TSPDT - Nicholas Ray


	"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)

	"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)

	"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)

	"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)

	"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)

	"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)