“Nobody talks to children,” observes James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. “No,” agrees Natalie Wood, “they just tell them.” Nicholas Ray, who directed the 1955 movie from his own story, earned a reputation as a filmmaker who not only talked to young people but listened to them. He made his debut with They Live by Night (1949), a sensitive treatment of teenage lovers swept into a life of crime, and followed it with Knock on Any Door (1949), about an impoverished Chicago kid who winds up on death row. Powered by Dean’s iconic performance, Rebel became the definitive 50s document of adolescent rebellion. Even Ray’s adult characters could be profoundly angry and alienated: Humphrey Bogart’s cynical screenwriter accused of murder in In a Lonely Place (1950), Robert Ryan’s police detective driven to violence in On Dangerous Ground (1952), James Mason’s suburban family man addicted to pills in Bigger Than Life (1956). The cinema of Nicholas Ray was a world of lonely misfits unable to make their peace with society.
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This Friday the Block Museum of Art will present the Chicago premieres of Don’t Expect Too Much, a new 70-minute documentary about Ray by his widow, Susan, and a restored 35-millimeter version of We Can’t Go Home Again, his unfinished final film, both of which were unveiled at the Venice film festival last year to commemorate his centennial. They focus on a much less exalted period of Ray’s life: in 1971, nearly ten years after the director’s Hollywood career had fizzled out, Dennis Hopper (a bit player in Rebel Without a Cause) helped him land a teaching gig at State University of New York at Binghamton, where he enlisted his students in the creation of an epic experimental feature drawn from their common experience. We Can’t Go Home Again, which runs 93 minutes, is often arresting but more often tedious, a game but failed attempt to marry experimental techniques to an improvised story. Don’t Expect Too Much, on the other hand, is an important addition to Ray’s life story, a troubling account of a 60-year-old artist, once great but now awash in a sea of drink and drugs, as he tries to connect with people 40 years his junior.
Don’t Expect Too Much shows Ray bringing this new energy to his film students at SUNY-Binghamton, and the documentary’s most engrossing element is the interviews Susan Ray has collected from those same students, now as old as Nick Ray was when they worked together. She, too, was 40 years younger than Ray, an 18-year-old student who’d volunteered for the Chicago Seven’s defense committee when they met, and she clearly understands the generational tension at play in her story. Ray immediately abandoned the classroom for hands-on instruction, with students rotating every two weeks from camera to sound to lighting to acting. There was an element of mutual exploitation: to him the students were a pool of unskilled but free labor that could keep his new project moving, and to them he was their ticket to the big time, a Hollywood veteran whose address book was jammed with movie stars’ phone numbers (most of them out of date). At the same time, the interviewees speak of Ray with admiration if not always affection; the man they remember was a brilliant artist and a passionate teacher, infuriating and inspiring.
Directed by Susan Ray
We Can’t Go Home Again ★★
Directed by Nicholas Ray
