The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (341 page)

Gregory Ratoff
(1897–1960), b. St. Petersburg, Russia
1936:
Sins of Man
(codirected with Otto Brower). 1937:
Lancer Spy
. 1939:
Wife, Husband and Friend; Barricade; Rose of Washington Square; Hotel for Women; DayTime Wife; Intermezzo
. 1940:
I Was an Adventuress; Public Deb No. 1
. 1941:
Adam Had Four Sons; The Men in Her Life; The Corsican Brothers
. 1942:
Two Yanks in Trinidad; Footlight Serenade
. 1943:
The Heat’s On; Something to Shout About
. 1944:
Song of Russia; Irish Eyes Are Smiling
. 1945:
Where Do We Go From Here?; Paris Underground
. 1946:
Do You Love Me?
. 1947:
Carnival in Costa Rica; Moss Rose
. 1949:
Black Magic
. 1950:
That Dangerous Age
. 1951:
Operation X
. 1953:
Taxi
. 1956:
Abdullah’s Harem
. 1960:
Oscar Wilde
.

Trained in the Russian theatre and in the Russian army in the First World War, Ratoff soon shed any trace of diligent schooling or harsh experience. He was an endearing, flamboyant ham, physically reminiscent of Emil Jannings in
The Last Command
. Before he took to directing, his acting work included the father in
Symphony of Six Million
(32, Gregory La Cava); the producer in
What Price Hollywood?
(32, George Cukor);
Under Two Flags
(36, Frank Lloyd);
The Road to Glory
(36, Howard Hawks); and
Sing, Baby, Sing
(36, Sidney Lanfield).

His own films are confections: the earlier ones moderately prestigious, the latter sadly shady.
Lancer Spy
was a nice matching of George Sanders, Dolores del Rio, and Peter Lorre, while
I Was an Adventuress
had Lorre and Erich von Stroheim together. That sort of larger-than-life performance was Ratoff’s forte, so that the striving for sincerity by Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman in
Intermezzo
was rather swamped by the director’s schmaltz. (In fact, Ratoff was “director” on that to pay off a gambling debt; Leslie Howard handled the actors.) Similarly,
The Corsican Brothers
, with two Douglas Fairbanks Jrs., Akim Tamiroff, and Ratoff himself, is a gay farrago;
The Heat’s On
was a poor Mae West picture;
Song of Russia
was patriotic rubbish, about as ethnically authentic as
Irish Eyes Are Smiling
. But
Black Magic
, with Welles as Cagliostro, is great fun, and proof of the charm with which Welles adopts the low-down. After the war, Ratoff spent more time acting, notably in
All About Eve
(50, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
The Sun Also Rises
(57, Henry King); and
Once More With Feeling
(59, Stanley Donen). Hopelessly crossbred by then, in 1960 he brought tears to his own eyes as a Jewish refugee in
Exodus
(Otto Prem inger), and made a hopeless mess directing the Robert Morley
Oscar Wilde
.

Aldo Ray
(Aldo DaRe) (1926–91), b. Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania
For every insistence on the vitality of American cinema, it must be said that Hollywood has made a bland, genteel picture of redneck America. The prejudice, barroom stink, and narrow-minded expansiveness of America has not often been portrayed honestly. From John Ford onward, provincialism has been gilded by sentiment and nostalgia. All credit then to Aldo Ray for some intriguing views of the American ordinary ranker. Ray was lured into films from California politics—he was sheriff of the California town Crockett—by director David Miller. He never lost the arrogant strut and insecure grasp of
lex
in a crossroads settlement law-enforcement agent.

Miller put him in
Saturday’s Hero
(51) and Ray was then briefly drafted into the much more sophisticated world of George Cukor:
The Marrying Kind
(52) and
Pat and Mike
(52). But his bull-necked coarseness assured him a string of soldier parts:
Miss Sadie Thompson
(53, Curtis Bernhardt); as a convict in
We’re No Angels
(55, Michael Curtiz);
Three Stripes in the Sun
(55, Richard Murphy); breaking into tears in
Battle Cry
(55, Raoul Walsh).

This development reached a splendid climax in three films: as the sergeant who takes over the war from Robert Ryan’s officer in
Men in War
(57, Anthony Mann); lusting after Tina Louise in Mann’s recreation of Erskine Caldwell’s country,
God’s Little Acre
(58, Mann); and as Norman Mailer’s Sergeant Croft in
The Naked and the Dead
(58, Walsh). The two military pictures caught the raucous, neo-fascist spirit of the American army eerily well. Ray was a match for Mailer’s Croft and it was no surprise that, ten years later, he was back in combat in John Wayne’s
The Green Berets
(68).

Ray may have been too strong a flavor for America. By the late 1950s he was a wandering actor in less and less worthy films:
Nightfall
(56, Jacques Tourneur);
The Siege of Pinchgut
(58, Harry Watt);
The Day They Robbed the Bank of England
(60, John Guillermin);
Johnny Nobody
(61, Nigel Patrick);
I Moschettieri del Mare
(62, Stefano Vanzina Steno);
Nightmare in the Sun
(64, Marc Lawrence);
Sylvia
(65, Gordon Douglas);
What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?
(66, Blake Edwards);
Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round
(66, Bernard Girard);
Welcome to Hard Times
(67, Burt Kennedy);
Kill a Dragon
(67, Michael Moore);
Riot on Sunset Strip
(67, Arthur Dreifuss);
The Power
(67, Byron Haskin and George Pal);
The Violent Ones
(67, Fernando Lamas);
Angel Unchained
(70, Lee Madden);
Seven Alone
(74, Earl Bellamy);
Inside Out
(75, Peter Duffell); as Stubby Stebbins in
Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood
(75, Michael Winner). Thereafter, he was reported as a star of porno movies and low-budget action pictures. But he also played in
The Executioner Part II
(84, James Bryant) and
The Sicilian
(87, Michael Cimino).

Nicholas Ray
(Raymond Nicholas Kienzle) (1911–79), b. Galesville, Wisconsin
1948:
They Live By Night
. 1949:
A Woman’s Secret; Knock on Any Door
. 1950:
In a Lonely Place; Born to Be Bad
. 1951:
On Dangerous Ground; Flying Leathernecks
. 1952:
The Lusty Men
. 1954:
Johnny Guitar
. 1955:
Run for Cover; Rebel Without a Cause
. 1956:
Hot Blood; Bigger Than Life
. 1957:
The True Story of Jesse James
. 1958:
Bitter Victory; Wind Across the Everglades; Party Girl
. 1960:
The Savage Innocents
. 1961:
King of Kings
. 1963:
55 Days at Peking
. 1973:
We Can’t Go Home Again
. 1974: “The Janitor,” an episode from
Dreams of Thirteen/Wet Dreams
. 1980:
Lightning Over Water
(d) (codirected with Wim Wenders).

When
Sight and Sound
was obliged to respond to the French endorsement of American cinema, it seized on Nicholas Ray as the best demonstration of misplaced enthusiasm. “Ray or Ray?” one article began—Nicholas or Satyajit?—suggesting that whereas the Indian made films of his own choosing, inspired by humanitarian sensitivity, the American made whatever entertainment movies he was allowed to. There is no need to disparage the maker of the Apu films, or their restrained insight, to justify the intense visual emotion in the best of Nicholas Ray’s work.

Ray is famous for the remark, “If it were all in the script, why make the film?,” and it is as the source of a profusion of cinematic epiphanies that I recall him: Mitchum walking across an empty rodeo arena at evening in
The Lusty Men
, the wind blowing rubbish around him; that last plate settling slowly and noisily in
55 Days at Peking;
the livid-coated hunting pack in the Trucolor
Johnny Guitar;
the lethal, trembling night operation in
Bitter Victory;
the CinemaScope frame suddenly ablaze with yellow cabs in
Bigger Than Life
. He remains a test case of the way such gathered moments exceed the hackneyed idioms of commercial cinema: with the piercing enactment of human solitariness through gesture, color, and space, and because—as with any film director—one comes away from his work moved by the spectacle of human nature that he has revealed.

Ray studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, and then worked as an actor and a traveling researcher into American folklore. Those interests remained alive. Few other directors had such a sense of the effect of locations and interiors on people’s lives, or the visual or emotional relationship between indoors and outdoors, upstairs and downstairs. His characters contract or expand according to the emotional tone of the place in which they find themselves. For example, consider the transient caravan world of
The Lusty Men
that Susan Hayward tries to domesticate; the courtyard that joins but separates Bogart and Gloria Grahame in
In a Lonely Place;
the saloon in
Johnny Guitar;
the police station, the Stark house, the planetarium, and the deserted mansion in
Rebel Without a Cause;
and the staircase in
Bigger Than Life
. There is not a director who films or frames interior shots with Ray’s dynamic, fraught grace and who thereby so explodes the rigid limits of “script” material. No one made CinemaScope so glorious a shape as Ray, because it seemed to set an extra challenge to his interior sensibility.

It is not unusual in America to find directors with an innate skill at handling actors. But in Ray’s case, this ability often jolted placid material and dull players into a life they never showed elsewhere. Ray’s special, perilous humanism gained performances that seem to have been penetrated and hurt by reality. It is not only a matter of using good actors: Mitchum in
The Lusty Men;
Bogart in
In a Lonely Place;
Robert Ryan in
On Dangerous Ground;
James Mason in
Bigger Than Life;
and the wonderfully touching trio in
Rebel:
James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo. In
Lusty Men
, Mitchum was playing subtly against his screen character, as a reflective, increasingly perplexed man. Equally, only
In a Lonely Place
came to grips with the malevolence in Bogart, or so effectively saw through the knowingness of his 1940s films.

That air of superiority in Bogart was contrary to Ray’s sense of vulnerability: in
Bigger Than Life
it is the suave James Mason who is cracking up. As for
Rebel
, it now looks like the first film to catch the revolutionary unease of the young generation. Dean is less a rebel in it than a dreamer, plainly engaged by his director’s nervous vitality.

Who else has made Farley Granger seem as appealingly vulnerable as he is in
They Live By Night
, and who else so joined battle with Joan Crawford’s manly fierceness? How well the domineering Susan Hayward is used in
The Lusty Men
. And how inventive it is to probe Charlton Heston’s heroism in
55 Days at Peking
with the most demanding, intimate, and exposing scene that he has ever played, where he stumbles over telling the Chinese girl that her father is dead.

Ray’s personality emerged in his handling of people and their environments. But he would not be a major figure if he did not also have a fundamental conception of American legend and society. This is not just a matter of the balladlike
True Story of Jesse James
, but the recognition that self-sufficiency and free-for-all in American life have made for alienation and violence. All Ray’s visual inventiveness and all his sympathy for people under stress come down to his brooding and romantic vision of a hero forced in on himself, touching and meeting other people but never understanding or being understood. At times, this action is bleak and primitive: thus the inability of Mitchum to settle in
The Lusty Men
and the way he is killed by a proud gesture to assert his independence; the realization of the Bogart character in
In a Lonely Place
that frustration has bred in him a homicidal violence; the loss of Sal Mineo at the end of
Rebel;
the implacable hopelessness of the desert expedition in
Bitter Victory
and Richard Burton’s helpless killing of the living and saving of the dead. There is never more than modest hope at the end of his films: in
Wind Across the Everglades
that the birds might be saved, although Burl Ives is dead; in
Rebel
that the friendship of Dean and Wood might last; that Mason’s recovery in
Bigger Than Life
might save his family life. More often, friendship and love break down; death severs the odd bond between young and old; the world is regenerated only through destruction.

Ray’s own chaos in the last two decades of his life—the wandering, the gambling, the lack of work, the excess of existential gesture—made him a self-conscious poet of American disenchantment.
Bigger Than Life
had all the ingrowing sickness of the good life.
Savage Innocents
is the last prairie, already corrupted by the trading post jukebox that howls over the snow.

Ray always seemed under pressure. There is a constant nervous tension in his films to be seen in the restless camera movement, the turbulent, hurt editing, the immediacy of action and discord in the colors, the intensity of the acting. His career as a whole was uneasy. More than
Sight and Sound
ever realized, his films transcended the Hollywood genres. It is not only that so many of his endings were not happy or that they blazed with lucid pessimism. He was an insecure figure, often ill—or averse to work—so that
On Dangerous Ground
was aided by Ida Lupino,
The Lusty Men
by Robert Parrish,
55 Days at Peking
by Andrew Marton. Although his films were as rigorously spectacular as any made during the 1950s, he was not happiest with the Bronston epics. His best work is done with a few characters, where external action expresses their uncontainable dilemmas. This is true of all his best films:
They Live By Night, On Dangerous Ground, In a Lonely Place, The Lusty Men, Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger Than Life
, and
Bitter Victory
.