Two things everybody knows about movie director Nicholas Ray are that he made Rebel Without a Cause and wore an eye patch. Go any further into his career, into the depths and shallows of Johnny Guitar, Party Girl, or The Savage Innocents, for instance, and suddenly you’ve joined the cult.
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Johnny Guitar, on the other hand, that cubistic, near-hysterical, woman-dominated western so beloved of French intellectuals (Jean-Luc Godard never stopped praising it), made Ray physically ill. Eisenschitz reports that Ray vomited on the way to the set each morning, presumably due to the intensity of this oddest of westerns. Ray, together with most American critics, never understood why the Joan Crawford-Mercedes McCambridge catfight-on-horseback struck such a nerve, but it has endured. With its expressive use of color and Ray’s trademark absorption with weakness and failure, Johnny Guitar is the wellspring of the cult.
More to the point is Bigger Than Life, a 1956 James Mason vehicle for 20th Century Fox that, like Rebel, examines what Eisenschitz calls the “crisis of nonconformism” in the story of a mild-mannered schoolteacher who shocks his wife and child with extravagant and ultimately violent behavior after using cortisone to treat his inflamed arteries. “The shrinking of idealism” is the order of the day as scrimping moonlighter Ed Avery (played by Mason) suddenly starts throwing his weight around the family’s cramped home. While Ray “pursues the inner logic of madness” in Avery’s tilted middle-class dreams, the colors and geometric shot combinations mirror the family’s startled reactions to their drugged dad.
Nevertheless, Ray is remembered for the emotion and intuitive elan he extracted from actors as different as Robert Mitchum, Susan Hayward, Richard Burton, Anthony Quinn, Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse, Sterling Hayden, Barbara Rush, and adolescent muses Dean, Wood, and Sal Mineo. One of Ray’s most cherished ambitions was to cast Elvis Presley as Jesse James, but he had to settle for Robert Wagner instead. Meanwhile, the director drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney, augmenting these vices with everything from methamphetamine (he shot it) to grass and cocaine. For the record, his right eye was lost due to a blood clot, and he wore an eye patch as the mood suited him.
I Was Interrupted by Nicholas Ray, edited by Susan Ray, University of California Press, $25.
