Camera, action
Nicholas Ray's films come home again.

By Johnny Ray Huston

JUST AS ACTORS make entrances in films, one way to enter the lonely domestic places and wild, nomadic terrain of Nicholas Ray's films is through their actors. James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, James Mason, Gloria Grahame: this director worked with, and in some cases forged definitive images of, more than one iconic performer. But acting in Ray's films wasn't mere stargazing. Ray added dimension to the mannerisms that define the above names. Action was one of Ray's favorite words when teaching acting; it's all over the memoir fragments and classroom transcripts of the Ray semibio I Was Interrupted. He didn't mean action in the literal, physical sense, or merely as a scene-starting barked order. His acting approach, informed by and yet critical of Strasberg and Stanislavsky, demanded an active, endless search – the search required by a director whose last, unfinished film was called We Can't Go Home Again.

"Nicholas Ray was the only one I know who could have gotten through Johnny Guitar," Crawford said when asked about the director in a 1973 onstage interview. She was hinting at the discord on the set of that film, a melodrama in lonesome-cowboy drag. Made in 1954, Johnny Guitar is set in a mythical American past, in a place – Joan's Town would be an apt alternate title, a fellow writer recently joked – that goes up in flames before any of its denizens can call it home. A gun is more than just a gun in Joan's town, and the citizens wear a vivid array of psychosexual colors. Bernard Eisenschitz's thorough book-length study, Nicholas Ray: An American Life, downplays Ray's bisexuality to the point of near erasure, though Ray's memoirs are forthright about the topic. In Johnny Guitar his camera is similarly candid.

By that point in her career, Crawford often surveyed her scenes from atop grand staircases. Her director – who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright – also knew his way up and down a flight of stairs; Johnny Guitar is one of many Ray films in which the visual architecture returns to that dramatic locus. Gazing down from a butch banister, Crawford's saloon owner favors pants; her outsize gestures are buttoned-down to poignant effect. Fashion is passion: the hues of the ties she wears tell her story – when she changes from black slacks into a wedding-white dress, it's promptly set ablaze, forcing yet another color-coded, gender-bent new look (and a retreat to a cave). Beneath symbolism so overwrought it's electric, one finds the film's lonely, melancholy, existential heartbeat. As Peggy Lee's theme song declares, there "never was a man" like the titular character. And for all of the camp fire in the dialogue, between the words a cold wind howls.

A line from Johnny Guitar, "I'm a stranger here myself," was one of Ray's signature offscreen statements. He was no stranger to melodrama – more like a cynical acquaintance. 1950's interesting minor work Born to Be Bad typifies his attitude. This time there are dueling Joans, Fontaine and Leslie, and as James Harvey notes in Movie Love in the Fifties, Ray's adaptation of a romance novel is "less about the turmoil in a woman's heart than about the nastiness in her crooked little smile." The smile belongs to Fontaine's character; the innocence of her screen persona is, for once, treated as false, a treatment that rings true. Born to Be Bad also contains a pair of Ray surrogates, both artists; together they form a split-image portrait of the director. One's a witty painter, played by Mel Ferrer, "harmless" to women (but hardly clueless about Fontaine). The other, played by Robert Ryan, is an alcoholic writer with a violent temper.

The volcanic presence of Ryan – a dark-eyed giant whose physical force is matched by tender intelligence – predates the Bogart of 1950's In a Lonely Place, the Dean of 1955's Rebel Without a Cause, and the Mason of 1956's Bigger than Life, each more explosive than the last. Likewise, Fontaine's crafty climbing speaks of Ray's attitude toward his wife at the time, Grahame. Grahame's heart-shaped face was painted by a naughty cupid; her infamous glamour included a layered approach to lipstick – a separate essay could be written about her techniques for showcasing her mouth – that predates ghetto fabulous by 50-some years. In Ray's botched black-and-white A Woman's Secret (1949), when the dialogue repeatedly mocks the tacky red chiffon dress Grahame's character has bought, it's worth noting that red became her, and Ray as well, who deploys that untamed color memorably in Johnny Guitar, Rebel (Dean's jacket) and Bigger than Life. Tacky or not, you could say red was his favorite color. Or at least his primary one.

Ray was tight-lipped about his tortured relationship with Grahame, whose notorious romantic choices would still make a scandal sheet blush today. His few comments were bitter, but In a Lonely Place's flickering vision of their torn bond is comparatively compassionate. Just as Ray's melodramas invert the genre, this is a noir in which the femme fatale (Grahame, whose arched eyebrows add irony to her nuanced line readings) doesn't die and isn't evil. Ray's hostility toward the cheap novels he'd adapted, and his paranoia – he was a tape-recording buddy of Howard Hughes, yet also the nonsnitch flip side of another pal, Elia Kazan, during the McCarthy era – seethe within screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart). The physical resemblance between actor and director is captured in an on-the-set photo of Ray overseeing a tense, possessive kiss that Bogart gives Grahame.

The rebel in Ray's greatest obscurity, Bigger than Life, has a cause – cortisone, a drug prescribed to save him from a fatal illness. A manic fever-nightmare of suburbia in which the protagonist's sweating gives the impression that each repressive room he enters is another, lower level of hell, Bigger than Life is built around Mason, or more specifically, Ray's attack on Mason's trademark detachment. Farther from heaven than Sirk himself – the Christian god himself is rejected on the stairs of a bad-dream home – this movie has "inspired" Todd Haynes just as much: a climactic bedroom battle between father and son (the same child actor as in Sirk's Tarnished Angels) is photocopied in Poison, and Dennis Quaid's recent closet case is but a half-realized descendant of Mason's angry teacher, whose PTA-night psychotic meltdown is outdone(!) by a tirade against that era's spylike guardian of domesticity, a milkman. Trashing every institution in sight, Ray views life as a terminal condition. And what '50s hetero inferno would be complete without Walter Matthau as a bemused, ineffectual onlooker?