Capsule Reviews: The River (1951), Caught, Bottle Rocket, Murder By Contract

The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)

Claude Renoir's literally painted-on Technicolor cinematography is a movie miracle, bringing out all the nostalgic fondness of Rumer Godden's florid remembrances and aiding his uncle's direction immeasurably. But Uncle Jean's gift for capturing the spirit of his characters almost works against him here, propping up the uncomfortable imperial paternalism of Godden's white characters. First love is a universal tale, but then so, unfortunately, are white industrialists relying on ethnic labor. As uncomfortable as the whole thing made me, there is still a refreshing lack of melodrama to the love quadrangle, and Renoir's addition of a mixed-race girl and her attendant alien suggests a deeper appreciation for racial politics than Godden displays. But still. "It's one of the least mysterious countries there are," Renoir says in the accompanying introduction. "For a frenchman, India is very easy to understand. People there have just about the same reactions as we do." How would he know? Grade: B

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.

On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

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

After making two certifiable classics (his debut, They Live By Night and In a Lonely Place) out of his first six films, Nicholas Ray upped his batting average with On Dangerous Ground, the film that launched one of the great gold runs of cinema, a decade-plus level of quality that experienced only one or two aberrations while churning out masterpiece after masterpiece. Though it is not his best film, On Dangerous Ground points to the reason for Ray's upcoming string of quality by succinctly demonstrating his ability to spin prose into poetic, psychological beauty.

Establishing the film's mood is a vibrant opening inside a car speeding down darkened city streets. Over these shots plays Bernard Herrmann's music, which kicks off with verve. The music is fast and vigorous, like the scherzo of a sonata, a passionate explosion of sound that nevertheless hints at the darker, more dour moods to come. The next dominant sound to come through the mix is the blaring car horn of a detective summoning his two partners, both of whom react to the urgent, impossibly loud sound with complete calm and disinterest, getting everything ready before departing as the impatient man below continue to agitate the whole block. The lackadaisical response of these cops, who are meant to be tracking the murder of one of their own, belies the energy of Herrmann's opening blast, suggesting that the true passion lies underneath these cynical exteriors.

Born to Be Bad (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

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

What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification. Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve, Christabel (Joan Fontaine) is charming to the point of childlike innocence. Yet just as Eve's fresh-of-the-bus sunniness belied a stop-at-nothing ambition to supplant her idol, so too does Christabel's sweetness soon give way to complete manipulation as she guns for the wealth of her cousin's fiancé. With Fontaine herself being wooed at the time by Ray's RKO boss, Howard Hughes, Ray's not-so-subtle jabs remind one of the jabs of Citizen Kane. But just imagine if Orson Welles had made that movie with Hearst's money.

More worthy of attention is Ray's style, which begins to show its true flashes of aesthetic invention that would make him the greatest director of the '50s. His use of doorways and other frames-within-frames emerges here with numerous shots that isolate characters and open up the mise-en-scène with unexpected entrances and transitions. Deep-focus photography captures the domestic boilerplate in crisp detail, allowing for all the objects to play their role in presenting domestic comfort surrounding inner turmoil. This, of course, would become the dominant form of Ray's thematic expression over the next decade, and Ray's background as an architectural apprentice under Frank Lloyd Wright is vividly on display even in this formative early work.

Flying Leathernecks (Nicholas Ray, 1951)

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

Though Flying Leathernecks is a solid war movie in terms of its construction, the drama that must have happened behind the camera is infinitely more appealing than the one that unfolded before it. Nicholas Ray and Robert Ryan, both committed liberals (Ray a former Communist and Ryan a pacifist) clashed with John Wayne, an actor whose personal beliefs and professional style could not have put him more at odds with Ray if he'd actively been trying to mess with the emerging director. The film itself is purported to exist primarily as one of RKO head Howard Hughes' patriot cred pictures to defend himself from accusations of Commie ties. Watching the various dealings, spats and good old-fashioned passive-aggression at work on this movie would make for one hell of an experience.

Nevertheless, the film is not quite so stupid as its shallow jingoism. Granted, its use of newsreel combat footage, incessant validation of Wayne's reluctant but dedicated warrior act and push for strict discipline make it a traditional war movie through and through. But Ray, who may not have cared as much as he did for films that more adequately reflected his beliefs, nevertheless finds a few moments of intelligence and character in the conflict between experienced professional Maj. Daniel Kirby (Wayne) and Capt. Carl Griffin (Ryan), the too-chummy officer who values the casual approval of his hotshot pilots over proper military decorum.