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American Cinema: Dossier - Nicholas Ray

a director should be able to recognize himself in the portrait that we drawof him and his films. Otherwise we have failed. The hallmark of Ray'svery great talent resides in his absolute sincerity, his acute sensitivity.6 Heis not of great stature as a technician. All his films are very disjointed, butit is obvious that Ray is aiming less for the traditional and all-round successof a film than at giving each shot a certain emotional quality. Johnny Guitaris 'composed', rather hurriedly, of very long takes divided into four. Theediting is deplorable. But the interest lies elsewhere: for instance in thevery beautiful positioning of figures within the frame. (The posse atVienna's is formed and moves in a V-shape, like migratory birds.)Nicholas Ray is to some extent the Rossellini of Hollywood;7 in thekingdom of mechanization he is the craftsman, lovingly fashioning smallobjects out of holly wood. Hence a hue and cry against the amateur! Thereis not one of Ray's films without nightfall. He is the poet of nightfall,and in Hollywood everything is permissible, except poetry. Hawks, forexample, keeps it at arm's length, and Hitchcock cautiously ventures fouror five shots each time, in small doses. While a Hawks settles down inHollywood - in reality he spends most of the year in Switzerland - andtakes things easy, flirting with tradition all the better to flout it, and alwayswinning, Ray is incapable of 'doing a deal' with the devil and turning thearrangement to his advantage - he is picked on and loses the battle evenbefore he starts fighting.Hawks and Ray form an opposition rather like Castellani and Rossellini.With Hawks we witness a triumph of the mind, with Nick Ray it is atriumph of the heart. You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or viceversa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both Imake so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don't watch any morefilms, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, ofpoetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferablepretension? No: a wonderful certainty. Translated by Liz Heron

Notes1 'Biarritz Rendez-vous': 'During the next year [1949], Objectif 49 [see "Six Charac-ters in search of auteurs", Ch. 2, note 4] successfully broadened out and organ-ized in Biarritz, with Cocteau as president, the "Ft"ftival du Film Maudit" ,Gacques Ooniol-Valcroze, 'L'Histoire des Cahiers', Cllhiers 100, October 1959).Maudit literally means 'cursed', but a more accurate translation here might be'unjustly neglected'. Ray's They Live By Night was an important film at thisfestival.2 I am deliberately omitting Flying Leathernecks, A Woman's Secret and Born to beBad, which are acknowledged as 'assignments ' (only the first came out in France).(Author's note.)3 In Johnny Guitar as in On Dangerous Ground the lynch-mob is led by Ward Bond:

Johnny: J've got a hunch the posse will be dropping in on you before night.108

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F r a n ~ o i s Truffaut '1\. VVonderful Certainty'

Same people that paid you , e s t e r d a y . But they won't be the same. Aposse isn't people. I've rideL .I.th them and I've ridden against them. Aposse is an animal; i t moves hkt' one and thinks like one . . .Vienna: They're men with itchy fingers and a coil of rope around their saddlehorns looking for somebody to hang. And after riding a few hours they don'tcare much who they hang. You haven't told me a thing I don't know.Johnny: I haven't finished.Vienna: Finish, but be brief.Johnny: A posse feels safe because it's big. They only make a big target. I canride around and pick off a few; the rest of them will lose their guts, turn tail,break up and go home.And later:Maclvers: My men are not killers. They've gotta be cold, tired and hungry before

they get mad.Emma: How long does that take?Maclvers: You've got five years of mad in you. You can give them another fivehours. (Author'S note.)4 Ray's realism is a realism of words and poetic accidents I a la Cocteau'. A seriesof larger than life affectations. All the cowboys in Johnny Guitar deliver insultsby calling each other 'mister':

The Kid: All of a sudden, I don't like you, mister.Johnny: Now that makes me real sad. I always hate to lose a friend.Vienna (attributed to The Kid in Truffaut's original): That's the way i t goes. Loseone, find one. Play something for me Mister Guitar.Further on:The Kid: Heads, I'm gonna kill you, mister. Tails, you can play her a tune.And finally:Bart: He ain't all right with me.Corey: Who is?Bart: Me. I like me, and I'm taking good care of me.(Not sequential in the film.) (Author's note.)

5 Truffaut seems to be referring here in particular to Bazin's 'Hitchcock contreHitchcock', Cahiers 39, October 1954, in which Bazin is troubled by the distancebetween his Cahiers colleagues' views of Hitchcock's work and Hitchcock's ownprofessed views.6 For those who need more proofs than those offered on the screen: it is not ourcustom in Cahiers to pay any attention to the tittle-tattle circulated in the Ho1ly-wood gossip columns, but it is important to bear in mind - Bazin agrees withme here - how much Ray's life resembles his films. First a long idyll with JoanCrawford whom he meets again several years later to film Johnny Guitar, which

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American Cinema: Dossier - Nicholas Ray

is the story of a couple who come together again! Nicholas Ray was married toGloria Grahame. After numerous quarrels and reconciliations they got divorced;Gloria accused her husband of violence and brutality. In a Lonely Place, whoseheroine is Gloria Grahame, tells the story of a scriptwriter who is sick of Holly-wood, but because he is in love with a young woman is persuaded to workthere again. He hits people who disagree with him, falls out with his friends,and gets drunk. One evening he almost strangles his mistress. She leaves him.It all ends very badly, which is quite surprising for a little studio productionfilm. One can imagine our lovers meeting again six years later. He has becomea guitarist, she runs a gambling-joint out West, and here is the end of In a LonelyPlace running neatly into the beginning of Johnny Guitar, with Crawford replacingGloria.Johnny: How many men have you forgotten?Vienna: As many women as you've remembered.Johnny: Don't go away.Vienna: I haven't moved.Johnny: Tell me something nice.Vienna: Sure, what do you want to hear?Johnny: Lie to me. Tell me all these years you've waited. Tell me.Vienna: All these years I've waited.Johnny: Tell me you'd have died if I hadn't come back.Vienna: I would have died if you hadn't come back.Johnny: Tell me you still love me like I love you.Vienna: I still love you like you love me.Johnny: Thanks. Thanks a lot. (Author's note.)

7 Like Rossellini, Ray knows the paltriness of speech. He never explains, he neveremphasizes. He makes schemas of films, rather than films (d. Rivette's articleon RR). There's something else they have in common: Ray is shocked bychildren's deaths (They Live By Night, Knock on Any Door, On Dangerous Ground,Johnny Guitar). The comparison that has been made between High Noon andJohnny Guitar is like comparing a sardine to Jonah, or to be more precise, Poujadeto Bonaparte. Furthermore, I would point out that the American cinema is closerto Gide than ours is, in that understatement is its favourite rhetorical device.For example: 'Sam wa.sn't a bad guy' or 'Jeff, I've known officers worse thanyou', or else 'She's not a bad looking doll'. (Author's note.)'Rivette's article on RR' refers to Jacques Rivette's 'Letter on Rossellini', Ch.26 in this volume.Pierre Poujade, b. 1920, led a much publicized political protest movement inFrance during the 1950s, reaching its height i r ~ 1'1Sf, { L ; : ~ . shortly after Truffaut'sreference here), when elections to the National Assembly brought 'Poujadists'52 out of a total 595 seats. Initially a petit-bourgeois protest against governmenttaxation and interference, the movement also combined fascistic and anti-semiticelements. 'Poujadisme' survives Poujade himself as a term for right-wing, peti tbourgeois, anti-government tendencies.

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