Nicholas Ray

Abstract

Nicholas Ray (b. 1911–d. 1979), the director of Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar, In a Lonely Place, and other Hollywood films from 1947 to 1958, came to filmmaking with a diverse artistic background from the 1930s. As a student of architecture, he was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, and, as an actor, he was a member of the socialist-leaning New York City acting company the Theatre of Action, which associated with the Group Theatre. He also served in various New Deal agencies—the Works Progress Administration, the US Department of Agriculture’s Resettlement Administration, and the Office of War Information—that immersed him in American folk culture before moving to Hollywood. In cinema studies, he is best known as the American test case for auteurist film criticism. Discovered by the French critics at Cahiers du Cinéma after World War II, Ray was celebrated as an auteur, a director with a consistent signature style and personal vision who (like an author) is understood to be the single force of control that structures the entire film. Yet, at the mercy of producers and executives, he also worked within classical studio and genre systems and was generally unknown or ignored in the United States at this time. After directing his final studio film, Party Girl, in 1958, Ray spent the late 1950s and 1960s outside of Hollywood, helming a series of international co-productions. Throughout the 1960s, he would struggle to finance projects independently; his unrealized efforts during this period include an adaptation of the Dylan Thomas story The Doctor and the Devils and a film about the trial of the Chicago Seven. Ray spent much of the 1960s outside of the United States, attending retrospectives of his work, living in Paris during the student protests of 1968 and attempting to put together production deals. In the 1970s, Ray returned to America, eventually taking a job as a film professor at Harpur College at Binghamton University, State University of New York. With his students, Ray would embark on his ambitious final project, a multi-image experimental film entitled We Can’t Go Home Again. The film would remain unfinished at the time of the director’s death, but, in 2011, it was restored by his widow, Susan Ray. While underappreciated by critics in America during his career in the 1950s, the critical studies referenced below demonstrate the ongoing importance of Ray’s films to cinema scholars.