Born.

Nicholas Ray, born this day 97 years ago. Thanks to Tom Farrell for the picture and the heads-up.

“Born. Lived. Interrupted. And it happens every day.”

“I had hoped to be appointed to the first Venus rocket.”

“I once foolishly performed an abortion on a peach tree.”

Boy, PRETTY POISON, that’s some film. You should definitely rush out and get ahold of a copy, definitely. If anybody gets in your way, BRUSH THEM ASIDE LIKE INSECTS.

Well, it shouldn’t be necessary to go that far, it’s just my gentle way of suggesting you should bump it to the top of your rental lists, that’s all. Good to see it without knowing TOO much about it, so you’ll just have to trust me. I think I can tell you that -

1) Anthony Perkins is released into the community after a long time in an institution. But this is not Richard Franklin’s PSYCHO II.

2) He begins a relationship with high-school girl Tuesday Weld. But this is certainly not LORD LOVE A DUCK.

3) Said relationship gets… complicated. But this is not ANYTHING ELSE.

Dan Sallitt has more to say HERE. It’s spoilerific but seriously worth reading once you’ve seen the film. Or you can do as I did: read the post, forget most of the plot points over the course of a year, then see the film and have it be a lovely surprise. But that’s kind of time-consuming.

Noel Black, far from prolific but clearly rather interesting, directs. The years after the decline of the studio system and before the “new Hollywood” seem peppered with misshapen gems like this. Lorenzo Semple scripts, and it shows another side to him from the campy Batman show and FLASH GORDON script. I love both those things, but the slide from quirky screwball to noir here prefigures Jonathan Demme’s SOMETHING WILD (my fave Demme?) and is probably more deep, dark and interesting. Anyway, Demme’s is the only other film I can think of that achieves this exact genre-shift (although Nicholas Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE actually kind of touches on comedy to begin with before heading for the shocking dark) and they’d certainly go great together.

Like Tony Perkins and Tuesday Weld! They have chemistry! Fiona observed this, and I agree: they’re very different players in every respect, but both good and seemingly instinctive and they pay keen attention to each other. Their reactions to each other are so genuine we have to believe they’re into each other.

Fiona rated Tony’s pick-up line as the best ever. Accosting Tues in a phone booth: “Don’t say a word act perfectly natural we’re under surveillance. Rendezvous tonight bring this object. Spring Street movie house eight p.m. seventh row balcony left side aisle got that? Make your phone call don’t look after me.” And with that he is off.

“You WOULD go,” asserted Fiona.

Born. Lived. Interrupted.

Shadowplayer and Nicholas Ray associate Tom Farrell writes ~

“Nick Ray died on June 16,1979, here with daughter Julie and wife Betty in 1960.”

Seems apt that I received this just after posting a piece on the Dylan Thomas film — at one point Ray was going to film Dylan Thomas’ Edinburgh-set screenplay THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS, with James Mason and Barbara Steele. Looking at the Freddie Francis version that eventually got made, or at the new Thomas movie, for all its virtues of craft and decency, is a good reminder of why we need impassioned, ungovernable geniuses like Ray in the cinema today.

Quote of the Day: Goddamn Norwegian Mad

Ending our series of zingers from Nicholas Ray:

Here’s Ray, after describing how he and his family were persecuted in Wisconsin during WWI because they were of German-Norwegian origin ~

“The story begins at the in-between time of November 8, 1918, the day of the false armistice. I was seven and had become a Lutheran monk sulking under the butternut trees, lying in a hammock, wearing bell-bottomed sailor trousers, teasing my sister to tickle up or go. That night my oldest sister Alice drove my other sisters, Ruth and Helen, my mother, and myself through the town of Galesville and, we all beat pots and pans and lit torches, honked the two horns, and yelled out ‘PEACE PEACE PEACE!! ARMISTICE ARMISTICE PEACE PEACE!!!’

“The next morning Alice came into my room to say with heavy doom that it had been a false armistice. I hadn’t yet observed that that was the nature of life, so I got goddamn Norwegian mad and ran slamming doors through the house to the front porch. The walls were covered with antler heads, the floor with the tears of my mother and our neighbours, the Beizers. The Beizers’ house had been painted yellow during the night to show that they were still dirty yellow huns.

“The best epitaph I can think of is:

Born

Lived

Interrupted.

“And it happens ever day.”

~ From I Was Interrupted, Nicholas Ray on Making Movies. Edited by Susan Ray.

A Wedding

“I got married in Las Vegas once. To Gloria Grahame. I didn’t like her very much. I was infatuated with her, but I didn’t like her very much.

“There was something vindictive about me that made me stay at the crap tables while she was waiting out the last few days before her divorce became final. I wanted to be absolutely broke. I didn’t want this dame, who later proved to be as shrewd as she had begun to threaten to be, to have anything of mine. I didn’t want her to have any money at all. I was in the middle of making IN A LONELY PLACE. I lost a bundle.”

~ Nicholas Ray in I Was Interrupted, Nicholas Ray on Making Movies.

I wonder if Ray really lost all his money quite as deliberately as that.  If he did, it annoys me somewhat — I’d rather he gave the money to a good cause. He seems to have had a gambling addiction, of the kind that gets satisfaction from losing rather than winning.

Witnesses who saw Phil Silvers at the roulette wheel or craps table reported the same thing — his body would relax totally once he had lost his last dollar. Some kind of relief was achieved.

In his collected diaries, Charlton Heston reports asking a friend about Ray before embarking upon the colossal misadventure that was 55 DAYS AT PEKING. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but the friend said something like, “Oh, he’s a good director. Good sense of story and good with actors. Great visual style. Intelligent. But Chuck, I’ve played poker with him. And Chuck, he’s a loser.”

In the U.S. the word “loser” seems to have a greater power than elsewhere, like it’s the worst thing you can call somebody. I think in Scotland we’d just shrug that one off. “Yeah, so what?” But Heston’s friend is using the word in a more precise and meaningful way — a loser is someone who sets out to lose.

When William Goldman and Rob Reiner were preparing to do MISERY, they talked to Warren Beatty about possibly playing the lead role. Beatty told them that if they kept the script like Stephen King’s novel, where the character has his foot chopped off by the crazed fan, “He’s a loser.” Having his bones broken was a way to make the injury recoverable, so that the ending is happier. The hero can win back what he lost.

This is kind of weird and repugnant to me. The idea that a person who loses a foot is a different KIND of person — a loser — from a person who just has his bones broken, then gets better, is a basically false view of the world, a place where shit happens.

Anyway, returning to Ray, whose loserishness I find appealing and attractive — that marriage to Gloria Grahame ended, and then she married Ray’s son. That didn’t last either. When I mention this in lectures, there’s a sort of shudder of revulsion, as if an act of incest were involved. But it’s not! O.K., marrying your ex’s offspring might be sort of unusual, but really, there’s nothing actually wrong with it per se. Tony Ray was probably closer to G.G.’s age than Nick, and if not, who cares?

G.G.’s last love affair is commemorated in a fine book, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.

A Powerful Curse

“For the NY Times Classifieds:

MAY ANY FILM MADE ABOUT HOWARD HUGHES NOT DIRECTED BY NICHOLAS RAY BE PUT TO REST IN A VAULT AND MAY THE VAULT HAVE SEVEN ROOMS AND MAY EACH ROOM HAVE SEVEN SHELVES AND MAY THE FILM BE SHIFTED EVERY SEVEN YEARS FROM SHELF TO SHELF TO ROOM TO ROOM UNSEEN AND UNREMEMBERED.

1977.”

~ Nicholas Ray, in I Was Interrupted, Nicholas Ray on Making Movies.

Home Brew

“I have been under the lash of alcoholism since birth.

“I was born in Wisconsin. My grandfather died on Main Street, in front of the office of a doctor called White Beaver by the Indians, while carrying the first buck deer of the season over his shoulders.

“My father built levees, docking areas for steamboats, and dykes against floods. He built colleges, creameries, whorehouses, cathedrals and breweries. Before he was 21, he was the contractor for the construction of one of the first churches on the northern Mississippi. He married his first wife in the church. He divorced her, and was ex-communicated. He joined the Masons and married my mother, a Norwegian Lutheran. I was born when he was 50, my mother, 39. In my most vivid memories of their relationship, they slept in separate bedrooms. My mother was fond of saying, “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.” Who cared when there were so many younger lips?

“All during my childhood and Prohibition there was booze in the house, and on the street. At home it was for stealing; I stole my first pint at ten. On the street it was for buying — grain alcohol mixed with sugar and hot water — with money stolen from home. One day a schoolmate downed a bottle of grain alcohol and died horribly. We held a drunken ritual in his honor. Years later in Hollywood the head grip on my crew reached behind the darkened set for his stash of gin and drank from a bottle of carbon tet. He was carried offstage dead.

“During Prohibition where I grew up there were twenty-one saloons and speakeasies on one street. I learned to drive when I was 13 so I could get my father home safe from his nightly rounds of speakeasies and bootleggers. Sometimes I’d wait for him in the car and masturbate. At the age of 14 I learned of his mistress, and found her in a speakeasy across from a brewery my father had built. She lead me to a hotel room. He was lying in sweat and puke, with puke pans on the floor at the side of the bed. I took him home and nursed him through the night.

“In the morning Doc Rhodes came. He was a dope addict. Before I left for school I watched him heat a substance in a spoon and draw it into a hypodermic. In Latin class I alternated between dozing off and hypertension. I asked to be excused. I went to the S&H Pool Hall and practiced three-cushion billiards. There was a phone call. My mother had tracked me down. My father was dying.

“He was dead when I got home. I had never been in a Catholic church, but I genuflected at his side, kissed him, and spent the night in a Turkish bath.

“Six months later my mother and I got the doctor into court, but I was so pissed on home brew I couldn’t testify, so we lost. The next day I saw the doctor walking on Main Street. I was driving a new Oakland Cabriolet. I was drunk. I ran the car at him across from the cathedral my father had built. A fire hydrant got in the way. Doc Rhodes left town. I got my first ticket for reckless driving.

“I learned about Aqua Velva long before I started shaving. No, I didn’t drink it. I poured it on the sheets or into the bathtub to clear the smell of my puke.

“The pool hall was important, especially on Sundays at noon, after church. I got kicked out of high school seventeen times.

“A boy needs a father at certain times in his life so he can kick him in the shins, so he can fight for the love of his mother. The boy misbehaves at one point, runs away at another, while his father remains constant, a gauge against which the boy can measure himself. Take that away and the spine is lost.”

~ from I Was Interrupted, Nicholas Ray on Making Movies, edited and introduced by Susan Ray.

Ray’s autobiographical sketches have the same dynamism, raw emotion, concision and avoidance of sentimentality found in his best films. And his story is an incredible one — the odds would seem to have been against him from the start, yet he left an indelible mark upon cinema.

Quote of the Day: 55 Drinks at Peking

Screenwriter Bernard Gordon (55 DAYS AT PEKING) on Nicholas Ray ~

“Nick was trying hard to battle a long alcohol dependency, but his approach struck me as weird and unproductive. He didn’t allow himself any wine or liquor but kept a bottle of an Italian digestif, Fernet Branca, at hand. Almost every bar had this drink in stock, ready for patrons who’d eaten too much and were suffering from acid indigestion. Ergo, digestif. I tried it myself. It worked much better than Alka Seltzer, but it was a vile-tasting concoction made from something like fermented artichoke hearts; sipping it was only slightly less unpleasant than suffering from heartburn. It was actually a strong alcoholic drink. From the taste, I suspected it was about a hundred proof. Keeping to his vow and his promise to stay off the sauce, Nick sat all evening, sipping his digestif, consuming almost the entire bottle. Toward the end of the shooting on PEKING, Nick became seriously ill. I blamed that corrosive drink.”

~ From Hollywood Exile, or How I Learned to Stop Worryng and Love the Blacklist.

Gordon’s stories from this one shoot are incredible. With an alcoholic director, and an alcoholic star (Ava Gardner, who walked off the film partway, necessitating an offscreen death for her character), the film was what you might call troubled. When David Niven, who had cheerfully signed up without reading a page of script, protested that his character wasn’t active enough, an English writer was brought in to help Gordon flesh out the role. Robert Hamer, the most serious alcoholic of the bunch. It was said at Ealing Studios, latterly Hamer’s home, that if by some freak of chance, endurance or depravity you managed to misbehave more appallingly than Hamer on a night out, he would be unable to face you the next day for shame of having been outperformed in the degeneracy stakes.

Gordon found Hamer charming, but completely unproductive.

He reports that Philip Yordan, handling the production for Samuel Bronston, was an eccentric sort of chap (Yordan, a writer himself, was a “front” for many blacklisted scribes. When all the blacklisted writers names were being restored to the credits of films they’d worked on, Yordan provided information about who had done what — except where he’d had a falling-out with the writer. Then they could go unnamed forever as far as he was concerned). Returning to their hotel from a late meal, Gordon saw Yordan purchase a stack of astrology magazines.

“You don’t believe in that stuff, do you?” asked Gordon, amazed.

“Do you know of a better way to predict the future?”

Heads you lose.

Regular Shadowplayers may recall my near-sexual fascination for Busby Berkeley and the FLOATING HEAD OF DEATH. Imagine my all-pervading joy and sheer, sensuous transport at finding another such head at the start of B.B.’s THE GANG’S ALL HERE:

This cheerful yet somehow alarming individual drifts weightless towards us, crooning “Brazil”, right at the start of the film. He’s not quite as skull-beneath-the-skin terrifying as Wini Shaw in GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935, but it turns out he’s only a foretaste of the main attraction, which comes at the film’s end:

At the climax of a number celebrating the perennial joys of the polka dot, the traditional B.B. chorus-line transmutes by the aid of mirrors into a glistening Technicolor iris-sphincter, permutating kaleidoscopically and finally emitting –

Eugene Pallette! B. Kite and I struggled to capture this man’s majesty in our Believer article on character actors, only for Fiona to encapsulate the Great Man in a colossal nutshell: “He’s the brick shithouse everybody’s always talking about.”

Anyway, I don’t want to take that sphincter metaphor any further than I absolutely have to, but basically the entire cast of the film is evacuated right in our faces, an image out of Heironymous Bosch.

It’s hard to decide who’s more terrifying. Mock-turtle Edward Everett Horton on a sickly green polka dot platter, lunging into our eyes like a vision from Hades, certainly comes near the  top. For once in this film, Carmen Miranda is actually less horripilating than everybody else.

Benny Goodman is just WRONG ALL OVER. He’s an odd film presence, in general, quite likably different and welcome, but hurled bodiless towards us with a translucent lavender ruff, he becomes a CREATURE OF NIGHTMARE.

AARGH! Shit shit shit get it way from me! Charlotte Greenwood demonstrates why Nicholas Ray slept with a gun under his pillow. If you wake up from dreaming of THIS, you’ve gotta be able to fire off a few rounds at anything lurking in the corner of the room or you’ll have a case of the screaming ab-dabs for sure.

And then Alice Faye, the singing Simone Signoret, with her cerulean-blue face, is wafted at us on happy updrafts of melody and we realise that we truly are in the Twentieth Century Fox’s idea of Sheol, Gehenna, the bottomless pit – adrift, decapitated, among the eternally smiling, hopelessly insane stars.

“Hell will have no surprises for them!”

The Wrong-Eyed Jesus

“Look — it’s Jesus!”

That first subtitle in LA DOLCE VITA, as a giant Christ flies by, slung from a helicopter, causing bikini babes to rise from their sun loungers in mildly surprised recognition, always cracks me up.

What’s the occasion? Why, it’s Easter in Romania! Time for a seasonal caption competition. All suggestions must be lines from existing films, intended to compliment the shot above, depicting the Little Lamb Who Made Us All as he appears in Nicholas Ray’s KING OF KINGS.

My suggestions –

“He has his father’s eyes.” ~ ROSEMARY’S BABY.

“Don’t look at his eyes!” ~ THE DEVIL RIDES OUT.

“Let Jesus fuck you!” ~ THE EXORCIST.

You might surmise from the above that I have it in for Christ, but this is not so. A little good-natured joshing. While rejecting his claim to divinity (or the claims made for him) I don’t have anything against his parables and precepts. In the manner of Ralph Richardson (as in all things), I fill my glass with gin, raise it, and say ~ 

“To Jesus Christ! What an extraordinarily nice fellow!”

And drink it all down at once.