Nicholas Ray

A. O. SCOTT

The New York Times

It is a curious coincidence — but then again, as they say, probably no accident — that Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” was released in the same year (1950) as Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard.” Both films cast a dark, cynical, knowing eye on life in Hollywood, and both concern screenwriters down on their luck and hoping for a break. While neither refers to the political unease infesting the film colony at that blacklist-haunted moment, both seethe with unspoken paranoia and anxiety, with a sense of imminent betrayal and lurking menace.
Wilder’s characters — the thwarted young writer played by William Holden and the moldering, reclusive former star incarnated by Gloria Swanson — are specimens of spiritual malaise and moral decay, held up to ruthless analytical scrutiny. Ray, laying hold of similarly ripe psychological material, handles it with an empathy that is at least as disconcerting as Wilder’s rigor.
“In a Lonely Place,” which begins a weeklong run at Film Forum on Friday, leading into “Nick Ray,” a 14-film retrospective of his work, obeys the rules of the film noir genre dutifully enough, though Ray, as was his custom when circumstances allowed, took some liberties with the original script, which was adapted by Andrew Solt from a story by Dorothy B. Hughes. There is a murder, a police investigation, a star-crossed love affair and violence that erupts suddenly and scarily. But this is not a crime story, and certainly not much of a whodunit, even though it stars Humphrey Bogart, the most recognizable movie detective of the previous decade.

Bogart, in this picture, plays an artist rather than a gumshoe, and his co-star, Gloria Grahame (on her way to being the director’s ex-wife when the movie was shot), turns out to be more of a sensitive soul than a femme fatale. And as is almost always the case in Ray’s best movies, whether westerns, war epics or gangster melodramas, the genre paradigm is a loose and fungible framework, a scaffolding for the flights of intense and painful feeling that were the director’s specialty.
Ray’s career in Hollywood was relatively brief and frequently frustrating. He flourished in the 1950s and was responsible for one of the decade’s cinematic touchstones, “Rebel Without a Cause.” That movie, like “In a Lonely Place,” takes a fairly conventional template and fills it with wild, extravagant emotions and hyperbolically expressive cinematic effects.
“Rebel” is, superficially at least, a social-problem melodrama grounded in contemporary concerns about juvenile delinquency. But handwringing sociological diagnoses are really the last thing on its mind, and the rebellion the film dramatizes is more metaphysical — or, to use a fashionable word of the period, existential — than anything else. The rage of Jim Stark, as embodied by James Dean, is out of all proportion to Jim’s circumstances, and the excessive, irrational force of this passion is Ray’s great subject and his signature.
Dixon Steele, the antihero of “In a Lonely Place,” is similarly subject to unruly tempests of emotion. Whether his volatility is a matter of abnormal psychology or creative temperament is a question earnestly posed within the movie, but also something of a red herring. As with Jim Stark, any attempt to pin down or pigeonhole Dixon would be the worst kind of abuse, even as the force of his personality leads him inevitably toward a tragic state of solitude.
With his battered charm, his impulsive generosity and his volatile temper, Dixon was said by many who knew Bogart to be as close to his real self as he ever came on screen. The film, Ray’s second with Bogart (following “Knock on Any Door” in 1949), was personal for the director as well. The apartment complex where much of the action takes place — where Dixon falls for his neighbor Laurel Gray (Grahame) — was a nearly exact model of the place Ray lived when he first came to Los Angeles.
It is a comfortable enough place, where Dixon brings a coat-check girl from his favorite watering hole after hours one night. When she turns up dead, suspicion settles on the writer, whose history of violence is soon revealed and who is let off the hook, at least temporarily, by Laurel, who supports his alibi and takes a shine to him on the basis of his interesting face. And their brief happiness together somehow intensifies the dread that wells up in George Antheil’s score and seeps into the narrow, assymetrical monochrome compositions of the cinematographer Burnett Guffey.
There is some suspense in the story but not much doubt about how things will end. Throughout, though, the details of the plot register less than the shadings of emotion, as the center of attention pivots from Dixon’s anger to Laurel’s fear. And these emotions have the effect of isolating these two loners, who had found a measure of companionship together, from each other and from everyone else around them.
“In a Lonely Place,” like “Rebel Without a Cause,” "Hot Blood,"“Bigger Than Life” and “Bitter Victory,” is a Nicholas Ray movie whose title would suit just about any of them. There may be no other director in the Hollywood mainstream (where Ray was never altogether comfortable) whose vision is at once so bleak and so luxuriously satisfying. As the ’50s went on, he shifted from black and white to Technicolor and CinemaScope, and the deep colors and widescreen format brought his blend of Method naturalism, psychosexual subtext and operatic scale to lustrous and splendid new life.
“In a Lonely Place” and the generous retrospective that follows cover both the high points and some of the hidden corners of Ray’s oeuvre (see box). The most striking and durable characteristic of these films is their strangeness — they look and feel like no other movies, and yet each takes you to a place you can’t help recognizing.
Da The New York Times, 17 Luglio 2009

FERNALDO DI GIAMMATTEO

Uomo di sinistra, proveniente da una famiglia di origine norvegese, allievo di Frank Lloyd Wright a Taliesin, partecipa all'attività di alcune compagnie teatrali prima di approdare a New York e lavorare con Elia Kazan e John Houseman. Durante la guerra realizza trasmissioni radiofoniche di. Propaganda. Assiste Kazan nella sua prima regia cinematografica ( Un albero cresce a Brooklyn, 1945) ed esordisce a sua volta nel 1947 con La donna del bandito. Notevole per l'approfondita analisi del contesto sociale, e per la intensa interpretazione di Humphrey Bogart, è il successivo film giudiziario I bassifondi di San Francisco (1948); mentre sembrano appartenere alla ordinaria amministrazione di un buon professionista i film che seguono, numerosi. Solo con il 1953 si giunge alla svolta che porrà Ray in cima ai pensieri dei cinefili, soprattutto europei. Con la collaborazione dello sceneggiatore Philip Yordan e quella (preziosa) dell'operatore Harry Stradling, il regista costruisce un teso melodramma a colori di ambiente western in cui molti vedono un gesto di rivolta contro la persecuzione maccartista e alcuni addirittura una reminiscenza della tragedia greca, grazie a due protagonisti «maledetti» e disperati nella loro eroica solitudine (Joan Crawford-e Sterling Hayden): Johnny Guitar.

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