55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963)

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

The last true feature Nicholas Ray made before his death, the Boxer Rebellion epic 55 Days at Peking perhaps doesn't even count on those terms as he collapsed before its completion. But while We Can't Go Home Again shall perhaps forever be an incomplete assembly of experimental sight and sound and Lightning Over Water is more Wim Wenders' baby, 55 Days at Peking must stand as the last movie to at least look like a Nick Ray movie, though I'm afraid it doesn't ever do much more than that. Often, this is the precise opposite of a problem, Ray's mad style elevating even the most stiff of projects into the realms of pure, glorious spectacle. Here, however, it at last feels like window-dressing, a spring of parsley on a burnt roast made by too many cooks.

But if the film is one of Ray's rare failures, it is nevertheless a necessary viewing, if for no other reason than the grim spectacle of seeing a master fall apart behind the camera. Even then, there are sumptuous visual delights to be had in this over-sprawling clash of West and East. Its clever opening shots, floating over the various embassies of foreign powers as their anthems merge with harmony and disharmony just outside the Forbidden City. As one cynical Chinese man says to a friend, "Different nations say the same thing at the same time: 'We want China.'" The resentment of foreign encroachment (and equal incredulity on the part of the Westerners at the resistance they face at disseminating their values) gives the film a common thread with all late-career Ray features. Sadly, it soon loses focuses and improperly handles the potential incisiveness of the commentary.

Intriguingly, 55 Days at Peking always seems to set every scene in a classical piece of Western staging before pulling back to show the Chinese culture around it. Whether it's the Western look of dusty, Union blue Marines riding in front of the Forbidden City or a martial arts demonstration that becomes the centerpiece of a European-style ball, this constant intrusion of one culture into another contextualizes the film's focus on the outsiders trying to spread their customs to a hostile people. Despite the shown atrocities of the Boxers, Ray likewise does not soft-sell the oblivious paternalism of the free (if you're a Western, white power) trade invasion that threatens China's autonomy through means other than war: economics.

Had the film shaved a good half-hour off its bloated running time and went for meaty themes over epic sprawl, such unorthodox ideas and subject matter might have made this as much a late triumph as The Savage Innocents. But 55 Days at Peking takes too long to get to its subject matter, its inventive juxtapositions of blind Western comfort and boiling Boxer tensions get bogged down in lengthy scenes that put off the true narrative for nearly an hour and derail the action not long after it belatedly begins.

Worse, the film soon gives way to a far more simplistic, reactionary reading as a piece of anti-Chinese Cold War propaganda. China's quest for sovereignty becomes not a reasonable cause against the arrogant cultural intrusion of the US, Great Britain, Russia, Spain, France and the like but a wave of terrorism that depicts Chinese insurrectionists as amoral monsters. They kill missionaries, they kill dignitaries. And lest anyone point out that missionaries and diplomats were hardly blameless in China's slow financial annexation, Boxers even shoot a white child on screen, ensuring our hatred.

I don't know what ideas are Ray's and what are those of producer Samuel Bronston, replacement director Andrew Marton or the team of writers assembled. Judging from Ray's past films, the more even-handed criticism that peeks through at times seems his work: we can see why the Chinese would obviously be upset by the growing influence of other nations, and there's no small amount of irony in an early scene of U.S. Marine Maj. Matt Lewis (Charlton Heston) trying to smooth things over with the local Boxers by bribing them to let a man go, even after he learns the man is dead. The American wants to buy trust, because he is an American and assumes money will win over the Boxers who want their own money back. Likewise, while the final commentary that the dynasty that tacitly endorsed the Boxers to drive out foreign parties effectively signed its death warrant (a clear precursor to Maoist revolt), it also makes for a complex view of how a revolt can spiral into a mob that hurts as much as it helps, as well as adding a dark tinge to the otherwise encouraged victory and assertion of dominance of the white powers.

But these are fitful moments of depth in a plodding, occasionally vile movie that presents the Western powers in an Alamo-like situation of whites defending themselves against the Other, even though the whites happen to be in the Other's territory. The film adheres to so many easy tacks—punishing the woman (Ava Gardner) for sleeping with a Chinese general, celebrating the Eight-Nation Alliance as a show of pan-imperial unity as opposed to a protection of investments—that one wonders if Ray collapsed as much from self-disgust at what he'd been forced into as his crippling addictions. Ray, who elevated the stately Biblical epic King of Kings by paradoxically shrinking its scope to more human levels, here feels trapped by convention, and not even Marton, who worked on another elevated Biblical epic (he was an assistant director on Ben-Hur) can add any life to this material.

Heston and David Niven, playing male rivals common to Ray's work, are both excellent, from Heston's Searchers-lite journey involving the half-Chinese daughter of a captain to Niven's self-doubt over whether he subconsciously allowed this rebellion to happen to boost his social profile and get a promotion. Some action scenes are likewise big and impressive, yet in nearly all cases they trade energy for vacant spectacle, making static even the sight of massive explosions. But it's just not enough. While thankfully not Ray's true swan song, 55 Days at Peking is nevertheless an unfortunate, if not entirely disposable, view of a compromised, splintered artist finally exhausting his last fumes.

The Janitor (Nicholas Ray, 1974)

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

Nicholas Ray's contribution to the Wet Dreams anthology film, entitled "The Janitor," is a deconstruction of Nicholas Ray the symbol through the symbolic destruction of Nicholas Ray the man. Ray himself plays two of the film's three chief parts, those of a priest speaking to a teenage congregation and a janitor who toils in a movie studio that becomes increasingly connected to the priest's story through broken diegesis and metacinema. And through it all, the film adheres to the softcore theme behind the overall project.

The first striking aspect of the film is Ray's face. With his untamed hair, eye patch, lined face and perilous, craggy chasm of a mouth, Ray looks like Dionysus in decline, a hard-living hero now dessicated by self-abuse. That brand of self-abuse finds its way into the film's main form of self-abuse, and the swirling torrent of religiosity, sexual ecstasy, guilt and self-hatred that springs forth from this collision makes "The Janitor" an unexpected triumph. Unless you were watching this to get off, in which case the film is a horrendous failure.

The contrast between the janitor and priest suggests that one is the fever dream vision of the other. As the janitor dances playfully around the studio as he sweeps, the faraway priest has his young daughter pull up his stockings before he goes out to address his teenage following. There, he rants against Moses' commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery," his screed flowing in and out of coherence as occasional returns to the janitor show the man happily toiling away, lost in his own head.

Back with the congregation, the priest's words have such an overpowering effect that the teenagers begin to engage in an orgy, much to his consternation. "Stop!" he begs. "I still have plenty of things to tell you!" If the film's ragged assembly suggests a fight with his own cinematic proclivities, the sight of a visibly bemused Ray trying to calm his eroticized disciples works as a skewed look at his second career as a teacher, perhaps exposing his fears that he had not imparted what he wished onto his pupils.

The aesthetic experiments go even deeper. Post-sync sound turns the audio mix into a hodgepode of the skittering recorded sounds of clattering objects and hiss and the overdubbed speech of a French baritone with a voice so deep and ponderous that the separately recorded speech divorces from the diegetic world until it becomes dialogue and omniscience to bridge the two distinct scenarios. In effect, both the audio and visuals embody a duality in their construction, distinct halves not so much in opposition as all-out war, thrown at each other like atoms in a collider until they smash together and fuse. Ray long used this approach with character, most notably in the rival soldiers of Bitter Victory and the conservationist/poacher duo in Wind Across the Everglades; here, however, he uses the make-up of film itself.

By the end of the segment's 14 nigh-impenetrable minutes, Ray has covered such topics as religious guilt, the spirituality of the orgasm (and the sexual bliss of the spirit), incest and the structural elements of cinema. The daydream at last becomes a movie, and an enraged janitor pulls a rifle from a closet and fires into his own looming image, an act of meta-suicide that seems the oddly logical endpoint of Ray's corpus of self-annihilating icon erection and deconstruction. Though Ray would continue to tweak the previous year's experiment We Can't Go Home Again and make the part-doc Lightning Over Water with Wim Wenders, "The Janitor" is an unexpected yet curiously satisfying summary of one of the cinema's greatest voices.

King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961)

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

Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving, pillaging and murdering Jews to establish supremacy. This curbs the sense of wonder, to say the least. Yet this focus on the historical context of the Gospel finds a secular approach to the religious story. The Jews in this film do not pine for a savior because of age-old prophecies; they simply need someone to help them escape this misery.

This situates the film somewhere between Ben-Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ. Though not as humanizing as Martin Scorsese's controversial film, Ray's epic nevertheless breaks ground of its own, breaking from the tradition of showing Jesus in synecdochical ellipses to show Christ in full. The mere process of visualizing him humanizes him, focusing on the man instead of the symbol. Ray understands this, even going so far as to frame most of Jesus' miracles in shadow or other indirect visuals to firmly separate the man from the god. Ray does not visually segment these sides of Jesus for the purposes of commentary or irony, merely to keep our focus on the man even if, like all Ray heroes, becomes an idol before our eyes.

Working for an independent production company (though the film was later distributed by MGM), Ray had to make do with a modest budget of $6,000,000, a small sum even then, especially for a 70mm extravaganza. The limitations are evident: a number of miracles are not shown but described by a soldier reporting to Pontius Pilate. Ray clearly called in some favors to make sure he could complete the project, and the cast brims with former collaborators. Most intriguing is Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus, considering his previous work for Ray was as Jesse James. There, his icy stare and impenetrability made him stilted. Here, despite the literally ancient nature of his dialogue, Hunter's blue eyes convey only kindness and compassion. Christ's Golden Rule was "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," but as one looks into Hunter's "teenage heartthrob" face (he was 33 at the time), one senses that maybe that was just because Jesus wanted someone to reciprocate his complete love and gentleness for mankind.

Hunter's emergence after Jesus' childhood and a diversion to show the Jewish rebels fighting back against Herod and Pilate—another bit of historical rationalization that unfortunately carries on too long despite the thrill of the insurrection scenes—elevates the film from its beautiful but static presentation to one that subsumes its grandeur into the humanity of its godly protagonist. This can be seen first when Jesus heads into the desert to confront Satan's temptations. First, Ray frames Jesus' time in the desert as clear torment, and the devil's temptations are thus made more tangibly enticing for offering relief to Jesus. When he passes these tests, though, a faint smile passes his face, one not of braggadocio but relief. This is not the smile of an infallible god but a man who has resisted the sway of sin and won, a man who had genuine stakes in his test and passed from effort, not a foregone conclusion.

Indeed, so much of this film feels unexpected for its subversion of iconography and mythology for more personal angles and even modicums of historical accuracy, finding fresh inroads for the endlessly repeated Gospel tales. The Sermon on the Mount becomes less a lecture than a Socratic dialogue between Jesus and the skeptics and faithful, a condensation of other of Jesus' teachings into an exchange of ideas no less edifying than outright instruction. We meet Judas (a young, unrecognizable Rip Torn) as a rebel under Barabbas (an overracting Harry Guardino, all gritted teeth hisses and animal-skin garb); his eventual betrayal of Jesus is the result not of base greed but conviction that the threat of Roman punishment will bring out the full power of the man he believes is the Son of God, leading to the Jews' deliverance. When the crowds later call for Barabbas' freedom instead of Christ's, we finally get a sense of why the Jews would want him freed over Jesus. He's the one who directly fights the Roman oppressors, while Christ continues only to speak of better days in the next world.

No longer framing through the compression of CinemaScope, Ray nevertheless finds a way to practice his architectural perfectionism in Super-70. Though many shots of the film carry the impersonal vastness of the Biblical epic, Ray inserts numerous moments that betray his hand. King of Kings boasts inventive angles, frames within the frame, and a use of shadow that, ironically, convey the warmth of God incarnate rather than encroaching menace. Red soaks the palace of Herod, as if the blood spilled of all the men, women and children cut down by his command caked his home. Best of all is a moving shot of a chained John the Baptist scaling a prison wall just to touch Jesus' outstretched hand, a shot that gains even more emotional resonance from the framing of Christ's shadow beside John as he looks up, effectively signaling that Jesus is already with him even as he reaches for the Lord.

Also a delight is Miklos Rozsa's rousing score, a justly famous swell of brass that now exists far outside the film itself as one of the great classic soundtracks. I'd never seen this film before, yet I recognized the main brass theme instantly, never knowing it came from this movie. Rozsa also did the score for Ben-Hur, but I may well prefer his work here. Rozsa also judges the moments of more intimate humanity, adding nuance and texture to the gargantuan roar of his Hosanna trumpets. By the end of the film, even that fist-raising theme has been on a journey of its own, wracked through the pain of Christ's sacrifice and reemerging with renewed vigor with the resurrection.

Much better than expected, the unfairly neglected King of Kings nevertheless fumbles occasionally for its overlength, ironically because Ray does such a good job of humanizing Christ that he makes many huge moments somewhat distracting and disjointed. He spends too much time on the Passion, yet he impressively avoids lingering on images of torture, eliding over graphic images to come at the torture and crucifixion from different angles. If it overstays its welcome, King of Kings nonetheless does succeed as a unique portrait of Christ in a saturated pool of depictions. I admit a bias for any film that approaches Christ as a man first and a god second, but Hunter, who failed to impress me as Jesse James, found the soft contours of his stiff, undying youth, and Ray tempered the anti-auterist format of the Biblical epic with his invigorating compositions. As I did with Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, I found myself willing to follow this Jesus, not because I believed he was the Son of God but because he was a good person, tested and struggling like the rest of us. It's more impressive if a man can overcome such obstacles anyway. Though Ray still has to cater to the full Christian significance of the story, his humanizing touches make this one of my favorite depictions of Jesus in cinema.

*This omission, I feel, was the most disappointing result of the limited budget. By having to talk of the call for the violent Barrabas' freedom, Ray must deny himself some more mob commentary, for what is the rabble calling for Christ's crucifixion but the original and most notorious mob? Then again, it does spare this telling of the Gospel its most antisemitic aspect, which is not without worth.

The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, 1960)

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

Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority but mere survival. Its title speaks to the contrast of Inuit life between the innocence of such life and the savagery needed to stay alive. This is embodied in the first shots, of two Inuits throwing real spears into a real polar bear, puncturing the poor beast as blood pours out into the icy water in which it swims. The Eskimos simply need to eat, but the sight of a bear being stabbed to death is gruesome, especially in the age of close animal monitoring and CGI slaughters in the movies.

Yet Ray's film depicts not so much a Manichean contrast as a coexistence of the irreconcilable traits of humanity. By filtering that humanity through the customs of a non-Western race—some of them true, some of them not, all of that beside the point—Ray divorces the audience from its sense of normalcy to show the contradictory nature of culture and its inexplicability to those of another civilization. Granted, the inaccuracies and ignorance that pepper The Savage Innocents (to say nothing of the casting of not one Inuit in a part) hinder the film to a significant degree, but Ray's overriding point is the same one of all his films: the homes we make and who we make them with. Riddled with dated elements, The Savage Innocents nevertheless finds yet another angle from which Ray can attack his central preoccupations. And if his depiction of Inuits occasionally sends the eyes darting down from the screen to look at the embarrassment, that shame should also come from the realization that this thoroughly non-idealized portrait of another culture is more interested in the true behavior of a different race than nearly any Hollywood movie before or since.

The hero of the film, though played by the white, 45-year-old Anthony Quinn, is an almost childlike Inuit named Inuk. We get a taste for different cultures almost instantly when Inuk returns to the home of his friend, Anarwik, to find the man and his wife "laughing," as they say euphemistically. Rather than excuse himself with embarrassment, Inuk chats with the two, who talk right back as if nothing could be more common. Anarwik even offers to let Inuk "laugh" with his wife and takes extreme offense when Inuk old-fashionably (to our eyes, at least) turns him down, prompting a violent argument. For Ray to so casually introduce the idea of wife-sharing and polyamorous relationships into his film marks an open break from the system of values he had to uphold and only tacitly subvert in Hollywood. And while the film often feels like an old studio feature, with its racial miscasting and awkward transitions between studio sets and location shots, this defiant approach to sex and tangible violence (in both the animal killing and nonjudgmental physicality between characters) shows unmistakable defiance of Ray's old professional home.

If Ray used his old films to dive under the gloss of suburban, urban and Old Western values, here he takes direct aim at the Establishment. Apart from the sexual liberation of his non-Western characters (including some nudity), Ray also mocks the the emphasis placed on technology, capitalism and God. Inuk's innocence is on its purest display in his quest for a wife, even if he does threaten to kill a rival suitor for the woman he wants before deciding to settle for her sister. But when he and his new bride, Asiak, go hunting a polar bear, their long, traditional method of wearing down the beast abruptly cut short with the crack of a rifle, a thunderclap so unexpected after 40 minutes of tribal leaving that Inuk's own bewilderment and fright may well match the audience's own. Now Inuk gets introduced to the white culture through the technology of its weaponry; when white people actually show up this movie, they don't do themselves much more credit than their insidious invention.

The fellow Inuit who owns the gun points Inuk in the direction of a white trading post where he might be able to get a rifle of his own for 100 fox skins. This capitalist enterprise, ruinous to the ecosystem and clearly exploitative (no way the worth of the gun remotely stacks up to the fortune a white trader could make back home with that many pelts), is seen as vile and corrupting. The Inuits who populate the trading post are so Westernized that they laugh louder than the whites when Inuk and Asiak wander in with their bearskin clothes. The presence of money has already made these young people forget their cultures.

Lest Ray stop there, however, he moves beyond capitalism to deride the other staple of conservative American values: Jesus. A missionary follows Inuk and Asiak home to proselytize, but the Inuits do not understand the message. Their practical responses to the matters of faith—such as Asiak griping that this Jesus fellow better bring his own sled if he's going to be in their lives—is funny, but it reveals a simple truth: for people who fight every day to stay alive, the words of a man dead 2,000 years are meaningless. The man refuses the Inuit offers of old meat and wife-sharing, enraging the already irritated Inuk into inadvertently bashing the man's head in in offense. The missionary does not understand the Eskimos' values because he has been raised to consider Christianity to be a universal. His refusal of the spoiled meat and Asiak is immediate and fervent, not mean-spirited but borne of his sense of what is right. He does not explain his cultural perspective because he assumes it is the right one, and for that he pays dearly.

The film's final act follows the manhunt for Inuk by two white Mounties (including Peter O'Toole in his feature debut, though he demanded to be removed from the credits after his voice was overdubbed). These are not bad men, merely following their duty in bringing a murderer to justice. But when they catch up to Inuk, the ridiculousness of their cultural values being used on someone outside that system becomes evident in short order. But seeing the endpoint of one's cultural reach is not an easy thing to face, and O'Toole's trooper literally collapses from the strain of seeing everything he holds to be true nearly get him killed for nothing in a land where his perspective does not apply. Even his shows of kindness mean little, and for a film with so much misunderstanding of Inuit culture and the whitewash of the lead casting, I was pleasantly surprised to see this wasn't a film where the white man intervened on a minority's behalf. Quite the opposite: Inuk, without stating any message, asserts his hard-won dominance of his patch of ice, and though O'Toole says he's letting the man go, it's clear he's only doing so to save face. Inuk is the one sending the trooper on his way.

These thematic elements are only bolstered by Aldo Tonti's magnificent Technicolor 70mm photography. Graceful, swift tracks follow Inuits kayaking, and Ray captures the Arctic in its static beauty, the ice mingling with the pale blue of the sky until only the crags of glaciers delineate land and air. There are even surreal sights, like the shot of O'Toole's partner freezing to death after falling into water, his face frosting over in seconds as O'Toole pathetically tries to help.

Even if we accept the use of Inuit culture as a front for lobbing mortars into American values, The Savage Innocents still has a few too many absurdities (whether genuinely considered true at the time or not) to entirely forgive. The thought that an Inuit couple would be reduced to fears of angry spirits at the arrival of a new baby because they don't understand babies are born without teeth is just offensive. Nevertheless, The Savage Innocents holds up in many ways: as a redoubled effort in Ray's ongoing war with social and aesthetic conservatism, as a romanticized but often realistic view of another culture through its own prism, and as mournful view of a dying culture. Speaking of Inuk, Asiak and Asiak's mother, a white trader notes to a mocking friend, "Ten years ago, nearly all the Eskimos were like those three. Magnificent." If nearly all of Ray's protagonists reflect some aspect of the man himself, then this Inuit, a creature splintered off from the development of his long-removed Western kin, exhibits the director's full break from the system. Though he would take two more projects before his mental collapse, this film announced Ray would never be the same, and indeed he never was, not even in the mainstream (on the surface, at any rate) Biblical epic he would tackle next.

Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958)

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

Bursting with clichés and a simplistic script, Party Girl is nevertheless too packed with ideas not to love. An imperfect blend of Ray's mastered genres of film noir and melodrama, Party Girl is a sinister mob movie that also happens to be the most colorful and vibrant film of the director's career of color-soaked, passionate films. Ray's capacity for near-surreal dips into pure cinema have rarely, if ever, been as unabashed as the musical numbers, while others scenes plunge into such chiaroscuro that shots seem to cling to a branch hanging over monochrome.

Not that any of this is visible in the film's opening scenes, which portray the staid, conventional showgirl act that acts as the background noise for the drunken antics of the club owner, mob boss Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb, eyes never quite focused even when he turns into an icy monster later). Beneath the stage, the dames bicker viciously, insulting looks and brandishing nails with promises of hair yanking of Biblical proportions. The only supportive woman among this bevy of befeathered and besequined harpies is Vicki Gaye (Cyd Charisse), who tries to comfort her co-worker and roommate, a despairing, crumbling woman named Joy in one of life's cruel ironies. Pregnant with the child of a married man, Joy's childish pouting belies a serious problem, but Ray has a knack for removing foreshadowing from his atmosphere. When he follows through on this brief subplot with a shocking quick shot of gruesome finality, the effect is stunning, and I found myself for the first time truly unsettled by Ray's use of red.

Joy's fate does, however, open up new opportunities for Vicki, particularly at the behest of Tommy Farrell (Robert Taylor), Rico's mob lawyer. Disabled from a childhood accident on a drawbridge, Tommy hobbles around on a cane and handles the paperwork for the bosses. Rather than portray him as a weakling, Taylor makes Farrell as slick and cynical as an enforcer, only far more cunning. With his ever-furrowed brow, slicked-back hair and thin, vaguely ominous mustache, Taylor looks as likely to have someone rubbed out as Angelo. But underneath his rough exterior lies, well, not a gentle soul but at least a gentleman. Where other mobsters paw all over the showgirls, he escorts Vicki home and provides non-suggestive comfort when Joy is discovered. Afterwards, he tries to cheer Vicki up by convincing Rico to let her plan the dances, allowing her to finally exhibit her skills outside the stale, pedestrian style we saw at the beginning.

From this point, Party Girl moves in fits and starts to Ray's whims, a prospect that sounds potentially tedious until the genius of his imagery takes over from the pat screenplay. The arbitrary dance numbers don't seem so awkwardly inserted when the screen floods with pink and red or stark shadowplay. Vicki is already a figure of great sensuality—see how she meets Tommy in a visual position of power, a low-angle shot highlighting her fiery red dress as Tommy sits, shrunken. When unleashed on the stage, however, she explodes. Her dancing bears little resemblance to a Prohibition-era speakeasy act. Instead, her acts feel like worlds colliding, first dancing like a gypsy to hot jazz as her pink dress flows into a red cape and later shaking around in interpretive dance to tribal rhythms against deep shadow. Even with the frenzy of the music, a certain stunned silence emanates from the crowd, which looks so out of place when Ray occasionally cuts back to them watching the self-contained universes of Vicki's dances that it is they, not her, who look odd.

Ray even finds room for the twisted gender roles of Johnny Guitar in this visual phantasmagoria. Vicki meets Tommy in a visual position of authority, a low-angle shot highlighting her red-clad presence as reverse shots place Tommy in a position of relative weakness even before his disability is revealed. Indeed, as the film continues, even her inevitable realignment to traditional values—and she of course becomes the damsel in distress as the bargaining chip Rico uses to force Tommy to remain loyal—does not fully overpower her sense of confrontational, gender challenging verve. Beside her, Tommy's greasy mafia look turns into a boyish stab at toughness, and his sensitivity and frailty makes him even more feminine than Sterling Hayden's lovesick roamer in Ray's mad Western. The men all seem to want a strong woman, not merely Tommy: at the start of the film, Rico has the women throw him a bizarre commemoration for Pre-Code goddess Jean Harlow, who recently married. "The way he figures it, she double-crossed him," Vicki says, but then, wouldn't that be exactly the sort of thing Jean Harlow would do? During the "party," a more-sloshed-than-usual Rico pumps his revolver into a picture of Harlow, a symbolically suggestive act that also shows his petulance and heartbreak for losing the woman of his dreams, a woman whose entire presence was predicated on her aggressive persona.

The ideas never coalesce into a smooth whole, but such oddball tics barely begin to get at the idiosyncratic delights within. Ray sets up a court scene of Tommy defending a mob brute by way of a court artist already scribbling "Guilty" over his portrait of the defendant. But then Tommy draws out his limp, starts charming the jury and pulls out a watch, clearly preparing for some grandstanding. But just as Tommy gets ready to work his magic, Ray cuts forward to the aftermath as the courtroom is in a Brothers Karamazov-esque furor as the artist pencils "Not" next to his preemptive declaration. Other trials are headed off with internal action, and a fast but coherent montage of Rico dealing with Cookie and his crew presages the climax of The Godfather in its grim bloodbath. In (slightly) less dark terms,  Tommy's wife, a horrid dragon lady named Genevieve, returns when advanced surgery gives Tommy the chance at normalcy to cause yet more trouble for the already besieged Tommy and Vicki. Her unwieldy addition is made striking and engaging by Ray's dark framing and Claire Kelly's serpentine performance (she does everything but flick out her tongue to smell the air). Vicki only looks more appealing next to her, and it's no wonder Ray later frames a shot that rings her head in a halo.

With an ending so predictable one can even foresee its ironic punctuation, Party Girl never manages to write its way out of its trope grab-bag of sympathetic but stern detectives, sadistic mobsters and reforming underworld serfs. Yet the movie never flags, and Ray makes the inevitable finale visually unexpected, lurid and even perversely beautiful in its carnage. Rapidly expending his last vestiges of goodwill in the industry, Ray was all but done in Hollywood (though MGM would distribute his 1961 epic King of Kings, produced by an independent company). With its mad run through so many mainstream clichés, Party Girl is at once a sardonic kiss-off and a sincere, almost wistful goodbye for the system he had subverted to mastery over the span of a decade. What an absolute shame it goes almost unmentioned today.

Wind Across the Everglades (Nicholas Ray & Budd Schulberg, 1958)

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

Wind Across the Everglades marked the beginning of the end for Nicholas Ray. After falling ill during several productions during his career and necessitating shots from other directors, Everglades was the first time Ray's substance abuse problems finally got him fired. As such, it opens up a contentious debate centered on the film's auteurist cred. Budd Schulberg, the film's writer and co-producer, took over for Ray and purportedly discarded a great deal of footage in the editing bay. But if the final product certainly feels to have been put together by another's hand, there are numerous visual and narrative traits common to Ray's oeuvre.
 

Set in the late 19th century, Wind Across the Everglades charts American expansion into Florida, opening up new territory through swamps to Miami. It also creates a market for the plumage of region-specific birds, sparking a poaching frenzy that flagrantly ignores conservation laws, and few people rise to the challenge of monitoring the glades to enforce these laws. But when a nature studies professor named Walt Murdock (Christopher Plummer) steps off a train and immediately gets arrested for indignantly ripping the feathers off a woman's hat, the Audobon Society realizes they have just the man for the job. Unfortunately for the now option-less Murdock, the poaching gangs won't give up their lucrative trades without a fight, and as he ventures into the glades, Murdock finds himself confronted with a way of life at odds with his own even, in true Ray fashion, as he comes to see his rival as an equal not merely in intelligence and capability but almost spiritual connection to their setting.

Murdock's arch-rival is a vicious, almost Kurtz-like demon of the swamp named Cottonmouth for the live snake he casually ropes around his neck. Compared to the fake, Hollywood ruggedness of Plummer, with his chiseled jawline and refined carriage, Burl Ives lumbers like a bearded ogre. Ives plays Cottonmouth like an antediluvian Nephilim displaced and stranded in the great marsh during the Flood. He simply appears before Murdock when they meet and fades away just as quickly, rematerializing back with his band of poachers in time to set off an orgiastic volley of gunfire, birds dropping like rain. Back at the outlaw camp, Cottonmouth presides over the masculine rituals of his compatriots like a tribal chief, his grim pronouncements law among the other hunters. The band of outsiders is of course a core component of Ray's work, and for the antagonists to embody that here adds a fresh take on Ray's approach to outcasts before he would move to different civilizations altogether a few years later.

Murdock, so dead-set on stopping these people from exterminating the birds, does not realize how much he shares with them. They live among nature in muddy hovels and carved skiffs, while he pines for a Thoreau-esque connection to the primitive. "I'm afraid progress and I never got along so well," he says to one of his only friends, and he speaks of the Everglades as if it were a portal to the beginning of the Earth itself, unspoiled and beautiful. The poachers threaten that balance, although Ray and Schulberg also show the romanticized naïveté of Murdock's view of the glades with shots of animals devouring other creatures, especially an alligator that destroys a bird with no less savagery than buckshot. Neither Murdock nor Cottonmouth represents a balance, and they soon become archetypal foes in a cosmically inevitable battle for the soul of the swamp.

Reduced to a 1:85:1 aspect ratio after years of CinemaScope, Ray cannot capture the wildlife with the same panoramic capability of Scope. But then, Ray never used Scope to make panoramas, either; his most expansive landscape films, at least before his late-career 70mm work, were in tight framing, from Johnny Guitar's acidic canvas to The Lusty Men's almost unbearable sense of fate pushing down on the characters. Likewise, he captures the Everglades with gorgeous shots that make up for lost width by pushing back into the z-axis, adding depth of field to give a sense of space to this area. Of note, however, is the rapid editing of many of these bridging scenes, broken up—most likely by Schulberg—to show close-ups of animals in a less poetic, color recollection of the ethereal pillow shots of The Night of the Hunter's river trek. The choppy rhythm of these inserts robs them of some of their grace, but the shots nevertheless work to show a more intimate approach to the landscape, softening shots of the movements and behavior of animals as the characters move through this rich ecosystem.

Various touches make Wind Across the Everglades compelling for more than just these nature shots and the fine acting of the two leads. In a twist of cruel irony, a Seminole guide hired to lead Murdock to a slow death is put to death for his mercy and respect for the conservationist. That in itself is standard, but Cottonmouth perversely sentences the man to death by Manchineel, a tree that exudes a poisonous sap capable of seeping through a man in tortuous agony. In effect, the tree can exact revenge upon those who trouble this sacred, untamed land. On the other end of the spectrum is a showdown between Murdock and Cottonmouth that undercuts the villain's psychopathic capacity for violence with a drinking game. That was a bold move on Schulberg's part, and were it not for the steadiness of the actors and the sure footing of Ray, that might have been nothing but a silly, even narratively debilitating joke. Instead, it works as a comic high point, a well-paced scene that reveals much about both characters even as everything devolves into sloppy chaos.

Having been fired from this production, Ray would finish a kiss-off to Hollywood by the end of the year and take independent projects until his full collapse in 1963. Wind Across the Everglades may lack the frenzied passion of Party Girl—a film that feels like the cinematic equivalent of a bankrupt shop owner sloshing gasoline around his tax shelter after dark and fumbling for a match—it is as much an indication of where Ray would go outside Hollywood. More so, even, as it shows his interests broadening from archetypal settings (one of which, the conformist suburb, he helped craft) to new territories and different perspectives. It also shows Ray once again getting ahead of everyone else, tackling ecology well before it became a popular subject matter, even before Rachel Carlson kicked off the modern environmental movement. It's not a great film by any means—pretty much the whole of the ending is unjustified and forced—but Wind Across the Everglades boasts enough memorable images and trademark flourishes to feel like a proper Nicholas Ray film even when it's unmistakable that someone else led it to the finish line.

Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957)

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

For the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon being held at Cinema Viewfinder from Sept. 5-8, I've written a piece on Ray's elegant but unromantic war movie Bitter Victory at Cinelogue. A work of twisted purity, it uses a war as a backdrop for the more intimate, and thus more humanistically meaningful conflict between two men ostensibly on the same side. For a man who found the Romantic in self-immolation elsewhere, Ray's view of war is one of pure disgust: the death of one man, as they say, is tragic, but the death of millions is a statistic. Where he can find the sad resonance of one person's death reaching for his futile goals, the impersonal slaughter of war holds no glory. This makes for one of Ray's most downbeat and chilly films, but also one of his most passionately argued and affecting. And there's something so compelling about it that Godard's legendary praise of the movie still holds up. One of the master's finest works.

Hot Blood (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]
 
Nicholas Ray specialized in making films about misfits and outsiders coalescing into the nuclear units of new collectives, more often than not marking such formations with the harsh tragedies of emerging orders. But as Evan Davis rightly noted, Hot Blood is "the first film in which Ray begins from within a fully formed community." This would become a staple of Ray's late career, leading to journeys to Peking, the wild swamps of Florida and the Arctic. What links these movies is an ignorance of their subjects' cultures that cannot be entirely forgiven even with historical perspective in mind. However, like the misguided but not altogether untruthful depiction of Inuits in The Savage Innocents, the gypsies of Hot Blood serve a broader purpose that pushes their cultural traits, both accurate and inaccurate, into universal terms of societal abstraction. The fundamental point is that their system of values is not that of the traditional West's, and by focusing tightly on their isolated world of customs, Ray can not only show that the American way of life is not the only one but that it can even look as ridiculous to others as those people's civilizations look to us.

It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents. In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret. Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here cares little for the narrative. Instead, Ray devotes his attention to various dance numbers, color-soaked expressions of lust and violence that constantly push the film to the verge of becoming a musical. But it never crosses that line, perhaps because we'd forgive it its excesses if it did so. But Ray seems to delight in the garishness of it all—and of making a quasi-musical without identifiable songs and relying on dances from amateur dancers—and this is the only film so brazen that "gaudy" becomes a compliment.

The patriarch of the gypsy society shown within is Marco, a middle-aged man who goes by the sobriquet "The King of the Gypsies." Secretly ailing from a disease, Marco wishes to transfer his title to his younger brother Stephano (Cornell Wilde), but first he needs his impetuous kid brother to get married. Following custom, he arranges a marriage between Stephano and a gorgeous gypsy woman amusingly named Annie (Jane Russell, no stranger to films that needed her to dance despite formal training) without his brother's knowledge. Stephano, shown to be more attached to the normal Americans around him than his own people, recognizes Russell's beauty but insists on choosing his own wife. This position, obviously not an unreasonable, nevertheless sends the situation into a tizzy, and soon Stephano and Annie are locked into a psychological battle to hurt the other.

That these various threads never generate tension speaks to the weakness of the screenplay, but Ray uses every setup to lead to another musical interlude. The friction between Wilde and Russell gives each of these dances a restlessness not of desire but of clashing mindsets and resentment. Frustration pours out of Wilde when he slips away at night to hang with his regular friends and vent about the prejudice he encounters from the outside world (a dance instructor won't give him a job despite his prodigious skill) and the hindering traditions that shackle him to an outmoded way of life. Annie, on the other hand, feels humiliated by his attempts to push her into divorcing him, so she commits to seducing him entirely, then belatedly fulfilling his demand. Their mutual dances crackle with sparks of mutual loathing flowing in and out of genuine attraction, and their wedding dance, which involves the suggestive use of a whip, exemplifies the swirl of carnal desire, pure hatred and thin distinctions between lust and violence that defines the film.

Even the climactic airing of grievances between Marco and Stephano unfolds as a sort of dance, the endpoint of the violent urges underneath the dance moves of the whole film. Ray brilliantly stages in the trailer park where Marco hides the retirement trailer he intends to use to travel, ironically making him more like a traditional, nomadic gypsy through modern Western technology. But the brothers fight with belts according to tradition, further connecting their lithe exchange of blows to conflicts of tradition vs. change. As such, stylistic diversions that these dances might be, they nevertheless exhibit the torrent of conflicting emotions working in disharmony. In that sense, the film presages The Savage Innocents not merely in its racial outsiderdom but in its anti-Manichean collision of yin and yang into an amorphous, contradictory whole that defines the self-deating paradoxes of humanity. It even frames an outdoor scene of the gypsies dancing through the natural frame of trees as if to obscure and hide the society from the rest of the world around it, a lost world bustling behind dwindling patches of untamed forests. Such touches add resonance and artistry to what would otherwise be a pointless melodrama that can't even draw narrative tension out of the possibilities of terminal illness, in-fighting clans or encroaching modernity.

Though I'd side with Johnny Guitar and Party Girl as the better displays of wholly uninhibited color, Hot Blood's paean to red makes it so tacky it loops back around into beauty. Practically everyone in this movie wears red, subtly suggesting a collective of Jim Starks, a color-matched look at what Jim's world would look like after he built up a community of like-minded people. The happy ending that closes Hot Blood may be as forced and half-baked as the rest of the script, but after basking in the abstract ecstasy of a master's form for 80 minutes, that all seems a secondary concern.