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“Sample Film Forum’s two-week Ray-trospective and you’ll see how this singular talent took typical narratives for wild rides...
Ray’s work harnesses delirium and comes up with something emotionally dizzying.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York.
Click here to read full article
“ESSENTIAL VIEWING! Nicholas Ray made movies that understand why a lot of us stare up at screens so we can walk out in a daze afterwards:
to feel the space, the love or torment or something else...”
– Nicolas Rapold, The L Magazine.
Click here to read full article
“One of the greatest directors of the cinema.
The first home-grown poet of American disillusionment.
Woefully underrated, Nicholas Ray remains unjustly neglected.”
– Geoff Andrew
“A great architect of emotional landscapes. Ray's films include some of the most graceful and brooding gifts in the history of cinema.”
– Jim Jarmusch
“MOST HOTLY ANTICIPATED AMONG CINEPHILES IS FILM FORUM'S OVERDUE SELECTION OF FILMS BY NICHOLAS RAY!”
– The L Magazine
“The retrospective at Film Forumis a gift to the residents of Manhattan and its outer-lying boroughs. Every movie in the series has its own set of unique and memorable qualities, its own verses of poetry.”
– Eugene Kotlyarenko, INTERVIEW magazine
Click here to read full article
“His natural filmmaking gifts were tremendous... Ray’s unlikely heroes and lovers all share the same inherently and irresistibly adolescent belief that some stronger personal connection or shred of self-definition lies just around the next bend and will allow them to face the following day a little more loved, a little less marginalized, and a little less afraid of embracing who they are and how they got that way.”
– Bruce Bennett, Stop Smiling
Click here to read full article
 |
Currently on sale at our concession:
The Films of Nicholas Ray:
The Poet of Nightfall
by Geoff Andrew
$23 plus tax |
FRIDAY, JULY 17 – THURSDAY, JULY 23
 IN A LONELY PLACE
Click here for full details.
Showtimes: 1:10, 3:20, 5:30, 7:40, 9:50
JULY 24/25 FRI/SAT
BIGGER THAN LIFE
(1956) “God was wrong!” Good and bad news for dull schoolteacher James Mason... The bad news: he’s got a rare terminal disease. The good news: there’s this new drug called cortisone... Tour de force performance for Mason, as he moves from frumpy nice guy to full-blown, drug-induced megalomaniac. Color; Approx. 95 minutes.
1:30, 3:30, 5:40, 7:50, 9:50
“One of the finest pictures of the 1950s. There is not a director who films or frames interior shots with Ray’s dynamic,
fraught grace. No one made CinemaScope so glorious a shape as Ray, a self-conscious poet of American disenchantment.”
– David Thomson
"Godard’s assertion [see above] is all here, in every claustrophobic close-up and looming low-angle shot. Ray at his expressionistic best.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York
“One of the best, most radical, least known films in the 1950s.
A canny retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde story, Fathers Knows Best as Greek tragedy. Still terrifying!”
– Scott Foundas, Village Voice
“The story s secondary to the pageant of emotions and images. This tale of pharmocological woe is really a horror movie,
galvanizing in its impact and almost theological in the depth of its implications.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"Feels closer to a suburban monster movie than to any conventional melodrama from the period. Ray’s intoxicatingly evocative use of CinemaScope’s
wide screen gives living rooms and kitchens the epic expanse of a metropolis, which Mason lays waste to the way that Godzilla decimated buildings."
– Cullen Gallagher, L Magazine
“A POTENT MELODRAMA. DEEPLY DISTURBING… ACHIEVES THE GOTHIC DIMENSIONS OF A HORROR STORY!
Ray’s most powerful film, and in some respects his most important. A profoundly upsetting exposure..”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Mason's gift for cold-eyed madness is heightened by Ray's exuberantly lurid approach. He films Ed's jaundiced world view
with cocked angles and shock cuts and invokes the clash of slovenly good cheer and tyrannical order that sets decorous neutral tones
against the acid colors of corrosive passion and the eerie, unearthly fluorescence of of the little purple bottle at the heart of it all. ”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“Under Ray’s masterful direction, James Mason is given three or four of the most beautiful close-ups
I have had the chance to see since the advent of CinemaScope… The slightest detail has an overwhelming beauty.
A film of implacable logic and sanity,
Bigger than Life uses both those very qualities as targets, and scores a bull’s-eye in every frame.”
– François Truffaut
JULY 26/27 SUN/MON
JOHNNY GUITAR
(1954) Joan Crawford’s pants-wearing, gun-toting saloon owner stands to rake in the dough when the railroad comes through. But when a rancher is murdered, the townfolk ready a noose for Scott Brady’s “The Dancin’ Kid,” with insanely jealous cattle baroness Mercedes McCambridge hell-bent on having Joan join him. Enter old flame Sterling Hayden, as the eponymous Johnny... Color; Approx. 110 minutes.
Sun 1:10, 3:20, 5:30, 7:40, 9:50
Mon 1:10, 3:20, 10:00
Click here for more informaton about JOHNNY GUITAR
“One of the greatest films of the '50s. A delectable, almost mythic combination of deep feeling and high camp. A work of pure genius.”
– Time Out New York
“At the top of the essential Ray list. Among the oddest genres ever made... Will leave you amazed and perhaps unexpectedly moved.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“Ray’s most bizarre film, and his most personal. Johnny Guitar has invented its own genre.”
– Andrew Sarris
“The movie is majestic… like the face of Joan Crawford, which could have been chipped from the buttress of a Gothic cathedral, it is howlingly close to mad.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“Before there was Jerry Lewis there was Johnny Guitar—a luridly operatic mix of Freudian sexual pathology and political subtext,
featuring Joan Crawford's grim, glam gunslinger. Like all cult films, a pop-cultural magpie's nest, conflating Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard, and The Ox-Bow Incident—not to mention Jean Cocteau.
This blatantly theatrical western immediately confounds the generic imperative
with a 40-minute interior scene played by Crawford as though it were Shakespeare.”
– J. Hoberman
“It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western… the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns.
The cowboys vanish and die with the grace of ballerinas.
The bold, violent color contributes to the sense of strangeness; the hues are vivid, sometimes very beautiful, always unexpected.”
– François Truffaut
“Weird, hysterical, and quite unlike anything else in the history of the cowboy film. Love and hate, prostitution and frustration, domination and humiliation
are woven into a hypnotic Freudian web of shifting relationships, illuminated by the director's precise, symbolic use of colour, and strung together
with an unerring sense of pace. Perfectly sums up Ray's magical, dreamlike emotionalism.”
– Geoff Andrew
RETURN TO TOP.
JULY 27 MON (Separate Admission)
 BORN TO BE BAD
(1950) As Joan Leslie is about to host a party for artist Mel Ferrer, she practically trips over an unwelcome surprise guest: Joan Fontaine, who then proceeds to steal Leslie’s zillionaire fiancé Zachary Scott, ditch her maiden aunt, have an affair with writer Robert Ryan — and she can still force herself to hang on to those furs. George Eastman House restoration. Approx. 94 minutes.
6:00, 7:50
VIEW THE TRAILER: Low | High
“A lively, vicious, and daring film—perhaps the most stylistically audacious of Ray's films before his delirious Johnny Guitar. Ray insistently cuts on movement, giving the whole film an effective instability; every sequence seems volatile, every exchange of looks a threat.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
“Helps illustrate some less-trumpeted but key Ray moves: his fresh pre-Scope depth-of-field compositions, often straddling doorways, and — as almost parodied by Ryan's novelist — his feel for dialogue that is as expressive and instantaneous in effect and impact as a single striking image.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The L Magazine
"Rigorously unsentimental...beautifully staged and photographed...
with a nice comic tartness."
– James Harvey
“Ray seems an unlikely director for this sardonic melodrama with its Laura-like touches,
but he loads it with enough mean sheen—the dresses and decor are deluxe—to make it immensely enjoyable.”
– James Quandt
RETURN TO TOP.
JULY 28 TUE (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
 ON DANGEROUS GROUND
(1952) En route to a mountain manhunt, tough NYC cop Robert Ryan (“a frighteningly ambiguous performance” – David Denby) finds romance with blind girl Ida Lupino — sister to his sex killer prey. Striking opening scene: a woman’s loving hand strapping on her husband’s... shoulder holster. Bernard Herrmann’s score was the composer’s favorite. Approx. 82 minutes.
2:40, 6:00, 9:20
VIEW THE TRAILER: Medium
“A high point of neurosis in Film Noir.”
– Anthony Lane, New Yorker
“One of the great, forgotten works of the genre. A remarkably pure film.”
– Fernando F. Croce, Slant
“Has there ever been a face—rugged and manfully handsome yet fragile with inner agonies promising to explode into volcanic rage—like Robert Ryan's? Nick Ray harnesses the violent force of this face as Ryan pounds his beat, and every face on it, to Bernard Hermann's greatest score. Ward Bond has never been more precipitous or more startling—his grief and stupidity as powerful and natural as a mountain cataract. Into all this steps the serenely blind farm girl Ida Lupino.”
– Guy Maddin
“Not to be missed! Terrific! Bernard Herrmann contributes a beautiful score to this gripping story—
and reused a chunk of it later in his music for Hitchcock’s Marnie.”
– Elliott Stein, The Village Voice
“Robert Ryan gives a frighteningly ambiguous performance. Working under Ray's emotionally sensitive direction, [he] keeps the movie on edge right to the end.”
– David Denby, The New Yorker
“Recommended! The performances, cinematography, and general moodiness are captivating.”– Time Out New York
“Essential... A melancholic beauty.”
– Nick Schager, Slant
“Ray shoots and cuts with an offhand incisiveness, as if his camera were keyed to his cop's febrile brain.”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker
 A WOMAN’S SECRET
(1949) A gunshot in the night, and, home after singing on the radio, Gloria Grahame (who’d soon marry Ray) lies unconscious while her mentor Maureen O’Hara stands over her with a smoking gun. But as the flashbacks unreel (two of them contradictorily), O’Hara’s friend Melvyn Douglas isn’t buying it. Written and produced by Citizen Kane’s Herman J. Mankiewicz. Approx. 84 minutes.
1:00, 4:20, 7:40
“Drawing on Citizen Kane and prefiguring All About Eve… spins a twisty tale. Ray managed to bring crackling cynicism to the studio gloss, and this pristine print highlights the noir elegance of George Diskant's crisp black-and-white camerawork.”
– James Quandt
“Well served by the civilized direction, which not only turns melodrama
into a noir-ish mystery,
but also stresses, as so often in Ray,
the importance of interior space and the way it reflects/influences action.”
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)
RETURN TO TOP.
JULY 29/30 WED/THU (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
“An indispensible Noir twofer! You may want to wear a nicotine patch and refrain from operating heavy machinery
in the smoky, melancholy aftermath of that experience.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
 THEY LIVE BY NIGHT
(1949) “This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” Injured after a bank job, neophyte crook Farley Granger finds doomed love with care-giver Cathy O’Donnell, while the rest of the gang gets picked off by the cops. Ray’s directorial debut. Approx. 95 minutes.
WED 1:30, 5:15, 9:00
THU 1:30, 5:15
“The most romantic and haunting young-criminal-lovers-on-the-run movie ever made.”
– Jim Jarmusch
“Ray's remarkable 1949 debut, one of the many Hollywood precursors to Bonnie and Clyde,
is an unusually pure representation of the doomed outlaw couple—perhaps the most romantic of all films noir.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
“More than 50 years and countless imitations later, Ray’s ode to criminal couplings still feels remarkably vibrant.
Not even Bonnie and Clyde can match it in terms of open-road amour fou.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York
“With its dynamic visual style, acute observation of a specific social milieu and powerful emotional pull,
the film signalled the emergence, virtually fully formed, of a distinctive authorial vision.”
– Senses of Cinema
“A key film noir of the 40s… the freshness of Ray’s expressionist-documentary style is still apparent and gripping.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
“The most sentimental and soft hearted entry in the classic noir canon.” – Foster Hirsch
“Featuring thieves on the run and a goo-goo-eyed island-of-us romance to do Borzage proud, They Live By Night lays down qualities that distinguish the absorbing experience of many Ray films. To a certain extent that means a winning combination of established hooks and Ray's singular devotion to struggle in all its relatable, all-encompassing depths. Ryan speaks cut-to-them-kissing one-liners, and it's the most appealing part of a film that spotlights lingering schadenfreude reaction shots and sports a score that disorientingly sympathizes with Fontaine's gold-digger.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The L Magazine
“Ray’s best film.”
– François Truffaut
 KNOCK ON ANY DOOR
(1949) “Live fast, die young, and
leave a good-looking corpse” is
punk John Derek’s motto — he got two
out of three in real life — with the flashbacks unreeling during bleeding-heart attorney Humphrey Bogart’s plea for the copkiller as a “victim of society.” Approx. 100 minutes.
WED 3:20, 7:05
THU 3:20
"Nick Romano must be the ideal name for a flawed Ray hero-victim.
As embodied to vulnerable, narcissistic perfection by John Derek, he's the centre of a
fascinating mix
of social document and romantic agony. Hard hitting, tautly crafted, and repeatedly
stabbed through with Ray's impulsive generosity and anguish towards his characters.”
—Time Out (London)
“A jagged Rebel Without a Cause precursor curio in kid-gangster clothes, with Bogie conjuring drama out of line readings alone.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The L Magazine
RETURN TO TOP.
JULY 30 THU (Separate Admission)
 WIND ACROSS
THE EVERGLADES
(1958) On the trail of the menacingly charismatic Burl Ives’ gang of wild bird poachers (including Peter Falk in his debut), game warden Christopher Plummer treks into to the Florida Everglades at the turn of 20th century, pausing for an instant romance with enigmatic Chana Eden, amid striking location photography. Screenplay by Budd Schulberg. Color; Approx. 93 minutes.
7:15*, 9:15*
Sandra Schulberg, daughter of the film's producer Stuart Schulberg,
will introduce both the 7:15 & 9:15 screenings tonight.
Sandra is also the niece of Budd Schulberg, the film's screenwriter. |
“One of Ray's most beautifully bizarre projects. With an often poetic script and glistening location photography (in ravishing Technicolor), it effortlessly combines artifice with realism, and develops into an oblique meditation on the relativity of good and evil.”
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)
“One of Ray's most vibrant pictures; built around the ambiguity of beauty and danger,
it sees complex truths of human nature. [Ray] addresses a profound attraction
in the Western: the invitation to abandon rules and hypocrisy and live by night,
in savage innocence, on dangerous ground.”
– David Thomson
“Ray's masterful use of color and mystical sense of equality between the are made all the more piquant here
by his feeling for folklore and outlaw ethics as well as his cadenced mise en scene. Ray's personal touches are unmistakable.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Ray's pathos-riddled portrait of a flawed, impulsive, self-destructive, and entirely accidental hero—one not unlike himself.
Even as he reviles their savagery, Ray can’t help celebrating the crude animal vitality of outlaws—and likening society’s hero, and himself, to them.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Ray's seductive movie, set in the wilds of turn-of-the-century Florida is an ahead-of-its-time ecological thriller, led by the awesomely charismatic Burl Ives.
The legendary stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee, makes one of her rare screen appearances in the role of a beplumed bordello Miami madam.”
– Elliott Stein, Village Voice
RETURN TO TOP.
JULY 31/AUGUST 1/2/3 FRI/SAT/SUN/MON
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
(1955) “You’re tearin’ me apart!” wails James Dean’s Jim Stark to his apron-clad dad Jim Backus, and a generation of frustrated Eisenhower-era teens chimed in. Fifty years later, the icon of tormented youth Dean incarnated is more potent than ever, perhaps because, unlike the leather-clad punks of more exploitive 50s j.d. flicks, Rebel’s trio of maladjusted high-schoolers (Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo) are suburban every-kids, the poignancy of their performances now heightened by the real-life violent deaths that would later befall all three. Director Nick Ray’s fable of adolescent angst is heightened by a garish CinemaScope palette, a touch of the Tragic Unities (the action unfolds within 24 hours), and, in the celebrated planetarium scene, the elevation of teen torment to the cosmic plane. Color; Approx. 111 minutes.
FRI/SAT/SUN 1:10, 3:20, 5:30, 7:40, 9:50
MON
1:00
VIEW THE TRAILER: Low | High
“An unmissable film, made with a delirious compassion. Dean's alienation is perfectly expressed through Ray's vertiginous mise-en-scene:
the suburban LA setting becomes a land of decaying Formica and gothic split-levels.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
“One of the decade's cinematic touchstones. Takes a fairly conventional template and fills it with wild, extravagant emotions and hyperbolically expressive cinematic effects. The rebellion the film dramatizes is more metaphysical — or, to use a fashionable word of the period, existential — than anything else.
The rage of Jim Stark, as embodied by James Dean, is out of all proportion to Jim’s circumstances, and the excessive, irrational force of this passion
is Ray’s great subject and his signature.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“Still the best of the youth movies. What makes the film so powerful is both the sympathy it extends towards all the characters
and the precise expressionism of Ray's direction. His use of light, space and motion is continually at the service of the characters' emotions.”
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)
“If Ray had made only Rebel Without a Cause, he’d still be assured a place in film history for turning James Dean into a movie-memorabilia poster boy.
Look past the iconography, however, and you’ll see how both of their Methody madnesses found youth culture’s pressure points.”
– David Fear, Time Out New York
“Not just a portrait of adolescence; it breathes haltingly, with adolescent lungs, unable,
like so much in Ray, to contain itself under the pressure of the encroaching world.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
RETURN TO TOP.
AUGUST 3 MON — SPECIAL EVENT
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
The Lost Foreign Version!
Click here for more information about ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
RETURN TO TOP.
AUGUST 4 TUE(2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
 BITTER VICTORY
 (1957) “I kill the living and save the dead,” laments British Army officer Richard Burton, while raiding Rommel’s headquarters—only trouble is, he’s the ex-lover of the wife of his cowardly South African CO Curt Jurgens. Striking b&w Scope photography of Libyan locations. It prompted Godard’s famous proclamation (see top of page). Approx. 103 minutes.
1:00, 4:35, 8:10
“The fluency and brilliance of the filmmaking, the easy rich expressiveness of
even its smallest details, the power and profundity of its high points - it all could almost
persuade you while you're under its spell, that Nicholas Ray was the cinema.”
– James Harvey
“Nicholas Ray's direction of black-and-white CinemaScope, that freak child of the 50s, is consistently brilliant in this raw, confused masterpiece.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
“The desert combat strips life and death to an elemental cruelty; in Ray’s harsh world view, nature itself is hostile to Burton's Leith,
a free-thinking loner and a classic Ray antihero. Ray avoids dramatic fireworks, and presses horror and heartbreak into images of mute despair.
The credit sequence alone, with its static rows of faceless combat-training dummies, suggests the blank violence that will follow.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Shot in black-and-white 'Scope on Libyan dunes, it's akin to the same year's Paths of Glory in its remorselessness about institutional cowardice,
but personalized through Burton's Captain Leith — beyond cynical, brave, yet on the edge of brittleness.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The L Magazine
HOT BLOOD
(1956) To get his rebellious brother Cornel Wilde to agree to succeed him as King of the Gypsies, Luther Adler arranges a marriage to out-of-towner Jane Russell, but her Dad has a scam in store. Ray’s nearest approach to the musical, with “the gaudiest colors to be seen in the cinema” (Godard). Color; Approx. 85 minutes.
2:55, 6:30, 10:05
“Intelligent and devil-may-care, bursting with health and life.”
– François Truffaut
“Recommended! One of Ray's nuttier efforts is the closest the director came to making a wall-to-wall musical.
Also the source of the finest ad copy ever written: Jane Russell shakes her tambourines and drives Cornel wild.”
– Time Out New York
“A hot and gaudy plunge… Ray's sense of freedom is everywhere apparent: a subjective shot suddenly turns the 'Scope image upside down,
splashes of brassy color pump up the palette, and realism keeps giving way to mid-fifties artifice.”
– James Quandt
“Worth it for the bizarre spilt-paint-buckets palette rooted in orange. Its bigga-family donnybrooks and on-again-off-again courtship flirt with the formulas
of a musical, which allows two highlights: a bang-on-a-can dance-off and a bullwhip-equipped wedding dance number that's a very public seduction.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The L Magazine
“Has its share of interesting moments and vibrant energies, Definitely one of the more intriguing and neglected of Ray's second-degree efforts.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum
RETURN TO TOP.
AUGUST 5 WED (2 FILMS FOR 1 ADMISSION)
 THE LUSTY MEN
(1952) “Never was a bull that couldn’t be rode, Never was a cowboy that couldn’t be throwed,” and after enough throws, ex-champ Robert Mitchum returns to his dusty Texas home town. But hero-worshipping ranch-hand Arthur Kennedy needs a mentor to break into that rodeo game himself, even if wife Susan Hayward just wants her own home. Approx. 113 minutes.
1:30, 5:30, 9:30*
VIEW THE TRAILER: Low | High
Nicca Ray, daughter of Nicholas Ray,
will introduce the 9:30 show on Wed, August 5 |
“One of the best contemporary Westerns ever.”
– Phil Hardy
“Not to be missed... anchored by one of Robert Mitchum's best performances.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“Even in the quietest, most meditative scenes, there’s a restless waiting for what’s next that keeps the viewer on edge, anticipating the revelations of the next moment. In other words, Nicholas Ray is the first existential action filmmaker.”
– The House Next Door
“A masterpiece –perhaps the most melancholy and reflective of Ray’s films. Ray creates an unstable atmosphere of dust and despair—
trailer camps and broken-down ranches—that expresses the contradictory impulses of his characters: a lust for freedom balanced by a quest for security.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
“Rich in emotional resonances which Ray conjures into life convincingly.”
– Time Out (London)
“I love Ray’s saddest work, and, like every viewer before me, I am felled by the beauty of the shot that finds Mitchum—a rodeo rider—
limping amid gusts of trash through a vacant arena, with the sharp, heartbreaking light of late afternoon slicing in from the side.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
THE TRUE STORY OF JESSE JAMES
(1957) The bullets fly as the James Brothers (Robert Wagner’s Jesse and Jeffrey Hunter’s Frank) and their gang run into surprising resistance from the irate citizens of Northfield, Minnesota — and then the flashbacks begin, in ballad-like portrait of a man who fell in love with his own legend. Color; Approx. 92 minutes.
3:40, 7:40
VIEW THE TRAILER: Low | High
“Romantic and rebel, leading a double life, Jesse is another of Ray's hurt heroes—confused, conflicted, contradictory, echoing Rebel Without a Cause.
Superbly shot in CinemaScope with a sweeping, dynamic sense of space and enclosure,
and punctuated by sad ballads delivered by a blind wandering minstrel, Jesse James remakes a myth in very personal terms.”
– James Quandt
RETURN TO TOP.
AUGUST 6 THU
PARTY GIRL
(1958) In Prohibition Chicago, limping gangland mouthpiece Robert Taylor falls for dancing “party girl” Cyd Charisse and decides its time to go straight—but will impulsively brutal Capone-like kingpin Lee J. Cobb let him go? Color; Approx. 99 minutes.
1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30
“A brilliant film . . . There are torrents of inventiveness. Every sequence is a cascade of ideas. . . . Ray's most interesting film to date.”
– Cahiers du Cinema
“Ray's most beautiful film.” – Joel Magny
“Johnny Guitar, set in Prohibition Chicago. Ray's handling of color and Scope is as masterful as ever…
ideas and emotions are transformed into stunning visuals.”
– Time Out (London)
“Ray's farewell to Hollywood and one of his most affecting love stories. A flamboyant poem in delirious color and
'Scope that is treated with a mixture of violence and lyricism unique to Ray. Taylor and Charisse have never been better,
and rarely has Ray's theme of two flawed individuals trying to strike a symmetrical balance achieved a more beautiful and convulsive expression.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Ray’s direction, with its garish, searing streaks of color (red has rarely slashed the screen so violently), sharp diagonals, and quickly jerking wide-screen views, reflects its characters’ raging energies and inner conflicts. A spectacular flameout of a dénouement reveals the self-destructive folly of unchecked ambition.
Yet Ray lavishes as much passion on the elaborate backstory and on a strange medical subplot, suggesting that the evil doings on which the plot runs are,
essentially, not failings but maladies awaiting treatment of their underlying causes.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
RETURN TO TOP.
Special thanks to Jared Sapolin, Grover Crisp, Helena Brissenden (Sony Pictures); Caroline Yeager (George Eastman House);
Schawn Belston, Caitlin Robertson (20th Century Fox); Barry Allen, Melanie Valera (Paramount);
Marilee Womack (Warner Bros.); Mark McElhatten (Sikelia Productions); Gary Palmucci; and Eric Spilker. |
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