Rebel without a cause 1955 - "You're tearing me apart!"

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IMDB Rating: 7,8

Director: Nicholas Ray
Main Cast: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Jim Backus, Ann Doran, Corey Allen, William Hopper, Dennis Hopper, Rochelle Hudson

"A clenched fist of teenage alienation and cultural disillusion, Rebel Without a Cause questioned the complacent state of 1950s American society with the subtlety of a blow to the jaw. A truly landmark film, Rebel went where almost no Hollywood film had dared, exposing the anger and discontent beneath the prosperity and confidence of post-war America, picking at family values that dictated that happiness was best found in the nuclear family's well-appointed suburban home. The alienated kids in Rebel were part and parcel of these homes - angry, wounded animals who rejected the very comforts that were supposed to make America superior to the rest of the world. If the notion that comfortable, middle-class white kids could harbor such feelings of anger and nameless yearning wasn't discomforting enough, even more so was the notion that their parents were ill-equipped to understand or help them. From Plato's neglectful mother and father to Jim's ineffectual parents to Judy's pathologically repressed father, all of the film's parents are seen as people whose conformity to the values of 1950s society masks their own discontent and - in the case of Judy's father and Plato's parents - underlying deviance. Thus, the teenagers are not so much the problem themselves as heirs to the problems created by the older and supposedly wiser generation.
Rebel without a Cause began as a case history, written in 1944 by Dr. Robert Lindner. Originally intended as a vehicle for Marlon Brando, the property was shelved until Brando's The Wild One (1953) opened floodgates for films about crazy mixed-up teens. Director Nicholas Ray, then working on a similar project, was brought in to helm the film version. His star was James Dean, fresh from Warners' East of Eden. Ray's low budget dictated that the new film be lensed in black-and-white, but when East of Eden really took off at the box office, the existing footage was scrapped and reshot in color. This was great, so far as Ray was concerned, inasmuch as he had a predilection for symbolic color schemes. James Dean's hot red jacket, for example, indicated rebellion, while his very blue blue jeans created a near luminescent effect (Ray had previously used the same vivid color combination on Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar). As part of an overall bid for authenticity, real-life gang member Frank Mazzola was hired as technical advisor for the fight scenes. To extract as natural a performance as possible from Dean, Ray redesigned the Stark family's living room set to resemble Ray's own home, where Dean did most of his rehearsing. Speaking of interior sets, the mansion where the three troubled teens hide out had previously been seen as the home of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
Released right after James Dean's untimely death, Rebel without a Cause netted an enormous profit. The film almost seems like a eulogy when seen today, since so many of its cast members - James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Nick Adams - died young. Mineo, sad and touching as the lost boy infatuated with Dean's Jim Stark, was murdered near his Hollywood home, while Wood, who brought female sexual yearning to the screen in ways that had never before been seen, drowned in a mysterious boating accident. And, of course, Dean died in a car accident before the film was even released. That Rebel Without a Cause remains a classic is in no small part due to Dean's raw, soulful performance, made more timeless by his mortality." - www.allmovie.com

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Johnny Guitar 1954 - An unusual Western with much sexual symbolism

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IMDB Rating: 7,7

Director: Nicholas Ray
Main Cast: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Scott Brady, Ward Bond, Ben Cooper, Ernest Borgnine, John Carradine

"Few Westerns more obviously begged the question 'What was the studio thinking?' than Nicholas Ray's brilliantly perverse Johnny Guitar. Ray had a knack for finding subversive subtexts in standard material, and on the surface Johnny Guitar's outlaws on the run, factions battling over a town's future, and love and betrayal among the tumbleweeds seem like the stuff of a typical Western. But in Johnny Guitar, nearly all the men are unwilling or afraid to fight, the action is dominated by two aggressive women who hate each other (but are also oddly drawn to each other), the title character is at once the lover and the employee of the female lead, and her arch-rival is driven to near-psychotic hatred and violence by unrequited affection for a handsome outlaw. Lust rules nearly everyone in this film, and in ways that generally fall outside the boundaries of mainstream Hollywood's sexual economy; one look at Joan Crawford's butch Western outfit, complete with string tie, should be enough to signal that this isn't an ordinary sagebrush shoot-'em-up. Ray plays this saga of unusual appetites in a hyper-emotional style against a broad and colorful backdrop, and the result feels more like an opera than a Western, as Martin Scorsese has pointed out. Throw in an allegory of 1950s anti-Communist blacklisting, the bold visual style, Victor Young's moody score, and the con brio performances of Crawford, Mercedes McCambridge, and Sterling Hayden and you have a unique movie that's fascinating and entertaining throughout.
According to most sources, the animosity between Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge was quite real, added several extra dimensions to their scenes together. Director Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Philip Yordan stuff the film with so much sexual symbolism that one wonders why they left out a train going into a tunnel. Ms. Crawford's vivid red-and-blue wardrobe scheme was later appropriated by Ray for James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause - with equally stunning results. In addition to the stars, Johnny Guitar is well stocked with reliable supporting players, including Ernest Borgnine, Ben Cooper, Royal Dano (superb as a consumptive, book-reading hired gun) and Paul Fix." - www.allmovie.com

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In a lonely place 1950 - One of the darkest portraits of Hollywood

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Nicholas Ray
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy

"A haunting work of stark confessionalism disguised as a taut noir thriller, In a Lonely Place - Nicholas Ray's bleak, desperate tale of fear and self-loathing in Hollywood - remains one of the filmmaker's greatest and most deeply resonant features.
It stars Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele, a fading screenwriter suffering from creative burnout; hired to adapt a best-selling novel, instead of reading the book itself he asks the hat-check girl (Martha Stewart) at his favorite nightclub to simply tell him the plot. The morning after, the girl is found brutally murdered, and Steele is the police's prime suspect; however, the would-be starlet across the way, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), provides him with a solid alibi, and they soon begin a romance in spite of Gray's lingering concerns that the troubled, violent Steele might just be a killer after all.
During production, Ray's real-life marriage to co-star Grahame began to crumble, and his own vulnerability and disillusionment clearly inform the picture; the brooding, bitter Steele - a role ideally suited to Bogart's wounded romanticism - is plainly a doppelganger for Ray himself (the site of his first Hollywood apartment is even employed as the set for Steele's home), and the film's unflinching examination of the character's disintegration makes for uniquely compelling viewing." - www.allmovie.com

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