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| Nicholas
Ray |
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| Director
/ Screenwriter |
| 1911 - 1979 |
| Born August 7,
Galesville, Wisconsin, USA |
| Key
Production Country: USA |
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Key Genres: Drama,
Western, Psychological Drama, Adventure, Film Noir, Crime Drama |
| Key
Collaborators: Albert
S. D'Agostino (Production Designer), Robert
Ryan (Leading Player), Philip Yordan (Screenwriter), Jay C. Flippen
(Leading Character Player), George E. Diskant (Cinematographer), Sherman
Todd (Editor), Robert Peterson (Production Designer), Humphrey
Bogart (Leading Player), Jeffrey Hunter (Leading Player), John Houseman
(Producer) |
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Highly Recommended:
They Live by Night (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), On
Dangerous Ground (1951), The Lusty Men (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954),
Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Bigger Than Life (1956) |
| Recommended: Born
to be Bad (1950), Run for Cover (1955), Bitter Victory (1957), Party Girl (1958) |
| Links:
[
IMDB ] [ All-Movie
Guide ] [ Senses
of Cinema: Great Directors ] [
Film Reference ]
[ Classic
Film and Television Home Page ] [ Derek
Malcolm's Century of Films ] [ Guardian
Article (2003) ] [ Gerald Peary
Article ] |
| Books: [
I
Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies ] [ Nicholas
Ray: An American Life ] [ Films
of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall ] [ Live
Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause ] |
| DVD's:
[ Amazon
] |
| 1,000
Greatest Films: They Live by Night (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950),
The Lusty Men (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954),
Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Bigger Than Life (1956) |
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250 Quintessential Noir Films:
They Live by Night (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), On Dangerous Ground
(1951), Party Girl (1958) |
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"Few
other directors had such a sense of the effect of locations and
interiors on people's lives, or the visual or emotional
relationship between indoors and outdoors, upstairs and
downstairs...There is not a director who films or frames
interior shots with Ray's dynamic, fraught grace and who thereby
so explodes the rigid limits of "script" material. No
one made CinemaScope so glorious a shape as Ray, because it
seemed to set an extra challenge to his interior sensibility." - David
Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002) |
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"A huge
cult has grown around this American director in recent years,
bigger than almost any film-maker, and certainly one of Ray's
uneven output, could warrant. His best films are clustered in
his initial RKO Radio period - apart from Rebel Without a
Cause, his only truly first-rate film outside that studio.
Observers have professed to find various wonders in such later
Ray films as Hot Blood, The True Story of Jesse James,
Bitter Victory and others. I can only confess that their
virtues escaped me at the time and, on a re-viewing, still do." -
David
Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999) |
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"One of the finest directors of the '50s, Nicholas Ray
transcended the limitations of genre to create movies of a
highly personal nature. Imbued with an intense, romantic
pessimism and photographed with a rare feel for the emotional
resonance of colour and space. Ray's films are distinguished by
a passionate identification with society's outsiders, his
sympathies possibly arising from his own troubled relationship
with the film-making establishment." - Geoff
Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989) |
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"Those who form their own moral laws, whatever the consequences,
people the films of Nicholas Ray. His tendency to cut his images
on character movement makes his work extremely fluid." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) |
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"In the
theatre, words are eighty to eighty-five percent of the
importance of what is happening to you for your comprehension.
In film, words are about twenty percent. It's a different
figure, but it's almost an opposite ratio. For the words are
only a little bit of embroidery, a little bit of lacework."
- Nicholas
Ray (Directing the Film, 1976) |
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"My
affection for CinemaScope initially was my affection for the
horizontal line as I learned it from having been apprenticed to
an architect who was someone named Frank Lloyd Wright." -
Nicholas
Ray (Directing the Film, 1976) |
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