Nicholas Ray: The rebel filmmaker gets his due

The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray, the title of TIFF Bell Lightbox's new Toronto retrospective on the American director, is derived from a famous, overreaching quote by Jean-Luc Godard – as if there's any other kind. Bowled over by a viewing of Ray's Second World War drama Bitter Victory (1957), Godard argued that if the cinema was the synthesis of all the arts that had preceded it – theatre, poetry, painting, dance and music – Ray's films similarly built upon and transcended the work of his ancestors and contemporaries.

Godard's pronouncement had the ring of history to it. But history is written by the winners and, more than 50 years later, Nicholas Ray has acquired the faint whiff of a loser – at least by the standards of popular film culture. He never received an Academy Award for best director (nor was he ever nominated); in 2007, the American Film Institute removed Rebel Without a Cause (1956) from its widely disseminated "100 Years…100 Movies" list to make room for The Lord of the Rings and The Sixth Sense. Even Patrick McGilligan's admiring new biography of the man carries the subtitle The Glorious Failure of an American Director.

It's a designation that seems callous – nobody would ever put that title on a book about Martin Scorsese – yet it also fits in with Ray's towering, battered legacy. Few filmmakers have ever burned brighter, but it was a self-immolating flame. "I've always run at the fire bell," wrote Ray in his posthumously published autobiography I was Interrupted, and he meant it: In the 30 years between his debut They Live by Night (1949) and the valedictory self-portrait Lightning Over Water (1979) – co-directed by Wim Wenders while Ray was in the throes of terminal lung cancer – he made 25 features, was fired from several others, picked fights with studios, took four wives (including one of his leading ladies and a woman 40 years his junior), opened a nightclub in Madrid and did enough hard living for several lifetimes.

Ray's legend as a self-styled misfit and outsider belies his early Hollywood hot streak. Following the acclaim of They Live by Night – which practically invented the lovers-on-the-run genre with its tender, Depression-era tale of romantically entwined fugitives – Ray worked for most of the 1950s with major stars. The haunting L.A. story In a Lonely Place (1950) gave Humphrey Bogart a role worthy of his craggy grandeur as a fading screenwriter accused of murder, while Bigger Than Life (1953) unleashed James Mason in terrifying counterpoint to the era's Father Knows Best values. Playing a small-town schoolteacher driven homicidally mad by cortisone injections, Mason lords over the film's vast, vividly coloured frames like a buttoned-down, black-eyed giant: When he ominously compares himself to a vengeful, biblical God, it doesn't seem like an overstatement.

The director's most famous collaboration, though, was with James Dean, whose sad, bruised beauty made him a perfect muse in Rebel Without a Cause (1956). A hell-raiser with a heavy heart, Dean's drag-racing, death-chasing juvenile delinquent Jim Stark became the poster boy for photogenic but alienated movie youth, and the film was Ray's greatest success. Dean's death in a car crash was a harbinger of professional wreckage ahead, however. Forcibly removed from the editing room on the outlaw drama Wind Across the Everglades (1958), Ray suffered similar indignities on King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days at Peking (1963), losing his hard-fought industry traction and becoming a vagabond, wandering Europe before returning home to teach filmmaking at NYU.

Ray couldn't even get over the hump on the films he made on his own terms. We Can't Go Home Again, an allegedly wild and politically volatile film produced in collaboration with his students, premiered at Cannes in 1973 and then disappeared off the face of the Earth – unsatisfied, he continued to tinker with it until his death in 1979. Ray's fourth wife Susan, whom he met in 1969 when he was 58 and she was 18 and whose devotion sustained him in his final years, will be on hand to present We Can't Go Home Again for its Canadian premiere Oct. 30. She'll also present her own film Don't Expect Too Much, a documentary described as a "companion piece" to Ray's long-hidden magnum opus.

Don't Expect Too Much has a self-deprecating title that's aimed not only at its amateur author, but also at her husband and his messy personal and professional reputation. It might also be a joke at Godard's expense, taking him to task for placing the weight of embodying an entire art form on one man's shoulders – a way of saying thanks, but no thanks. But Ray's grand, gigantic films – bigger than life, indeed – can bear the burden, and will outlive both mainstream indifference and the praise of their most hysterical acolytes.

In the case of Nicholas Ray, it's okay to expect too much.

The Cinema Is Nicolas Ray runs at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox through Dec. 13.

Special to The Globe and Mail