Nicholas Ray

Party Girl

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Robert Taylor as crooked lawyer Tommy Farrell

Party Girl reminds us that director Nicholas Ray wasn’t just a master of noir. Alongside the stark monochrome of great dramas like In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night, there’s this insanely lush, ridiculously colourful offering, often bracketed with Ray’s other colour movies of the era – Johnny Guitar or Rebel without a Cause, for instance – but quite apart from them in tone. It’s still very noirish, a gangster movie in colour, really, with Cyd Charisse the titular star but the movie very much focused on the character Robert Taylor plays, Tommy Farrell. They’re both not-quite people: she’s a fan dancer (which really means stripper at the very least) at … Read more

They Live by Night

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Bowie and Keechie

A gimcrack romance decked out in film noir finery, They Live by Night is a “kids on the run” story, the child of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and parent of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands. Three escaped prisoners on the run are holing up at the secluded cabin of the brother of their leader, where the youngest of the three first claps eyes on the brother’s daughter. In one of the great introductions in moviedom, Bowie (Farley Granger), a fresh-faced 23-year-old who’s been in jail since he was 16, meets Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), hat pulled down and light slanting across her face. He doesn’t know how to talk to girls. But one … Read more

On Dangerous Ground

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Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan

One of the most cultish of Hollywood directors, Nicholas Ray, made his directorial debut in 1949. 1951’s On Dangerous Ground was his seventh film in two years (eighth, if you count Roseanna McCoy, where he replaced director Irving Reiss). If this maverick made films in a hurry, he also made films that moved at speed. On Dangerous Ground almost tells two stories before heading off to tell two more. The linking factor is Robert Ryan, in one of his trademark masculine-but-neurotic roles, playing Jim Wilson, a cop with a tendency to punch first and think later. First up, there’s a cop killer on the loose, and Wilson, along with buddies Pop (Charles Kemper) … Read more