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?

On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

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

After making two certifiable classics (his debut, They Live By Night and In a Lonely Place) out of his first six films, Nicholas Ray upped his batting average with On Dangerous Ground, the film that launched one of the great gold runs of cinema, a decade-plus level of quality that experienced only one or two aberrations while churning out masterpiece after masterpiece. Though it is not his best film, On Dangerous Ground points to the reason for Ray's upcoming string of quality by succinctly demonstrating his ability to spin prose into poetic, psychological beauty.

Establishing the film's mood is a vibrant opening inside a car speeding down darkened city streets. Over these shots plays Bernard Herrmann's music, which kicks off with verve. The music is fast and vigorous, like the scherzo of a sonata, a passionate explosion of sound that nevertheless hints at the darker, more dour moods to come. The next dominant sound to come through the mix is the blaring car horn of a detective summoning his two partners, both of whom react to the urgent, impossibly loud sound with complete calm and disinterest, getting everything ready before departing as the impatient man below continue to agitate the whole block. The lackadaisical response of these cops, who are meant to be tracking the murder of one of their own, belies the energy of Herrmann's opening blast, suggesting that the true passion lies underneath these cynical exteriors.

Of the detectives assembled to track down the two perps, Ray devotes his primary attention to Jim Wilson, played Robert Ryan, a man who, for all his gentleness in real life, always looked as if the only things going on behind his eyes were how sad he was and how much he wanted to hurt something to take his mind off things. Ray exploits that look to the fullest: Jim doesn't have to worry about any femmes fatales because he tends to ignore women altogether, both disdainfully (like the lolita who asks him to buy her a drink with such suggestive tones it shouldn't even be called seduction for lack of subtlety) and reluctantly (like the nice soda shop girl who is taken). Ryan's face only stops displaying morose self-absorption when those flashes of anger come out. Unfortunately for those in his vicinity, he gets angry often.

Jim proves more passionate in the suspect search than the others, but his rage clearly comes from areas other than wounded camaraderie. When Wilson breaks into the hideout of the killers' partner, Bernie, Ray uses shot/reverse shots to show the hood's defiance transition into utter terror when he realizes the glint in the cop's eye isn't just righteous fury.

The other cops chastise him, but, for a time, no one rushes to quell him. These streets are too jaded for anyone to really care; of course, the problem with Jim, as his partner "Pop" (Charles Kemper) notes, is that he is too sensitive, that he has never learned to cope with the harshness of the urban underworld to which other cops have inured themselves. In a cruel irony, Jim's violent explosions are his way of lamenting the lack of peace on the streets. When he beats the aforementioned Bernie, he rhetorically asks why "they" always make him get information this way, screaming his question in agony and fury. Later, when Jim beats yet another thug, he responds to Pop's intervention by shouting "How do you live with yourself?" to which the other cop sagely shouts back "I don't! I live with other people!" Wilson, so broken by the evils of the job, now cannot view anyone as human, and naturally that sorrow only turns to more anger.

This perpetual-motion anomie gives On Dangerous Ground an edge that breaks it from its otherwise formulaic, even sentimental (in the end) noir structure. But it is Ray's direction, with its recurring cues, juxtapositions and minutiae, that truly gives the film its flavor. He visualizes the overarching sense of wounded, vulnerable masculinity with relics of past athletic glory from both Jim's and Pop's pasts: Pop carries around a newspaper clipping of his football days, while Jim goes home and picks up an old trophy. These items, reminders of a time of more innocent displays of masculine bravado, give the men more comfort than their current jobs as gun-toting officers. One could also contrast the social adoration they received as star athletes to the disdain they now face as cops, as seen when they accost the wrong man for fitting a description and receive some scathing insults in return. (Ray would use the metaphor of high-school glory days again in Bigger Than Life, where a perennially deflated football makes an even stronger statement about masculine insecurity.)

When Jim gets sent to the countryside to assist with a murder (but really to get him away from the scandal of his brutality), Ray wastes little time juxtaposing the concealing, labyrinthine alleys of the urban undercity with the wide-open expanse of the country. Compared to the city, where crooks can hide mere feet away, the flat plains offer nowhere to hide. But then, that also true of the pursuers, and Ray gears up for his upcoming demystified Westerns by presenting the rural manhunt as a foil for the urban one. He links the two by connecting the swarming precinct with the lawless posse rounded up by Walter Brent (Ward Bond), the local farmer whose daughter was killed. The difference, of course, is that where the cops at least had to follow some letter of the law, the posse doesn't even get off the grounds before shooting up a storm. That unrestrained display of bloodthirst and the naked exposure and smaller population only magnifies the sense of wayward masculinity and isolation.

Jim sarcastically refers to this snowy retreat as Siberia to comment upon his banishment, a description that initially conflicts with the idyll and beauty of the surrounding. Nevertheless, Ray frames Wilson's arrival at the Brent homestead with an interior shot looking out the door to show chicken wire surrounding the place, combining with the bars of the window pane to subtly refashion the house into a prison.

This opened-up setting gives Ray compositional variance, but whether he's shooting angular, claustrophobic alleys or panoramas, he always stresses Jim's separation and despair. Brent is none too pleased to see this "city cop" (words he repeatedly hisses as if quickly venting steam to prevent an explosion), but the raging Jim clearly approves of the more direct and vengeful retribution of the country. When Brent leads his posse out of his farm, he looks back angrily to Wilson expecting liberal disgust and an order to cease this nonsense. Instead, he sees only Jim smiling with grim satisfaction and approval, and Walter suddenly looks unsettled by the tacit permission he's received.

The film takes another turn when Jim and Walter, separated from the rest, approach a lonely house on a hill where a lone light soon extinguishes itself. Convinced the killer has hidden here, they storm up the door and beat on the door, only for a blind woman, Mary (Ida Lupino), to answer. Lupino's face carries concern, worry, blank innocence but also awareness and intelligence. To look at her is to know at once that she's covering for someone but to also know that she means no harm and does not wish to deceive anyone for any reason other than to protect her brother. She instantly throws off the balance of the film, and Ryan blanches when confronted with her, his bitterness and rage momentarily set aside. Ray's framing of the men's search of the house casts them as intruders, their shadows dancing along the walls as Mary sits in a chair looking blankly ahead.

Mary brings out the psychological aspects behind Jim: when he tells her his profession, she asks him, "How is it to be a cop?" an awkward phrasing that inadvertently casts a pathetic attempt at ingratiating distraction as an existential prompt. She notes that he does not treat or speak to her with condescension or sadness, unaware that Wilson is too consumed with his own self-pity to spare any for another person. Nevertheless, she sparks a clear change in him, and though he knows she's hiding someone, his anger dissipates. Jim even behaves like a police officer around Walter, calming down the man, unloading his shotgun and even showing simple human decency in draping a blanket over the man when they stay over at Mary's house. When he goes out hunting for Mary's brother, Danny, he does so with an intent to bring the boy back for a fair trial, not to beat or kill him.

It's a fast turn-around, but Lupino has enough effect to make it plausible, if still improbable. But Ray never lets the film flag, and his handling of Danny is dark and precisely executed. He introduces the deranged lad through the knife he used to kill the girl, the steel of the blade glinting in the dark cellar where he hides, blindly brandished at the beckoning sister who stands at the top of the cellar surrounded by sky and light like the Holy Mother for whom her name derives. Later, when Jim chases the man to an abandoned shack, Danny backs toward a window that casts his knife arm in light while leaving the rest of him darker. A shot of Jim appraising the situation in the middle ground keeps Danny's knife arm in the foreground. Finally, Ray cuts to an extreme close-up of the knife as he threatens Jim, Danny's entire being focused into the weapon until it becomes his visual representation.

This is but one small example of the masterful technique Ray had already consolidated by this point. Early examples of hand-held shots add frenzy to foot chases, while Ray sends a camera tumbling and unfocusing later to capture the feeling of Jim's and Walter's car accident. Those rawer moments add excitement to the movie, as does the elegant shadow work Ray manages even in the bright, wide-open countryside in daylight.

Herrmann's score is also a driving force: led, intriguingly, by the woodwinds, the melodies are forceful but necessarily wary until the brass and strings pick up the music and explode. Herrmann also knows the importance of silence, inserting a key break at the height of the climax, letting the ominous sound of falling pebbles skittering down a rock face communicate the mood and queasy feeling of the resolution of the chase before the music returns.

The film ends with predictable optimism despite its narrative conclusion (Howard Hughes overrode Ray's desire for a more downbeat conclusion), but Ray undercuts much of the sappiness by letting the dour dénouement truly sink in. Mary, already stiff-faced, now looks practically catatonic, and a shamed Jim speaks even less than she does. For all his vivid, impassioned Romanticism, Ray was also capable of somber grace, and he imbues these last moments with elegance. A fade from rural to urban captures a retreating Jim at a metaphorical crossroads, while a joining of hands shows Jim's and Mary's union. With such gentle work, suddenly the harsh, cold plains look inviting and fulfilling.

A Woman's Secret (Nicholas Ray, 1949)

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

A Woman's Secret feels like a test run for its maker. It presages the following year's far more sturdy and aesthetically adveturous Born to Be Bad in its plot elements and noir-tinctured melodrama. Yet if the film looks forward to Ray's career to come, it also represents a step backwards for the man whose raw energy made They Live By Night one of the emotive of noirs. A Woman's Secret (a misnomer, as there's no real mystery in this movie), is too buttoned down, too reminiscent of better movies made before and since, to make much of an impact for anyone save Ray completists.

Herman J. Mankiewicz's script conveys his caustic brand of wit, but his screenplay bizarrely seems a first draft of his brother Joseph's superior treatment of All About Eve, which makes pointed satire out of the broader showbiz melancholy seen here. But the flashback structure he used to unravel the life of Charles Foster Kane works better to contextualize and empathize with a character. As he tries to string out a series of self-serving recollections from truth-twisting suspects and lawyers, Mankiewicz fails to maintain any suspense, and by the time a key clue unlocks the story, the narrative has moved in such a disjointed, uninterested fashion that one is hard-pressed to care. This is the only film I can think of that can begin with a woman shooting another woman and still feel pedestrian. That is is a Nicholas Ray film makes its zero-Kelvin stagnation all the more upsetting.

The alleged shooter in question is Marion Washburn (Maureen O'Hara), a has-been singer who lived vicariously through her discovery, Susan (Gloria Grahame). Susan announces her intention to quit, and when Marion follows her off-screen, a gunshot is soon heard. Marion confesses, but obviously this cannot be all, as we still have 82 minutes to go. Flashbacks explain not only Susan's discovery but the lives of Marion and her piano player Luke Jordan (Melvyn Douglas) as they intertwine around this limited but ambitious star whose Nowheresville brightness makes her as appealing as it does dim and prone to mistakes. Grahame's singing is limp, but her presence turns her expressionless face into the ultimate come-on of the Madonna. Where Eve Harrington climbed over bodies to get to the top, Susan enjoys the life of fame less and less as she becomes increasingly exposed to it, but that just won't do for either Marion or Luke.

Ironically, Susan's emotional breakdown from the pressure of manipulation has less humanity than the scheming evils of All About Eve. Mankiewicz's inert script soon slows even the charm of his wit, and not even Melvyn Douglas' refined know-it-all can inject life into this foregone conclusion. Following the nighttime desires of They Live By Night and the social criticism of Knock on Any Door, Ray wants to get at more interior concerns, to dig at the emotional states behind closed doors and bourgeois parlors. In theory, this should be a significant stepping stone for Ray, who would devote almost the entirety his career afterwards to subverting and deconstruction suburban middle-class domesticity. In practice, however, the film still feels like it wants solely to be a whydunit that puts far too much confidence in the drawing power of its narrative.

This is not to say that the film suffers for being cold. The following year's Born to Be Bad—a film that would line up with far more parallels with All About Eve—is almost glacial in its walled-off, unevolving emotions. But that film nevertheless showed Ray's wicked side, and its ironic edge showed a filmmaker sorting out what he wanted to say about the true worth of our system of values in physical and mental interiors. He just hadn't figured out how to subsume it into a passionate narrative yet. A Woman's Secret, on the other hand, wants to be passionate, wants to make us care and to be invested in its final twist. Yet after seeing a few of the director's compromised misfires and other intriguing but uneven efforts, I was most troubled to finally come across something unique: the first utterly dull Nicholas Ray film.

Born to Be Bad (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

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

What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification. Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve, Christabel (Joan Fontaine) is charming to the point of childlike innocence. Yet just as Eve's fresh-of-the-bus sunniness belied a stop-at-nothing ambition to supplant her idol, so too does Christabel's sweetness soon give way to complete manipulation as she guns for the wealth of her cousin's fiancé. With Fontaine herself being wooed at the time by Ray's RKO boss, Howard Hughes, Ray's not-so-subtle jabs remind one of the jabs of Citizen Kane. But just imagine if Orson Welles had made that movie with Hearst's money.

More worthy of attention is Ray's style, which begins to show its true flashes of aesthetic invention that would make him the greatest director of the '50s. His use of doorways and other frames-within-frames emerges here with numerous shots that isolate characters and open up the mise-en-scène with unexpected entrances and transitions. Deep-focus photography captures the domestic boilerplate in crisp detail, allowing for all the objects to play their role in presenting domestic comfort surrounding inner turmoil. This, of course, would become the dominant form of Ray's thematic expression over the next decade, and Ray's background as an architectural apprentice under Frank Lloyd Wright is vividly on display even in this formative early work.

Despite this background, Ray never lets his specialty in one art detract from his new choice of medium, and what makes Born to Be Bad engaging is less the rigor of its set design than the construction and flow of the images. Dave Kehr summed up Ray's ingenious editing rhythm nicely: "Ray insistently cuts on movement, giving the whole film an effective instability; every sequence seems volatile, every exchange of looks a threat." The edits tend to occur on walks, arm movements, head turns and other acts of great and minor locomotion, pushing the visuals ahead with more steam as the narrative remains inside decorated walls and ballrooms, creating a conflicting pace that spins the film slowly off its axis. Nicholas Musuraca's sharp cinematography defines the objects by their edges, constantly anticipating some new turn of events that will change the narrative direction yet again. That is not to say that the film ever plumbs the surreal depths of later movies like Johnny Guitar, but one can see how Ray arrived at that point with this early experiment in structural conflict.

Ray's formal growth is also aided by solid dialogue packed with innuendo as Christabel (Fontaine) constantly seduces, deflects and manipulates. But she doesn't even have the best lines. Nick (Robert Ryan), a writer supported by Chris' cousin Donna (Joan Leslie), covers up a faint vulnerability with braggadocio and wit. "You seen the view? It's better with me in it," he teases Christabel, who is too busy setting her sights on the rich Curtis (Zachary Scott) to particularly care for him. But it is Mel Ferrer as Gabriel, the artist who hangs around this wealthy family, who steals the show. Barely closeted, "Gobby" serves as a bitchy Greek chorus, his pithy summaries and barbs as laser-precise as they are hilarious.

Ferrer's performance is the most interesting one from the historical perspective of dealing with gays in Hollywood, but several of the actors give unorthodox performances. Scott, the rich man who wants to be sure he is being married for love, nonetheless becomes a pawn of Fontaine's passive-aggressive campaign to loot him. Fontaine herself shines as the airy demon who turns "Surely you don't think I had anything to do with this?" into a musical motif. Ryan, in the first of four collaborations with Ray, shines by virtue of that wonderful face of his, trapped not in agelessness but in the nebula between youth and old age. The sadness in his face, whether stressing over his book or pining for the woman he sees through but cannot resist anyway, brings out the lines of his lonely mug. Conversely, when he hears any good news, the huge glee on his face shaves off 20 years, but this only creates a constant oscillation, making Ryan uncomfortable in his own skin. Though he gets many defiant lines, one look into Ryan's face and you can see darker, more complex emotions at play.

Though Christabel's lies eventually catch up with her, as they must, she remains defiant to the end, not only unrepentant but uninterrupted in her continued strand of lies, this time aimed at third parties who can ensure damage control if she acts fast. Where the film falters is in sympathizing with the victims of Chris' schemes when the actors make these characters out to be just as culpable. Nick knows that he's being used but likes the sex, while Scott shows how easily men of wealth will preemptively strike to protect their money. Even Leslie, playing the straight man in this melodrama, uses that calmness against Donna by having her sit by and accept what her cousin does to her so as to avoid worsening the scandal. The actors and Ray move the film into more complex areas, but the narrative, despite the padding of its rich dialogue and a few quirks, holds the movie back.

Thankfully, Ray takes the wheel himself in the film's coda, closing via Gobby's sense of barely contained joy as the fallout from all this scandal drives up the prices for his portraits, even using his Greek chorus-like status to see more developments (like Christabel wooing her divorce lawyer) to keep raising the asking price. It's a wry, clever demonstration that Ray increasing ability to capture everything through the images. Granted, the film's coldness sets it apart from Ray's other works even as it starts to pour in the foundation for his later domestic critiques. But if Born to Be Bad is more noteworthy for its glimpse into an advancing artist, the fact that it's someone as talented as Ray should make it worth more consideration than merely 1950's second-best ode to a bitchy, unrepentant social climber.

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.

Flying Leathernecks (Nicholas Ray, 1951)

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

Though Flying Leathernecks is a solid war movie in terms of its construction, the drama that must have happened behind the camera is infinitely more appealing than the one that unfolded before it. Nicholas Ray and Robert Ryan, both committed liberals (Ray a former Communist and Ryan a pacifist) clashed with John Wayne, an actor whose personal beliefs and professional style could not have put him more at odds with Ray if he'd actively been trying to mess with the emerging director. The film itself is purported to exist primarily as one of RKO head Howard Hughes' patriot cred pictures to defend himself from accusations of Commie ties. Watching the various dealings, spats and good old-fashioned passive-aggression at work on this movie would make for one hell of an experience.

Nevertheless, the film is not quite so stupid as its shallow jingoism. Granted, its use of newsreel combat footage, incessant validation of Wayne's reluctant but dedicated warrior act and push for strict discipline make it a traditional war movie through and through. But Ray, who may not have cared as much as he did for films that more adequately reflected his beliefs, nevertheless finds a few moments of intelligence and character in the conflict between experienced professional Maj. Daniel Kirby (Wayne) and Capt. Carl Griffin (Ryan), the too-chummy officer who values the casual approval of his hotshot pilots over proper military decorum.

Although Hughes clearly wanted the film to support the military, Ray also suggests that Ryan's character, who would be closer to his own, is unfit for command, unable to make the sacrifices necessary to lead successful missions. Where Ray obviously differs from the film's validation of Wayne's character is that he and Ryan would doubtlessly be more than happy not to fit into a war zone. But Wayne's Kirby is not as cold as he seems: he does not send men to their deaths casually and takes every loss personally, writing letters of condolence to the families instead of letting the chaplain handle such matters. The lack of mail Kirby himself receives on a consistent basis may also be a motivating factor in this commitment, one of the few aspects of the film to feel like it belongs in a Nick Ray movie.

Earlier I used the word "solid" to describe the film, and that is chiefly its problem: Ray is not a solid director. He is a filmmaker of passions and politics and romances and dances and existential fights to inevitable deaths. The constant use of newsreel footage denies him full aesthetic control leading to sizable portions of the film in which his mastery of form is not on display, and the irritation he must have felt carries over into the shots that actually are his, few of which even remotely suggest Ray's hand. Compare this, his first film in color, to his next one, Johnny Guitar, and the difference is too vast to be the result of a learning curve. What's more, stack up the glorified battle footage here with the taut, grisly, repellent action shots in Bitter Victory to get an idea of where Ray's true and deeply held opinions on war lied. I'm not saying the director was forcibly stifled, but he clearly felt boxed in by the project.

Wayne and Ray are not an actor-director pair that was ever meant to be, Wayne's style of playing icons wholly at odds with Ray's ability to make icons of humans. Still, the shotgun marriage of their collaboration works a lot better than I would expected, especially as Ryan makes Wayne look even better by venting his frustrations through overacting. In comparison, Wayne is reserved, always resigned and only just capable of holding back his regrets for putting these men in harm's way even as he also conveys steely conviction to doing his duty. Even when he gets sent back home briefly after his tactics prove instrumental to taking Guadalcanal, Kirby never gives into the rousing celebration the film around him perpetually sells with its boisterous music, instead cherishing the moments with his family before his inevitable reassignment.

Ray even builds his most characteristic scene around Wayne when Kirby speaks to a pilot who lost his leg in a crash. Mostly holding on a close-up of the man's sweat-drenched face as he instructs the major on what to write back to his folks about the wound, mixing brave selflessness with bitter irony, is a touching scene, and one that brings out a great deal of humanity and empathy in Wayne. Other shots, such as those of men in foxholes being unheroically blown to bits by artillery fire or a prolonged bit of stock footage that lingers on a plane crash as a fireball silently blossoms into the sky, also feel like Ray moments in a movie that otherwise feels uncomfortably workmanlike.

There is something fascinating in all of Ray's films, but Flying Leathernecks is the first time that most of the intrigue exists outside of the film and in its production, and this is well before Ray fell into deep, deep alcoholism. Buoyed by an unexpectedly affecting performance from John Wayne and an amusingly edgy Ryan, Flying Leathernecks proves that even at his most disinterested and artistically absent, Ray could never be outright terrible. Having said that, this is the first of his films that I've seen where I would freely consider stopping and doing anything else while watching it.

Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

My review for Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray's narrow-framed but epic-scope Western, is up now at Cinelogue. A gender-bending, brazenly political film, Johnny Guitar was not Ray's first foray into color film but most directly points to his legendary uses of CinemaScope to follow. Frankly, the only film I can think of that uses color better and to more deliberately artful effect is Powell/Pressburger's Black Narcissus. Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge give electrifying performances as women locked in a rivalry of sexual expression and repression, while Sterling Hayden's masculine presence is undermined routinely by gentle, even plaintive emotion. It's a wild film from start to finish, and one of Ray's best films, second perhaps only to Bigger Than Life.

So please head to Cinelogue and check out my review. Comments appreciated.