend (1977). Though he was diagnosed with cancer in 1977, Ray appeared in Milos Forman's Hair (1979), and began a collaboration with Wenders on Lightning Over Water (1980), a documentary of Ray's last days. Ray died in 1979, just before he and Wenders stopped production. Including Grahame, Ray was married four times and had four children; his son from his first marriage, Anthony Ray, married Grahame in 1961. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Coming from a radio background, Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke EllingtonmusicalBeggar's Holiday, in 1946. One year later, he directed his first film, They Live By Night. It was released two years later due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes' takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society’s young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray’s films). It was influential on the sporadically popular sub-genre often called 'love on the run' movies, concerning as it does two young fugitive lovers on the run from the law. (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman’s 1974 remake of They Live By Night, Thieves Like Us.) The New York Times gave the film a positive review (despite calling Ray's trademark sympathetic eye to rebels and criminals "misguided") and acclaimed Ray for "good, realistic production and sharp direction...Mr. Ray has an eye for action details. His staging of the robbery of a bank, all seen by the lad in the pick-up car, makes a fine clip of agitating film. And his sensitive juxtaposing of his actors against highways, tourist camps and bleak motels makes for a vivid comprehension of an intimate personal drama in hopeless flight."[2]
Ray's most productive and successful period was the 1950s. In the mid-Fifties he made the two films for which he is best remembered. Johnny Guitar (1954) was a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men: highly eccentric in its time, it was much loved by French critics (François Truffaut called it "the beauty and the beast" of the western). In 1955, Ray directed Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean in what proved to be his second and most famous role. When Rebel was released, soon after Dean's early death in an automobile crash, it had a revolutionary impact on moviemaking and youth culture, virtually giving birth to the contemporary concept of the American teenager. Looking past its social and pop-cultural significance, Rebel Without a Cause is the purest example of Ray’s cinematic style and vision, with an expressionistic use of colour, dramatic use of architecture and an empathy for social misfits.
Rebel Without a Cause was Ray's biggest commercial success, and marked a breakthrough in the careers of child actors Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. Ray engaged in a tempestuous "spiritual marriage" with Dean, and awakened the latent homosexuality of Mineo, through his role of Plato — who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film. During filming it was rumored that Ray began a short-lived affair with Wood, who at age 16 was 27 years younger than him. This created a tense atmosphere between Ray and Hopper, but they were reconciled later in life.
Bisexual[1] and a heavy user of drugs and alcohol, Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s. After collapsing on the set of 55 Days at Peking (1963), he would not direct again until the mid-1970s. In 1970 at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore East, Ray ran into Dennis Hopper, who asked Ray to join him at his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where he was editing his new film, The Last Movie. Hopper helped Ray secure a position at Harper College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton University in upstate New York.[5] From 1971 to 1973, Ray taught filmmaking where he and his students produced We Can't Go Home Again, an autobiographical film employing multiple superimpositions. In the spring of 1972, Ray was asked to show some footage from the film at a conference. The audience was shocked to see footage of Ray and his students smoking marijuana together.[5] An early version of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray, never satisfied with the project, continued editing it until his death in 1979. He secured teaching positions at the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University with the help of old friends.[5]
Jean Evans, journalist, married 1930, divorced 1940. They had one son, Anthony (aka Tony, born 1937).
Gloria Grahame, actress, whom he married in 1948. They separated in 1950 and divorced in 1952, in the aftermath of the director discovering Grahame in bed with his son, Tony, who was then 13 years old.[5][6][7] (She and Tony Ray would marry in 1960.) Grahame and Nicholas Ray had one son, Timothy Ray.
Betty Utey, dancer, married 1958, divorced 1964; two daughters, Nica and Julie.
A film about Ray, Interrupted, was announced for 2007, to be directed by Philip Kaufman.
In the decades after his professional peak, Ray continues to influence directors to this day:
Jean-Luc Godard was a huge admirer of Ray and famously said in his review of Bitter Victory:
"There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray." In Godard's film, Contempt, the character played by Michel Piccoli claims to have written Ray's Bigger Than Life.
Martin Scorsese is a fan of Ray's, particularly his expressionistic use of color in Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Bigger Than Life (1956). He used clips from two of them in his documentary A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.
Director Curtis Hanson is featured on a documentary for the DVD release of In A Lonely Place, giving his analysis on the film. The film was one of many influences on his direction of L.A. Confidential (1997).
François Truffaut wrote essays about Ray (who is featured prominently in his book The Films in My Life). He asserts that They Live by Night (1949) is Ray's best movie, but gives special attention to his films Bigger Than Life (1956) and Johnny Guitar (1954).
Wim Wenders is another European admirer of Ray's and has paid homage to him in many movies. He even gave Ray a cameo in his film The American Friend. He co-directed Ray's final film, the experimental documentary Lightning Over Water, and edited it after Ray's death. The film is a touching portrait of the final days of Nicholas Ray's life.
While teaching at New York University, Ray taught and befriended cult director Jim Jarmusch, who became his assistant. In turn, Jarmusch says that he looked to Ray for script advice, and misses him to this day.
