Not certain how
55 DAYS AT PEKING (1963) got in there. The other five movies are his first five credits as a director in 1949-50 (
Ray was the uncredited of director of
ROSEANNA McCOY (1949), a Hatfield-McCoy movie with
Farley Granger that I haven't seen).
Ray was a bit of an iconoclast and eccentric, but he came by that honestly. In a paen on
Howard Hughes, whom he considered to be unfairly ridiculed, he wrote:
I studied and lived with the most outrageous egocentric of our times, Frank Lloyd Wright. I marched with the frail body and brilliant mind of Lord Bertrand Russell, drank a martini with FDR, and rejoiced at my father's death; but I flew with Howard Hughes.
Being prepared for what may seem outrageous -- often to my eyes a whirlwind of sentimentality and surrealism -- may help in watching his films. But not so much for tonight. In many respects, this grouping is of his most "normal" movies (now next week...oh, boy! Which, by the way, may be the best 24 hours of programming on TCM that I've ever seen.).
While every
Ray movie is worth seeing,
A WOMAN'S SECRET and
BORN TO BE BAD are in the lower portion of my
Ray list. It may be of some interest that
Ray was not the
Dory Schary's first choice for director of
A WOMAN'S SECRET --
Jacques Tourneur was, but he turned it down, belying his reputation of directing anything that was handed to him. It has a fine cast and was written by
Herman Mankiewicz, but it seems impersonal to me, and the best of
Ray is very personal. I need to re-visit
BORN TO BE BAD (after all, it has
Robert Ryan), but it didn't seem as good as its title promised.
55 DAYS IN PEKING is a favorite epic. If ever an epic was made to deal with the personal and intimate, and still retain its sweep and action, this is one of them.
Heston and
Niven are wonderful and I may be the only guy who will watch
and enjoy anything with
John Ireland (and, yes, I've seen
THE BASKETBALL FIX). Written by the ubiquitous
Philip Yordan.
Ray gets
Bogart,
Derek and
Macready to make
KNOCK ON ANY DOOR better than it probably would have been in anyone else's hands. And having
Burnett Guffey as the cinematographer doesn't hurt. Even if one still finds the misunderstood-kid-from-the-slums-that-society-created social melodrama narrative overwrought, it must be watched just to hear:
Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. And it is always a good thing to see a warm-up for
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (
Derek's emotional breakdown foreshadows
Mineo's performance) and
BIGGER THAN LIFE.
Was
Bogart ever better than in
IN A LONELY PLACE? This has a well-deserved following here at SSO. With
Guffey again. While being made,
Ray was in Las Vegas intentionally losing all of his money while waiting for
Grahame's divorce to be final, and best man
J.C. Flippen pulled him from the craps table to the church to get married even though Ray's heart wasn't in it. Self-destructive? Did any of that transfer to Dixon Steele?
THEY LIVE BY NIGHT. Simply one of the finest debut feature films ever (was
John Houseman lucky twice?). Romance and violence. Brilliant cast and cinematographer (
George Diskant). Although there are three or four
Ray movies that I enjoy more, everything is clicking here. If you only have time and space to record two of tonight's movies, this and
IN A LONELY PLACE are the two to go for.