Nicholas Ray’s Hollywood Counterculture

Last Saturday, arsenic portion of “Tales from The New Yorker,” a two-week programme astatine Film Forum that celebrates the magazine’s centenary with movies that person a transportation to its writers and their work, I introduced a screening of Nicholas Ray’s 1956 melodrama “Bigger Than Life,” which is based connected an Annals of Medicine portion titled “Ten Feet Tall,” by Berton Roueché, successful the September 10, 1955, issue. I’ve been somewhat obsessed by this movie for decades and person written astir it before, but, to hole my introduction, I work up connected its genesis, and this caller space of introduction proved revelatory—regarding not conscionable the movie but the past of cinema and Ray’s distinctive spot successful that history. In the backstory of “Bigger Than Life,” the tone of its cinematic times emerges, and reverberates adjacent to the contiguous day.

Roueché’s nonfiction is astir a schoolteacher successful Queens who falls severely sick with a malady that his doctors conflict to diagnose. While successful the hospital, he’s recovered to person a uncommon vascular inflammation that’s invariably fatal. But helium is fixed a recently developed medicine—cortisone (and the related substance ACTH)—and recovers, returning location to his woman and young lad and resuming work. There is simply a broadside effect, however: drug-induced psychosis. The teacher gets delusions of grandeur, behaving tyrannically toward his family. He yields to chaotic impulses and endures crushing temper swings. His behaviour strains his marriage. Eventually, his doctors set his attraction truthful that helium tin enactment some steadfast and sane. The movie mentation is acceptable successful an anonymous suburb, and it stars James Mason—who besides produced the film—as Ed Avery, the teacher. Barbara Rush co-stars arsenic Ed’s wife, Lou; Christopher Olsen plays their son; and Walter Matthau plays Ed’s gym-teacher colleague.

The task came unneurotic portion Ray was successful Europe, successful precocious 1955, to beforehand “Rebel Without a Cause,” starring James Dean. Mason recovered the communicative and pitched it to Twentieth Century Fox, wherever helium was nether contract. After seeing “Rebel,” helium chose Ray, besides nether declaration astatine Fox, to direct, and Ray, speechmaking the communicative successful Paris, was enthusiastic. By the clip Ray got backmost to Hollywood, successful January, 1956, a publication had already been written by Richard Maibaum, who aboriginal made his sanction penning thirteen James Bond movies, and a erstwhile novelist named Cyril Hume. (The making of the movie is elaborate successful a biography of Ray by the French professional Bernard Eisenschitz, from 1990, and another, by Patrick McGilligan, from 2011.)

Ray didn’t similar the script; Mason was consenting to enactment with Ray connected a revision, but Ray wanted to bring successful the playwright Clifford Odets (then besides successful Hollywood) to redo it. Mason refused this request. But Ray—together with Gavin Lambert, a British writer who was romantically progressive with Ray and was hired officially arsenic a dialog manager but who was Ray’s unofficial creator consultant—consulted Odets nonetheless. Ray had a large occupation with the ending, and helium snuck Odets onto the acceptable to revise it, connected a portable typewriter. According to Mason, 3 workplace executives, getting upwind of Odets’s presence, stormed toward the acceptable to forestall Ray from filming what hadn’t been “approved.” Mason, with admirable assurance successful his director, headed them off.

The workplace did win successful preventing Ray from changing immoderate parts of the script, but the manager had different ways of fixing things, arsenic Lambert writes successful his bonzer memoir, “Mainly About Lindsay Anderson”:

Forbidden to marque a constituent verbally, Nick had an bonzer flair for making it visually. He wanted to adhd immoderate dialog astir the medical profession’s carelessness successful prescribing caller “wonder drugs” whose broadside effects had not been thoroughly monitored, but under pressure from the American Medical Association, the workplace vetoed the idea. So helium formed immoderate tough-looking actors to play the doctors, and shot them astir ever connected the move, successful dark-suited, gangsterish cabals of 2 and three. “How I sprout depends connected what I privation to get away with—to fool the censor, the beforehand office, whoever—or how confident I consciousness astir the country arsenic written,” Nick told me.

With classical Hollywood, don’t judge the credits: the amended the filmmaker, the greater the engagement successful the assorted elements of production. On “Bigger Than Life,” Ray’s sole recognition is arsenic director, but helium was intimately progressive successful the penning and the editing, and overmuch much besides. He played a cardinal relation successful the accumulation design, and his usage of colour is startling, eerie, disruptive. The movie is afloat of eye-catching colors: high-style dresses that Ed forces Lou to effort on; a reddish overgarment (as successful “Rebel Without a Cause”) that their lad wears; the reddish edging of Ed’s Bible; supra all, a unusual small purple vessel of Ed’s medicine. The movie’s lurid hues travel disconnected arsenic ominous intrusions, disturbances of the regular order. Ray wasn’t the cinematographer (Joseph MacDonald was), but, nether Ray’s direction, the film—shot successful the widescreen CinemaScope format—departed importantly from manufacture norms. Defying nonrecreational orthodoxies astir keeping widescreen framings wide and widescreen editing simple, Ray relies copiously connected closeups, speedy montages, and distorting and disorienting diagonal angles.

Ray’s basal occupation with the archetypal script, by Maibaum and Hume, was that, sticking adjacent to Roueché’s article, it remained narrowly a communicative of aesculapian mystery. As Lambert recalled, Ray “found the narration betwixt the schoolteacher and his woman precise shallow, the aesculapian details presented ‘with shots of trial tubes and microscopes consecutive retired of The Story of Louis Pasteur [1936],’ and the ending anticlimactic.” Maibaum complained (in an interrogation by McGilligan) astir the director’s reworking of the film: “Ray exaggerated immoderate scenes and diluted others. Some directors don’t recognize that determination are scenes that are similar music: if you sound retired a fewer notes, it becomes discordant.”

In “Bigger Than Life,” Ray turned a aesculapian enigma into an existential disaster. He treats the cause arsenic thing similar a information serum that pushes Ed Avery’s petty discontents to extremist extremes, his progressively deranged ideas expressing things that were latent: his boredom with the radical successful his milieu and with himself, his disdain for the frivolity of wide culture, his vexation with his job’s bureaucratic routine. Ed’s monstrous behaviour nether the power of cortisone shatters the veneer of middle-class gentility to uncover the responsibility lines repressed beneath it. In his marriage, solicitude becomes control; astatine schoolhouse and astatine home, acquisition becomes despotism. Commonplace virtues crook toward vice: compassion veers toward deceit, attentive parenting toward either laxity oregon oppressiveness, relationship toward jealousy oregon contempt, sociability toward falsehood oregon cruelty. This fraying of each basal bonds leaves everyone—whether successful the family, the workplace, the neighborhood, oregon the societal set—irreparably alone. Ray made “Bigger Than Life” not discordant but atonal.

In definite circles, the sanction of Nicholas Ray is thing of a meme, astir a punch line. Just arsenic Jerry Lewis’s sanction is astir synonymous with “They emotion him successful France,” Ray’s sanction is practically a synonym for “auteur.” In the fifties, for the young French critics astatine the mag Cahiers du Cinéma—who would soon go the French New Wave directors—Ray was much than a hero; helium was an exemplar. Writing successful 1955, François Truffaut called him “an auteur successful our consciousness of the word,” and Éric Rohmer said that some helium and his fellow-critic Jacques Rivette considered Ray to beryllium “the greatest . . . of the caller procreation of American filmmakers.” In 1957, Jean-Luc Godard wrote, “If the cinema nary longer existed, Nicholas Ray unsocial gives the content of being susceptible of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to,” and, the pursuing year, declared, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.” For his part, Ray was profoundly gratified by these young French cinephiles’ emotion for his films, because, successful the United States, helium was astir anonymous, and his unorthodox films were often reviewed harshly. By contrast, arsenic Ray enactment it, astatine Cahiers, Arts (where Truffaut wrote), and the British mag Sight and Sound (which Lambert edited), “The interaction was established.”

Yet determination was thing paradoxical astir the Cahiers critics’ fervor for Ray. They had got the nickname the Hitchcocko-Hawksians due to the fact that the 2 Hollywood filmmakers for whom they asserted their lawsuit astir vigorously and insistently were Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. (In 1952, Godard called Hawks “the top American artist.”) But those directors, who were calved successful the eighteen-nineties and started their directorial careers successful the nineteen-twenties, were of a antithetic procreation than Ray, who was calved successful 1911, and who didn’t marque his archetypal film, “They Live by Night,” until 1948. That was the aforesaid twelvemonth that the young Rivette made his archetypal (albeit D.I.Y.) film; for France’s young critics, Ray seemed astir a contemporary.

Moreover, Hitchcock and Hawks were Hollywood insiders, good regarded successful the manufacture arsenic showmen and craftsmen, albeit not arsenic artists (something they’d ne'er person claimed publicly, though they were). Ray, however, was temperamentally an outsider, not slightest due to the fact that helium was unfastened astir who helium was and what benignant of ambitions helium had. In this regard, too, helium was the young French critics’ peer. He self-consciously defined the cinema arsenic creation and likened his ain enactment to that of an author, telling the Cahiers professional Charles Bitsch, successful 1958, “The camera is an instrument, it’s the microscope that makes it imaginable to observe the melody of the gaze. It’s a magnificent instrument, due to the fact that its microscopic powerfulness is, for me, the equivalent of a writer’s introspection, and the unspooling of movie successful the camera represents, successful my view, the writer’s watercourse of thought.” Though helium didn’t marque this declaration until helium was already lionized successful France, the cognition it expresses had been connected wide show successful his enactment from the start, on with a consciousness of solitude and alienation, arsenic suggested adjacent by immoderate of his champion films’ titles: “In a Lonely Place,” “On Dangerous Ground,” “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Ray told Bitsch that his “personal label” was “I’m a alien present myself,” which is besides a enactment delivered successful Ray’s 1954 Western, “Johnny Guitar,” by Sterling Hayden, who, successful the rubric role, gives the coolest show successful immoderate classical Hollywood movie—except, maybe, for James Dean, successful “Rebel.” Ray and Dean had go adjacent friends and formed their ain accumulation company, readying to marque 2 movies unneurotic successful abbreviated order; Dean died earlier they could recognize their plans. Ray wanted different king of cognition to prima successful his adjacent film, “The True Story of Jesse James”: Elvis Presley. (The workplace gave him Robert Wagner instead.)

Unlike Hitchcock, Hawks, oregon immoderate different Hollywood manager of the era, Ray was a fig of the counterculture. In the aboriginal nineteen-fifties (even the precocious forties), helium was already a idiosyncratic of the sixties—not conscionable earlier the Beatles but earlier the Beats. It’s hard to deliberation of anyone who played a akin relation truthful prominently astatine the time. Despite moving successful a lucrative and glitzy field, helium was fundamentally a bohemian adjacent of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Dylan Thomas. Hitchcock and Hawks weren’t outsiders; they cloaked their boldness successful bonhomie. And Orson Welles, though younger than Ray, having been calved successful 1915, nevertheless seemed older, having achieved fame and creator greatness during the Depression. Ray, though successful his forties, was astatine 1 with younker successful revolt.

What is an auteur? It’s not a manager who makes films that look a definite way, not a filmmaker who pursues a acceptable of themes consistently implicit the people of a career. It’s not a presumption that tin beryllium proved empirically, due to the fact that the thought of the auteur—of the manager arsenic the cinematic counterpart to, and adjacent of, the writer of a novel—isn’t a theory. It’s an experience, a consciousness of contiguous connection with an creator who’s obscurity connected the surface and yet everyplace successful the movie. It’s the consciousness that determination is idiosyncratic there, whose movie is successful effect a first-person discourse—which is to say, it’s an fundamentally literary, metaphorical phenomenon, not an empirical one. The investigation of style, form, and contented belongs to critics everywhere; but the young Cahiers critics, successful conjuring the characters of directors, were watching films not arsenic critics but arsenic the artists that they intended to beryllium and, by temperament, already were. They treated disapproval arsenic an creator enactment and past proved its validity with the movies that they went connected to make. And the creator they recognized astir keenly and embraced astir fervently was the 1 who, of each Hollywood filmmakers, was astir similar themselves—or similar however they wanted to be. To ticker movies auteuristically is to ticker them similar an artist; to contradict the primacy of directorial creation and ascribe authorship to the strategy is to ticker movies similar a suit. ♦