Nicholas Ray

So I love Douglas Sirk's movies.

Um, I love Nicholas Ray's movies, like Bigger than Life.

Mm-hmm.

Um, that was really getting me going.

Libby was allowed to spin her departure to the press as her decision, made because she decided the part was too small.

Within a year, Nick Ray was in Hollywood, making his film directing debut with They Live by Night.

That film was released the same year as John Huston's Key Largo, the film in which actress Claire Trevor, as a torch singer who is beyond hope and perhaps help, sings Libby's signature song, Moanin' Low, as part of a bargain with Edward G. Robinson's gangster Johnny to earn a drink.

In this clip, she sets up the song by describing how she used to sing it on stage, a description that closely matches the way Libby performed the tune within the revue The Little Show.

It's called Giant, and it's...

Was it Nicholas Ray? Maybe Nicholas Ray might have directed that.

I forget who I associate the filmmaking with.

I only associate, well, I associate it with the actors.

Right.

Which is one of the funny things about them also being, like, obsessed with, like, Nicholas Ray.

Yeah.

[laughs]

You probably won't be listening to this in time for that.

But Thursday, October 8th, I'll be at Skylight Books with the filmmaker Courtney Stevens.

Um, later in October I'll be at the Academy Museum where, uh, the film critic A.S. Hamra and I will present Nicholas Ray's "They Live by Night." And then in November, in mid-November, I'll be at the Metrograph, um, for a screening that's not announced yet.

I'll be in Chicago at the Music Box Theater to present "Gremlins 2."

That's M-U-B-I.com/ymrt for a whole month of great cinema for free.

In the late 1930s, Nicholas Ray, later the director of Rebel Without a Cause, was working for the Works Progress Administration, traveling through Middle America recording oral histories of people who were suffering from the fallout of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

Through this work, Ray met a kindred spirit in Alan Lomax.

Lomax had been crisscrossing the continent since he was a child, working with his father, John, to record the music and stories of everyday Americans.

This led to a CBS national radio show on which Lomax showcased white and Black folk singers.

Lomax and Ray ended up collaborating on another radio show called Back Where I Come From, which was broadcast from 1940 to 1941.

Incidentally, one of the many errors I caught in John Bradshaw's biography of Libby is that he calls Ray's collaborator on this show Stan Lomax, which was the name of a mid-century sportscaster and not, as far as I can tell, any relation to the Lomax who worked with Nicholas Ray.

One of Ray's more controversial acts as a producer of this show came in response to letters from CBS listeners who wrote in to complain that they couldn't decipher the words Lead Belly was singing.

mean, I think my taste in movies is pretty broad.

Whatever you see in real politic, right? It's all structured around like, what joke could I come up with? For some reason, it's just worked often for the joke that day that it would be Godard or Fassbender or Nicholas Ray or whatever.

I mean, yeah, these are all filmmakers who I really love.

But they also, for the sake of a comic strip, serve as sort of a shorthand.

You can read him really drilled down.

Like he'll write about a movie by just writing about like one scene.

He'll just write about one scene in this Nick Ray movie while simultaneously concluding that Nicholas Ray is the Mozart of cinema, right? But he's like, just like, but I'm only talking about like this one scene in Bitter Victory.

And then you realize like, maybe he didn't see the whole movie.

At least two of those marriages would cause major controversies that almost ended her career.

The biggest trouble came in her second marriage to director Nicholas Ray.

Gloria married Ray just 24 hours after she finalized a divorce from her first husband, actor Stanley Clements.

Scandalous in n- in its own right just for that reason, the real scandal happened in 1950 when rumors began to spread that Gloria had done the unthinkable.

As Nicholas Ray would later claim, he had come home at some point in 1950 to find Gloria in bed with his 13-year-old son from his first marriage, a boy named Anthony "Tony" Ray.

Yeah, yeah, take that in for a second.

Just really, just really take that in for a second.

This, Nicholas Ray would claim, was the reason for their divorce, which was finalized in 1952, and it was a story that he would stick to for the rest of his life, by the way.

Mm-hmm.

And she was, her second husband was Nicholas Ray, who directed Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Okay.

Gloria Grahame's big scandal was that she married her former stepson, Nicholas Ray's son.

Okay.

That's always fun.

[laughs]

The film was edited and released after Ray's death on June 16, 1979.

Here with me to discuss Lightning Over Water and the films of Nicholas Ray is writer Marie Phillips.

Hi, Marie.

Hey there.

Nice to be here.

It's great having you here.

I am so excited to talk about the films of Nicholas Ray.

Why Nicholas Ray? Why of all the people that you could have picked, why did you pick Nicholas Ray?