King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving, pillaging and murdering Jews to establish supremacy. This curbs the sense of wonder, to say the least. Yet this focus on the historical context of the Gospel finds a secular approach to the religious story. The Jews in this film do not pine for a savior because of age-old prophecies; they simply need someone to help them escape this misery.

This situates the film somewhere between Ben-Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ. Though not as humanizing as Martin Scorsese's controversial film, Ray's epic nevertheless breaks ground of its own, breaking from the tradition of showing Jesus in synecdochical ellipses to show Christ in full. The mere process of visualizing him humanizes him, focusing on the man instead of the symbol. Ray understands this, even going so far as to frame most of Jesus' miracles in shadow or other indirect visuals to firmly separate the man from the god. Ray does not visually segment these sides of Jesus for the purposes of commentary or irony, merely to keep our focus on the man even if, like all Ray heroes, becomes an idol before our eyes.

The True Story of Jesse James (Nicholas Ray, 1957)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

The first of Nicholas Ray's farewells to Hollywood, The True Story of Jesse James served the primary purpose of satisfying his contract with 20th Century Fox. Accordingly, its place within Ray's filmography is relatively obscure, and perhaps not without reason. The film plays like a repository for Ray's themes and tics, but Ray presents most of them early in the film, as if he wanted to make sure he didn't miss his flight to Europe. Mob and gang violence, tormented and iconic youth, and a sense of overriding hopelessness pervade the film, but these elements do not gel the way they do in Ray's finest pictures.

Nevertheless, the film does contain its charms, chiefly in the manner with which it presents the iconography of its protagonist. So many of Ray's heroes feel like timeless figures, but James was the first character Ray put on the screen who knew he was an icon. That foreknowledge allows Ray to have fun with the idea of someone who exists as a legend before a man: often, Jesse can interact with people who have no actual image of the man and thus never once suspect that the person to whom they are chatting is really the Jesse James. Even when some of them later learn the man's true identity, the looks on their faces still register mild disbelief. "How could he be Jesse James?" they seem to say. "He was talking to me!"