The Essentials: 5 Great Films By Nicholas Ray

“Johnny Guitar” (1954)
You gotta love those French new wave critics for making it intellectually ok to adore “Johnny Guitar” — Ray’s trashy-to-the-point-of-camp, talky Western/Women’s Pic hybrid — thereby rescuing it from the category of “guilty pleasure” to which it might otherwise belong. You see, as that cumbersome description might suggest, there is almost too much going on here — venomous female rivalries, old flames, bank robberies, stagecoach holdups, lynchings, gunfights, betrayals, arson, intrigues, a fine measure of cock-blocking and plenty of last-minute changes of heart, all shot in fetishizable, painterly Technicolor. The film should be a complete mess, but somehow, although each individual element sits weirdly alongside any other, the whole is so well orchestrated as to make it, on some visceral level, completely satisfying. Joan Crawford, her face almost an abstraction of a face under mask-like, heavy make-up, plays Vienna, who we’re somehow supposed to believe is a scrappy ex-hooker/saloon girl who clawed her way to her dream of owning her own business: a saloon built seemingly in the middle of nowhere that will pay dividends once the railway is routed right by it. Crawford is simply too patrician, too steely, too stately a presence to sell that backstory convincingly, and her unbending sternness makes it hard for the men who love her to seem anything but emasculated ciphers by comparison. But that’s part of the pleasure here: right down to the climactic showdown being between two women (Crawford and a maniacal Mercedes McCambridge), this film doesn’t simply replace male western archetypes with females (“Calamity Jane,” it ain’t), it actually lets its narrative warp into melodrama around its women, so what we get is almost subversive for the Western genre. Apparently, Crawford, as became her wont, feuded with practically everyone on set, especially Sterling Hayden, (the hero of this film in title only), and McCambridge (later the voice of the demon in “The Exorcist“), who referred to her as “a mean, tipsy, powerful, rotten-egg lady.” And perhaps that shows: as a film it’s a fascinating muddle of clashing characterizations and story strands that might not run deep, but boy are they writ large. But as a primer for some of Ray’s preoccupations (outsider-iness, the past vs. the present, male violence, the power dynamic in relationships) and style (theatrical Technicolor, staginess, wordiness) it’s pretty much, well, essential.
“Rebel Without A Cause” (1955)
Even those who aren’t aware of Ray’s career as a whole know 1955’s “Rebel Without A Cause,” thanks principally to the tragic death of star James Dean only a few weeks before the film made it to theaters. But for all of the rubberneckers, the film still holds up remarkably well today, even if it’s perhaps not Ray’s absolute finest. The film began as nothing but a simple B-movie, borrowing the title of Robert M. Lindner‘s psychiatric study “Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis Of A Psychopath,” which Warners had optioned a decade earlier, and the studio were trying to keep it cheap, ordering Ray to shoot in black-and-white, until Dean broke out in “East Of Eden,” at which point they ordered the scenes already filmed to be redone in (glorious) color. Dean plays a young man, newly arrived at an L.A. high school and already in trouble with the authorities, who falls in with classmates Plato (Sal Mineo) and Judy (Natalie Wood), who recognize him after being brought into the police station on the same night. The trio are furious at their peers, at the complacency (or absence) of their uncomprehending parents and at the world around them, in an infinitely more empathetic and realistic manner than the same year’s near-hysterical “Blackboard Jungle.” But there’s a richness beyond that, an undercurrent of sexual longing and inevitable, fatal madness that feels more like a Greek tragedy than a Shakespeare play. The screenplay’s probably the weakest link: the lines can clunk, pushing the theme into text rather than subtext, and it does feel dated in places. And it’s probably not Ray’s most impressive directorial effort, although it’s as impeccably staged and lit as ever. But the sheer fury it feels — thanks in particular to the superb performances by Wood, Mineo and especially Dean (who would all meet tragic fates themselves) — still feels like a firecracker today.