Nicholas Ray Blogathon: Considering Ray Elsewhere in the Blogosphere - Day 4

by Tony Dayoub

Wow, I couldn't have timed it better if I tried. On this final day I received a bunch of first-time contributions from some of my favorite bloggers. These are the bloggers that I read and learn a lot from. So I highly recommend perusing through all of today's submissions.

UPDATED 9/7 - Nicholas Ray Blogathon: Considering Ray Elsewhere in the Blogosphere - Day 1

by Tony Dayoub

So we'll see how submissions go today, but my plan (which will stay fluid) is this: Each day, I'll post links to pieces submitted by other writers on some of the films I plan on covering that day. Occasionally I'll highlight a submission by a notable film writer with its own post. Lastly, at the end of each day, I'll to try to post links to other pieces that have cropped up recently around the net in honor of Nicholas Ray's Centennial.

Here's what I've got today:

Nicholas Ray Blogathon: They Live By Night (1949)

by Tony Dayoub

I'm still amazed that They Live by Night is Nicholas Ray's directorial debut. It is an innovative and accomplished piece of work from a man whose previous film experience mainly consisted of assisting Elia Kazan on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Of course, Ray had spent some time acting in the Group Theatre, roamed much of the U.S. while documenting folk music for the Library of Congress, worked in radio, and even directed a Broadway musical. So at 36, what he most contributed to They Live by Night was life experience. Perhaps this is why one feels that the movie's young couple on the run is doomed to failure: because Ray takes an almost nostalgic perspective in the way he approaches the story, as if recalling better times. Harsh at some points, yet gauzily expressionistic in others, They Live by Night is a romantic fever dream which, as the cliche goes, burns twice as bright if only half as long.

Farley Granger

by Tony Dayoub

Handsome and stiff-jawed, it was easy to mistake him for a traditional leading man at first glance. But a few minutes spent with him and a quiet uncertainty in his features would quickly give way to anxious desperation. That was why Farley Granger was often cast as someone with something to hide. Alfred Hitchcock took advantage of that in two of his films, so did Nicholas Ray, and Italy's Luchino Visconti. In Granger's best period, a short span of time from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, each director pushed the suave acting neophyte to subvert his angular features to the point where they seemed brittle, exposing a fragility which often told the viewer everything one needed to know about his character.