It would feel wrong to not acknowledge that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nicholas Ray (then known as Raymond Nicholas Kienzle). To add a little substance to the post, it’s worth noting that his widow Susan Ray has been involved in reconstructing Nick’s experimental final film We Can’t Go Home Again [...]

(This is also at the DVD Times site. Same content both places. I just wanted to have it here too.)
When Warner Home Video opted last year to drastically change its business model in terms of classic film releases in R1, the impact was most felt by those who had loyally been purchasing the studio’s box [...]

I thought it might be fun to occasionally submit a ranking from top to bottom of a particular filmmaker’s works. Obviously, I’ll be required to have seen a significant portion of films from each director, but this kind of exercise can still be, perhaps, instructive on the most basic sense of recommendation as well as [...]

In the spring of 1958, director Nicholas Ray was tumbling a bit commercially. Ray’s filmmaking had never been exactly easy. Like his fellow Wisconsin native Orson Welles, it was on Ray’s first picture, the young lovers on the lam film noir They Live by Night, where he had the greatest control of his career and, [...]

While Nicholas Ray’s work is still treated with little respect on DVD in R1, there are a couple of films he directed which seem especially difficult to track down. One, which I’ve still not seen, was a project Ray made for Paramount, between Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, called Run for Cover. The [...]

 
“This boy…and this girl…were never properly introduced to the world we live in…”

Two weeks ago, the director Nicholas Ray had a very good couple of days on DVD. July 30 saw one of his finest films, Bigger Than Life, released in the UK by the BFI, a superb edition highlighted by Ed Buscombe’s commentary [...]

I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.

I can’t even pretend to feign objectivity when discussing Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place. I think it’s one of the most exquisite, fascinating films to ever come from Hollywood. [...]