Hollywood Maverick: Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray was a renegade of the Hollywood studio system whose cinematic odes to the lives of loners, outcasts, and rebels helped inspire generations of filmmakers to come. His work spanned genres and sub-genres which, at times, he helped popularize in the first place. There is no Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands without They Live by Night, the prototypical “couple on the run” film, to give just one example.

His films are technically breathtaking, characterized by an impressionistic style of filmmaking which earned him plaudits from titans of the French New Wave such as Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard, the latter of whom once described Ray’s work as being: “something which exists only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage, or anywhere else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen.”

Ray was an ardent humanist, with palpable empathy both for his actors and for the characters they played. From Robert Mitchum’s aging rodeo rider in The Lusty Men, to James Mason’s drug-addicted patriarch in Bigger Than Life, to James Dean’s instantly iconic turn in Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray directed some of the finest performances ever put to film.

To quote, again, from Godard: “the cinema is Nicholas Ray,” and we are excited to present four of his greatest films (three of which will be shown on 35mm) at the Jacob Burns Film Center.