The conclusion of our centenary tribute to the great American director includes such classics as Johnny Guitar and The Lusty Men as well as the lesser-known gems Run for Cover and The True Story of Jesse James.
Events in Hollywood Classics: The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray, Part II
Nicholas Ray
A super-butch Joan Crawford sports lean jeans and a six-shooter in Nicholas Ray’s deliriously stylized and darkly romantic gender- and genre-bending western classic.
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Sunday February 5
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01:00 PM
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Nicholas Ray
Evoking Rebel Without a Cause in its tenderly romantic depiction of its wounded, sensitive young hero, Nicholas Ray’s ballad-like account of the famous outlaw’s life and death is one of the director’s greatest and most little-known films.
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Sunday February 12
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01:00 PM
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Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray converts widescreen spectacle into an unusually sensitive, deeply felt and intelligent rendering of the Christ story.
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Sunday February 19
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01:00 PM
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Nicholas Ray
A great and almost unknown western from Nicholas Ray, Run for Cover stars James Cagney as an aging drifter whose Oedipal struggle with his surrogate son turns deadly after the two men become involved in a train robbery.
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Sunday February 26
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01:00 PM
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Tuesday February 28
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06:30 PM
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Nicholas Ray
Humphrey Bogart stars as a crusading attorney defending a young hoodlum accused of murdering a cop in Nicholas Ray’s forceful social-problem drama.
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Sunday March 4
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01:00 PM
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Tuesday March 6
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06:30 PM
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Nicholas Ray's masterful short television film precedes his full-throttle melodrama about an unbalanced singer with too much of a fondness for gents and guns.
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Sunday March 11
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01:00 PM
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Tuesday March 13
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06:30 PM
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Nicholas Ray
Anthony Quinn — immortalized as "Quinn the Eskimo" by Bob Dylan — stars as an Inuit hunter whose traditional ways come into deadly conflict with modern civilization in Nicholas Ray’s stunning Arctic adventure.
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Sunday March 18
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01:00 PM
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Nicholas Ray
Robert Mitchum stars as an aging rodeo rider whose mentoring of a young up-and-comer brings him face to face with his own mortality in this masterpiece by Nicholas Ray, a poetic ode to the dying west and a beautiful portrait of male loneliness and vulnerability.
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Sunday March 25
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01:00 PM
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Tuesday March 27
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06:30 PM
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TIFF's Director and CEO introduces TIFF Cinematheque's screening of Nicholas Ray's classic rodeo picture.
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Sunday March 25
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01:00 PM
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Nicholas Ray
John Wayne and Robert Ryan star in Nicholas Ray’s gritty war film about a besieged group of pilots desperately trying to hold off the Japanese forces on Guadalcanal.
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Sunday April 1
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01:00 PM
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Tuesday April 3
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06:30 PM
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Notes
Concluding our tribute to Nicholas Ray on the occasion of his centenary, the second season of this complete retrospective features some of Ray's finest and most underrated work, in which he reconfigured classic Hollywood genres — the western, the war movie, the "woman's film," the courtroom drama, the Biblical epic — to reflect his love of the forlorn, vulnerable, and misfit, his identification with the abject innocent and angry outsider. (Even Jesus, in the deeply personal King of Kings, becomes such an outcast, his red cloak recalling James Dean's iconic windbreaker in Rebel Without a Cause.)
Perhaps most significant this season are Ray's overhauls of the western's macho myths to uncover hurt, unexpected tenderness and tragedy: the hallucinogenic, nouvelle vague-revered Johnny Guitar; the unforgettable, ballad-like The True Story of Jesse James (which isn't true at all, and all the better for it); and the great and grievously overlooked Run for Cover, a tale of paternity and pathology that once again proves Ray a superb director of actors (here, James Cagney). Supremely, The Lusty Men remains, with John Huston's The Misfits, the finest, most melancholic portrait of the passing west; if it doesn't break your heart, nothing will. — James Quandt
We are deeply indebted to the generous assistance of the following individuals for making this retrospective possible: Susan Ray; Bernard Eisenschitz; Fleur Buckley, British Film Institute; Daniel Bish, George Eastman House; Todd Wiener and Steven Hill, UCLA Film & Television Archive.