Biography for Nicholas Ray

Prior to becoming a film director, Ray studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright and then worked with Elia Kazan and John Houseman on stage projects. His film directing debut, produced by Houseman, was "They Live By Night" (1948), a convincing version of the now-familiar lovers-on-the-run-from-the-law theme. This was followed by two middling melodramas, "A Woman's Secret" and "Knock on Any Door" (both 1949). The latter made a forceful social statement about juvenile delinquency, but its emphasis on polemics rather than drama blunted the overall effect. The film starred Humphrey Bogart, who returned for Ray's next production, "In a Lonely Place" (1950), among the best work ever done by both star and director.

Ray was already concentrating on disaffected loners--individuals who, by choice or fate, could not be integrated into society's mainstream. "In a Lonely Place" explored the life of an asocial screenwriter suspected of murder. Ray extracted Bogart's most passionate performance, placing it in a spare, direct framework. "In a Lonely Place" is not only one of the best movies about Hollywood and the fallacy of romance but also a bitter parable about the postwar condition. It remains a very contemporary motion picture.

"On Dangerous Ground" (1951) starred Robert Ryan as a disillusioned city cop infected with the violence which surrounds him. Ray's careening camera served as an apt metaphor for the instability of an atomized urban existence. Despite the studio-imposed happy ending, with Ryan returning to the blind Ida Lupino in a bleak rural landscape, the film's evocation of the paralyzing angst of modern life could not be evaded. Alienated protagonists populated Ray's films of the early 1950s--Robert Mitchum's ex-rodeo star searching for home and security in "The Lusty Men" (1952); Joan Crawford as the embattled saloon owner in the uniquely baroque, woman-dominated Western, "Johnny Guitar" (1954); and of course, James Dean--along with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo--in "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955).

It was in "Rebel" that Ray's allegiance with the marginalized was most evident and most sympathetic. The teenagers in the story are at the mercy of a society that demands conformity and saps individuality. Integration or destruction are the only options available and, though Dean and Wood are reintegrated into society by film's end, Ray makes it clear that this action is tantamount to a slow death.

In "Bigger Than Life" (1956) James Mason plays a teacher whose addiction to cortisone leads to neuroses that foreground a number of the era's dominant concerns--conformity, consumption, education and religion. The film is not only excellent drama, but, like most Ray movies, it is also an important social document. Furthermore, "Bigger Than Life," like "Rebel," demonstrated that Ray was one of the few directors to use CinemaScope in an accomplished way. His time with Frank Lloyd Wright had given him a keen sense of space and horizontal line.

Ray's films had been largely taken for granted in his native country until the critics of Cahiers du Cinema embarked upon a concerted process of deification. In its wake, such films as "Party Girl" (1958), once dismissed as lurid, were suddenly respected for their stylistic and thematic flamboyance and complexity. Concurrent with the spread of the Ray cult to the USA in the early 1960s, the director's output underwent a significant change, as he undertook two period epics, "King of Kings" (1961) and "55 Days at Peking" (1963). Though both films featured Ray flourishes, they lacked the intensity of his earlier, more emotionally compact works.

Ray subsequently abandoned Hollywood and spent some time in Europe before returning to the States in the late 1960s to take a job teaching film at New York State University at Binghampton. A unique collaborative project with his students resulted, usually known as "You Can't Go Home Again" (1973). Ray's increasingly poor health limited his activities to several cameo appearances in films of other directors; he himself was the subject of his last directorial effort, in collaboration with Wim Wenders, "Lighting Over Water" (1980), about the final months of Ray's battle with cancer. It was a difficult but fitting epitaph, as the director (like so many of his characters) was shown searching for peace and a sense of place.