Run For Cover (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

Though not as wild as Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray's lesser-known follow-up, Run for Cover, likewise deconstructs the West as a place of mythical individualism. The former inverted gender roles, used vivid color to paint a surreal and demonic vision of the West and crafted an anti-McCarthy allegory that ate at the genre as much as the political realm in which Ray operated. The latter continues to eat at the romanticized lawlessness of the West, going so far as to begin with a dangerous misunderstanding that prompts mob violence without any shred of proof or rationality.

After meeting at a waterhole and engaging in a brief stand-off that soon turns friendly, Matt Dow (James Cagney) and studly young Davey Bishop (John Derek), set off together to the nearby town. When they stop to shoot at a hawk, the workers on a passing train, having just been held up, assume these two are more robbers and toss out a sack of money. Before Matt and Davey can return it, the workers reach the town and exaggerate the story to whip up a posse, leading to the shooting and permanent injury of Davey. When Cagney confronts the posse with the truth, their resolve freezes. Even when backed by numerical superiority, people will go to great lengths to make James Cagney less angry.

As a depiction of mob violence trumping civilized order, Run for Cover never reaches the operatic heights of Johnny Guitar's Trucolor conflagration, but Cagney's undiluted presence gives this more elegant film some of the bite one expects of a Ray film. Even so, this is not a film that plays on the explosive Cagney. Before I had heard of this film, I found myself thinking how great it would have been if Ray, that most passionate of directors, had collaborated with Cagney, that most passionate of actors. My delight at learning of their actual partnership soon turned to surprise as I saw the two craft something more elegiac than forceful.

The wounded Davey recuperates in the home of the Swensons, a Swedish emigré father and daughter who planned to head to California without realizing the scope of the country and ran out of money before reaching their destination. Their subplot is a dour one: they set up in the town to make enough money to get to California, but because they were broke they couldn't hire anyone to work the land. Because they have no one to work the land, they cannot make any money to realize their dream. The daughter, Helga, accepts this with resignation, and she looks at the arrival of Matt and Davey as a spark of life in her trapped existence. Matt begins to court her, and when she notes that, traditionally speaking, she shouldn't even be speaking alone with him, the coy, boyish smile that crosses Cagney's face takes 20 years off, until he's the same young buck who burst onto the screen in the early '30s.

Like the protagonists of several of Ray's films, Matt has to make his own family after the loss or alienation of his own. Imprisoned for six years on a false charge (hence explaining his hatred of mobs and their swift, directionless vengeance), Matt got out to a wife who had long since left him and a son who would be about Davey's age. Ergo, he uses his courtship of Helga and his surrogate fatherhood of Davey to fill the holes in his own life. Though 21 years her senior, Cagney's effervescence makes his wooing of Helga more lilting and charming than predatory, and he still asks the father—to whom he is far closer in age—for permission for her hand. (He does so in an amusing game of chess where he clearly lets the father win and the father jovially calls him out on it and admires the man's shrewdness in tacit flattery.)

Where Run for Cover's depiction of a chosen family differs drastically from, say, the makeshift nuclear unit in Rebel Without a Cause is in the reaction of Davey. Jaded and embittered by his wound, Davey looks for any excuse to give up, and despite a flash of initial enthusiasm, he recognizes Matt's gesture of making him deputy is just a patronizing way of giving the boy something to feel good about. Not only does Davey reject these attempts at indirect adoption, he undermines Matt's authority and ethos as sheriff, effectively rebelling against the father figure he never accepted in the first place. While Matt continues to uphold an idea of law as the new sheriff, Davey often lets things lapse in the elder's absence. When Matt returns with a robber he has assured will get a fair trial in his town, they ride up and see a dead man's feet swinging in the air and the sound of revelry coming from the mob in the saloon, celebrating their slaughter.

The final act, in which a robber who was Matt's cellmate recognizes him and causes the town to suspect him of being in cahoots with the criminals and a chase ends in arrow-ridden Comanche territory, dips into the realm of the excessively grandiose after the more graceful tone of what came before. Nevertheless, Ray finds the beauty and grim elegance of a forced double-cross and the lonely ride to a doomed scenario. Whether framing a disturbingly serene shot of Matt and Davey overlooking the massacred gang with "so it goes" finality or descending into a makeshift underworld for the climax, Ray always manages to make something memorable of even the most questionably plot turn.

As was demonstrated with Helga's story, the Wild West is not so free as it seems, and money controls the destinies of its inhabitants just as it does everywhere else. Money prompts the climactic betrayal and leads to a misunderstanding that plunges Matt into a guilt that Dean's Jim Stark could not even begin to fathom. If the horrid resolution to Rebel Without a Cause shows a disgusted falling-in-line with acceptable social parameters, Run for Cover's end is of a more senseless kind, a punishment on an almost cosmic scale for a man who may never escape the fate that was unfairly thrust upon him and now repeated in grisly terms. And just as the solidified union of Jim and Judy is tainted with trauma, so too is the peaceful dénouement of Run for Cover completely undone by the knowledge of what Matt and Helga won't have in their lives. He was capable of happy endings, but has a director ever inserted more unsettlingly ironic ones than Ray?

Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

Opening on a quick zoom-in on a cop blowing a whistle, a frenzied police shootout and a brutal rounding up of the usual suspects, Knock on Any Door wastes no time exhibiting its maker's gifts. All of this unfolds in no time, with barely a few lines of dialogue scattered among throngs of witnesses and enraged police officers to make sense of things. Only someone like Nick Ray could use this torrid, forceful start to introduce what will eventually become a courtroom drama that uses flashbacks to craft a social study of the role of society in shaping thugs.

Ray frames the cop killing in shadow, enshrouding the face of the killer, but the police confidently charge Nick Romano (John Derek), a local thug with a a rap sheet as long as a medieval tapestry. Nick, like much of the movie, plays as a sort of run-through for the ideas Ray would flesh out further with Rebel Without a Cause. As if working his way up the social ladder, Ray precedes his take on the invasion of bourgeois, suburban values with a decidedly working-class overview of the same broad topic of disaffected youth. But if Nick, like Jim Stark, has no active cause, he is nevertheless the product of causes of a different sort, transformational social influences pointed out in detail by the visualized arguments of lawyer Andrew Morton (Humphrey Bogart).

Bogart, as if prepping for his even more despairing performance in the following year's In a Lonely Place, plays up his hangdog looks to match the anguish of Ray's approach to character. Initially, Morton is reluctant to defend Nick not only because he came from the same rough slums where the crime took place but because the partners of his firm threaten to withholding making him a full partner if he takes such a tawdry case. But after an amusingly one-sided argument with his wife, who merely sits silently with an unmoving, judgmental face that prompts hand-wringing self-defense, Andy finally acquiesces. But that doesn't soften Morton's opinion of Nick one bit; "If he's innocent," Andy drawls, "it'll be the first time."

That fatalistic approach defines the film, even after Bogart builds to a passionate defense in court and melodramatic flashbacks show Nick's fall into a life of petty crime. Visiting Nick in a holding cell, the chain-link fence casts a shadow upon the opposite wall, doubling the sense of being trapped before the trial even begins. In court, Morton openly addresses the various biases of the jury, the penchants for sympathy that led them to be chosen for the trial in the first place. His kind tone to the jury members belies his open acknowledgement of the deck-stacking behind each jury selection. But it is when Morton's attempts to contextualize Nick's life lead to flashbacks of the young man's lurid but unimportant life that Ray's capacity for making visually striking images of ennui and anomie comes alive.

The full-frame width of the screen helps define the different dimensions of the underclass to which Nick belongs as the child of first-generation immigrants growing up in the slums. The 'Scope framing of Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life emphasized the empty space around middle-class families who project fantasies of even bigger wealth into that area, while the tenement housing here is cramped, barely able to fit a meager collection of basic furniture, to say nothing of the considerable progeny filling these sardine-can apartments (recall that both Rebel and Bigger feature families with only children compared to the sizable ones here). The script fashions the botched case of Nick's father—a case Morton handed off to a co-worker because of its perceived ease, only for the other lawyer to let the man go to jail because he didn't want to waste time defending an immigrant facing minimal jail time—as the catalyst for his downfall, but the crucible in which he lived would have wrought its changes at some point even without a freak occurrence.

One of Ray's most consistent themes during his command of the 1950s was his clear disdain for mob mentality and the desire to string up the nearest undesirable whenever anything went wrong. Morton shares that attitude, and the flashbacks that stem from his statements to the court show how criminals are made, not born. Derek plays his younger self with a Beaver-like innocence, his voice high and his face fresh. Confronted by the indifference of the system, however, he begins to harden, that charming, boyish face curling until even his forehead seems to sneer. Arrested for a petty crime, Nick finds himself in a horrid jail cell with a friend dying of pneumonia, which the guards treat with blasts of a fire hose, and the POV shot of water blasting the frame into oblivion makes his outrage all the more deeply felt. You'd be hard-pressed to trust the cops after that, too.

Left without any sense of direction in this awful neighborhood, Nick morphs into a punk, a greaser whose mantra "Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse" is at once defiant and childishly asinine. But that swagger floats him beyond the truth that he is, ultimately, one piss-poor crook, capable of nothing more impressive than lifting money from registers or causing minor vandalism. His sole attempt at a proper robbery is darkly comic in the anticlimax of its disaster: the robbery is cut short by discovery, and as the men flee one of Nick's cohorts slides out a door, only to fall down the stairs outside, roll under the rail and plummet to his death. Pathetic actions like these cannot dent Nick's reputation, however, and even before he tries a real heist he's the toast of the local misfits.

To add complexity and flecks of actual happiness to Nick's story, Ray shows the boy falling for Emma, a girl so sweet she seems to be spun out of cane sugar. (As is fitting, we meet her as the girl behind the register in a candy shop.) Having gone in there to steal from the register, Nick suddenly blanches at this vision of almost unreal innocence, and even when Emma's alcoholic aunt presents Nick with the opportunity for a clean steal, he cannot bring himself to do it, much to the annoyance of his friend waiting outside beckoning and even storming in later to impatiently and indirectly berate Nick in front of Emma.

Love in Nicholas Ray's movies is always a stabilizing force, but never one strong enough to overpower the crippling effects of fate and the system. Morton, a foil for Nick, grew up in the same areas but pulled himself out of hardship, something that initially makes him cold to the rest who are still stuck there. But as he works with Nick and tries to help the kid out, we see the contrast between the two: Morton realized he couldn't beat the system and joined it, but that simply isn't an option for Nick, no matter how hard he tries. Not even settling down with Emma can cool him for long, as he's passed the point of no return.

While these flashback scenes can get repetitive and try to justify too many conscious choices as being the product of the environment, Knock on Any Door still boasts some poetic images both beautiful and horrifying. The initial tryst between Emma and Nick shows off Ray's melodramatic framing, a gift with which he was apparently born. Light shadows highlight the illicit nature of the virgin's affair with the thug but also its passion, while later their coldness toward each other reaches a haunting nadir when a pregnant Emma reaches her breaking point without any prior foreboding and a static shot placed at waist level shows her turning on the oven's gas to kill herself. Making this even more stunning is the equally troubling, and equally striking, shot of Nick, wanted by the cops, watching her funeral from afar, looking down from a rooftop in acute pain.

"Nobody knows how anybody feels," Nick snaps to Morton in his first flash of cynicism of the flashback. It's a pronouncement that, if true, means the trial going on back in the present is a lost cause, as Morton's case relies entirely on empathy, but that teenage sense of isolation is already belied by Ray's empathetic, perspective-oriented direction. Still, faced with someone like Kerman (George Macready), the prosecuting district attorney and personification of the Establishment, Nick has a reason to feel the mainstream has ignored him without empathy. Morton's argument is passionate, human and convincing, but Kerman dismantles him with almost personal zeal, using base insults and badgering to wear the kid down. Morton, more so than Nick, is the film's tragic hero, a man absorbed by the system who still wants to show people perspectives outside it, but he's in even less a position to change minds than Nick.

Small, human moments tend to directly follow huge explosions of drama in this film, from the horribly serene funeral after the botched robbery to Morton humbly changing his client's plea after Kerman's hounding of Nick gets the intended result. With the truth revealed, Morton's arguments now feel small rather than passionate, Bogart's slumped shoulders as he looks up at the bench making him look even smaller as Ray uses a wide-angle lens to push out the background, further isolating and minimizing the lawyer. Ray's final shots are some of the best in cinema, the (often ironic) visual equivalent of Billy Wilder's gift for summarizing punchlines, and the last image of Knock on Any Door is one of his most troubling. As guards march Nick toward his doom, Morton stands in the foreground, the diagonal slits of light creating a two-dimensional steps to the gallows, as it were. Nick's final look back only punctuates the sense of fatalism and woe, and suddenly the land of opportunity seems as oppressive and unforgiving as the regime it devoted everything to fighting after WWII.