Nicholas Ray Blogathon: Born to Be Bad (1950)

by Tony Dayoub

A lot of the fun found in Born to Be Bad, a minor film by Nicholas Ray to be sure, is in watching Joan Fontaine subvert her sweet screen persona to play the manipulative Christabel Caine. From the moment she bursts into the life of her publisher uncle's employee, Donna (Joan Leslie)—the jaded city girl Christabel is staying with until she gets her footing in San Francisco—small-town Christabel's default mode of advancing in society is a sort of clumsy, saccharine method of laying love-traps around vain, rich men whose latent attraction to her blinds them to her motives. What else can explain how Donna's fiance, Curtis (Zachary Scott), is the only one to fall for the excessively honeydrippy Christabel?

Opening Shots: They Live By Night

by Jim Emerson

Nicholas Ray's directorial debut, "They Live By Night" (1949), begins like a trailer and then slams us right into the opening titles of the feature. An attractive young couple (Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell) are nestling in close-up by the flickering light of a fireplace. They smile, they kiss, and then something off-screen (and unheard on the soundtrack, though signaled by an jarring shift in the musical score) causes them to react with fear and alarm...

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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.

You Can't Handle the Truth

Historical extras on its Blu-ray edition fail to make the case for The Conspirator

by Tony Dayoub

Just out on Blu-ray and DVD, Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, about the plot surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, is the American Film Company’s debut feature. Throughout much of the new disc’s extras, the company touts itself as a production house interested in shepherding stories mined from the annals of American history in the most accurate way possible. And while watching the bounty of special features included in the Deluxe Edition Blu-ray disc, an American history nut like me would find ample evidence that Redford’s 2010 film had been vetted by numerous historians. Included are 10 featurettes that dig into specific aspects of the movie, like the production design, costuming, or its main characters. The hour-long documentary, “The Plot to Kill Lincoln,” provides the historical background behind The Conspirator’s inciting incident in exhaustive detail. A viewing of the disc’s main feature, however, proves that if the facts contradict the story the filmmakers want to tell, truth will still lose out to fiction...

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