beamish13 wrote:Very disappointing set. I hope Criterion does keep going back to the Nick Ray/WB well, though, as his Technicolor nightmare Party Girl and the recently restored The Lusty Men are no-brainers.
Certainly agree with your second sentence, but I guess I'm not really disappointed here at all... I'm just happy that this masterpiece finally got rescued from basically only existing via a 2-movie disc thing (paired with an Anthony Mann flick, and the transfer was pretty alright, but still). I'm glad enough to just get (probably) a faithful and vivid HD transfer of the movie. I still have only seen this once actually, but it made a deep and lasting impression. I think it's right up there with (or slightly second to)
Johnny Guitar, as far as Nick Ray goes. Those two and
In a Lonely Place strike me as the most successful and powerful examples of his inimitable passionate, romantic, visually operatic style.
Though, incidentally, what's interesting is that
They Live By Night and to a lesser extent
In a Lonely Place actually don't have a terribly operatic visual schema compared to Ray's other work. Actually, both have a more soft, lyrical, almost impressionist look. I think
Night in particular has a very French Impressionist kind of vibe, the B&W photography having a hazy glow and softer grey cast instead of a more expected harsh chiaroscuro, high-contrast noir aesthetic. I forget if the film is set in the 1930s, but the source novel is, and the film somehow feels more of that decade than its own (and certainly doesn't reflect many glimpses of the then-upcoming decade).
Anyway, this is all part of why I actually dispute the common "film noir" tag given to
Night, as well as to
Lonely (though it does fit the latter more). I presented a paper at my alma mater's Film & Television research symposium on just this specific subject last year -- the way that virtually all of Ray's films (that he had decent creative control over, that is) are really essentially melodramas, whether more male-focused melodramas or romantic melodramas. So I'd argue that even the supposed "noir" flicks of his like these two are not really noir, that they only rather loosely fit that description. I mean, it's kind of semantics, and I don't care if someone labels them noir, I just personally disagree. Actually, IALP is much more noir-ish (with its harsher kind of fatalism and noir-ish LA/Hollywood settings like the baroque apartment complex), so I can understand that more... but TLBN is just so much gentler and more romance-focused and less high-contrast/shadowy/urban-set, etc than most noir. I guess, due to its class consciousness/critique of "normal" capitalist society, it's often classified as a "film gris," which I can agree with.
But generally what's so great about Ray is his passion and romanticism and optimism, even. (IALP is an odd duck among his work for having such a dark ending -- most have rather happy endings basically, and I contend that only a couple of those are that way just as result of Code/studio tinkering). And so his films take on the tenor of pure melodrama most of the time, and melodrama dominates whatever other genre they're ostensibly said to be. E.g.
Johnny Guitar is more like a baroque, operatic and Romantic full-on melodrama with Western setting/tropes than simply a Western. And of course films like
Bigger Than Life and
Rebel Without a Cause put these melodramatic impulses on center stage as melodrama itself is accepted as their genre instead of noir or Western or war or crime-film, etc.
It's impressive just how many great films, most flat-out masterpieces really, Ray actually made. All of his movies from 1949's
They Live By Night to
Party Girl almost a decade later in 1958 may not fit that description, but I'd wager that at least six or seven surely do.
Night is so high up on my personal favorites (and in some ways edges out even
Johnny) I think partly 'cause it's both very representative of Ray's general style and approach, while also having an even more tender and passionate and very intimate quality than the others. To end with an Armond-esque "underdog vs. sacred cow" cliche here -- I'd go to bat for Ray's film as the best directorial debut of the 40s
any day over Welles's more famous picture, and indeed it's possible TLBN is my favorite directorial debut by any filmmaker (coincidentally, Malick's
Badlands, one of the obvious thematic descendants of Ray's debut -- of which there are many! -- gives it some stiff competition).
