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Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray
Birth name Raymond Nicholas Kienzle
Birth 7 August 1911
Galesville , Wisconsin
United States
Nationality Flag of the United States U.S.
Deaths 16 June 1979 (67 years)
New York , NY
United States
Occupation (s) Director , screenwriter , actor
Notable Films Lovers of the night ,
Johnny Guitar ,
The Rebel ,
Trap ,
The 55 Days at Peking

Nicholas Ray, whose real name Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, is a director , screenwriter and actor American born on 7 August 1911 in Galesville ( Wis. ), who died on 16 June 1979 in New York ( New York ).

Summary

/ / Biography

He is the youngest of four children. His father, who has already had two daughters from a previous marriage, is an alcoholic. German Catholic , he became a Lutheran. Her mother works in the arts.

Nicholas Ray studied first at the University of Chicago, he left in 1932. He moved later to New York and changes name. Then he returned to Wisconsin, invited by Frank Lloyd Wright , with whom he studied in a school of architecture, called Taliesin. He leaves again this school ... to return to New York.

With only 100 dollars in his pocket, he joined a group of improvisational theater in New York. There he met producer Elia Kazan , best known for his unusual way of pushing students to their limits and it is this way of teaching which marks Nicholas Ray for the rest of his life. Moreover, when Kazan produced his first film in Hollywood The Lily of Brooklyn , he was hired as an assistant.

He then began making his own films. The first is entitled The Lovers of the night. In 1949, he produced A Woman's Secret , starring Gloria Grahame , whom he married after the filming. Then follow the shootings: The Streets of unhappiness with Humphrey Bogart , The Violent in 1950. Then come Born to Be Bad , from Devils Guadalcanal (with John Wayne ), The House in the shade , The Indomitable and Johnny Guitar , a success at the box office.

After this success, Nicholas Ray meets the company Warner Bros.. , who asked him to make Rebel Without a Cause. This film should be, initially, a vision of the work of Dr. Robert M. Lindner on violent teenagers. Warner Bros., which bought the rights to this work, plans to appeal to two young players ( Marlon Brando and Sidney Lumet ). However, neither is willing to participate in this project.

The topic of juvenile delinquency is pervasive in the American media has long been at the time and this encourages Ray to commit to the project. He also said about it: "This was neither the psychopath or the son of a notorious family who was interested." Soon after, however, Ray begins to write his own story, titled The Blind Run, a 17-page story flood which is a series of brutal and shocking scenes of crime. Joins her producer David Weisbart, with whom he recasts the story to make it more acceptable. Subsequently, Ray realizes the absurdity of the study including Rebel Without a Cause must explain the theories the baddies come from small families poor, the rich are the good guys. "This is totally untrue," said Ray. These are all of us. "

To refine the script for Rebel, it uses a dynamic writer of 32 years, Stewart Stern. Ray selects James Dean to play the main character in the feature film. The two men have much in common: they have had such a bad father (Dean's father abandoned him at age six years).

The soundtrack is assisted by Leonard Rosenman , who composed the music for East of Eden.

However, the Warner Bros. remaining glaze over the choice of lead actor. The company wants more young players, rising stars like Robert Wagner , Tab Hunter and John Kerr. To find the female star of the film, he appeals to Natalie Wood , then 16 years.

James Dean died shortly after, a week before the premiere of the film Giant. While his tragic destiny written in the legend, Ray is at wit's end. Dean's death is a great loss for him. Desperate to replace him, he directed The King of Kings and 55 Days at Peking. However, he suffered a heart attack on the set of 55 Days. This sounds the death knell for his career. He lost everything. It is becoming more and more excited about James Dean, saying that he bequeathed the property, such as the gun he exhibits to students at the Sorbonne.

Became an alcoholic and compulsive gambler, his fortune back by eye. In 1969, at age 58, he met at the University of Chicago its fourth and last wife, Susan Schwartz, a student aged 18.

He died of lung cancer on 16 June 1979.

Nicholas Ray and the revival of Hollywood

Nicholas Ray is one of the initiators of the evolution of cinema hollywodien in the post- World War II , among others with Elia Kazan. The salient characteristics of this new film is the figure of the anti-hero : guns away from pre-war, the main characters of these films are "losers", marginal, aging heroes or tired, out of step with their environment or their era. This is particularly true in the work of Nicholas Ray, where most often the hero or the main characters to a tragic end.

Even when he attacked a kind hollywodien par excellence, the blockbuster Bible with The King of Kings (also inspired by the master of the genre, Cecil B. De Mille , who made a film of the same title on the same theme in 1927 ), treatment of his subject remained in the tone of the rest of his filmography, as opposed to previous practice, which usually chooses his themes in the Old Testament and in any case in a laudatory approach, exultant and pious It chooses to treat that makes the heart of the New Testament and the Gospels , the life of Jesus , but focusing less on both the religious theme that earthly life of the individual in a mode of narration close to that of the peplum , which course of a objective point of view, is that of a loser, rejected by religious institutions Hebrew and sentenced to death by the Roman occupiers, if we do not consider the future of his message.

The specificity of Nicholas Ray in American cinema and especially hollywodien is that, unlike many of his contemporaries (Elia Kazan and Joseph Losey, already cited, but Jules Dassin and many other filmmakers of the early 1950s ), its filmography is listed in the "genre cinema ( westerns , film noir , blockbuster "antique", peplum ...) but also that, unlike his other contemporary "classical" in each genre in which he illustrated it the dynamite guns: the main character is often an "anti-hero," the male characters are often weak or full of doubt, in many of his films is the strong character a female figure, then it often introduces an element that will make the heart of genre films in the following decades, that of violence without purpose. The work of Sam Peckinpah or Don Siegel (though his contemporary), as well as that of many Italian directors of spaghetti western , foremost among them Sergio Leone , are greatly indebted themes and aesthetics of Nicholas Ray.

The tragedy in the work of Nicholas Ray

A paradoxical feature of this film is the lack of real suspense in his films which is nevertheless a clear majority (film noir, westerns, thrillers). It can be considered as an author tragic in the sense that the trajectory of his characters is often predictable from the beginning of the film in a manner quite similar to the methods of Greek tragedy.

As in the tragedy, Nicholas Ray places the narrative tension but rather the indeterminacy of this predictability, the viewer is then captured by a contradiction between the expectations of an inevitable end anticipation and desire to see the heroes escape this purpose.

Influence

In the decades after its heyday, Ray remains a major influence for great directors:

Filmography

Director

Writer

Actor

Awards and Proposals

Awards

Proposals

Bibliography

  • John Wagner: Nicholas Ray, Seaside, 1987
  • Bernard Eisenschitz: American fiction - The lives of Nicholas Ray, Christian Bourgois, 1990.

See also

Internal Links

External Links


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