Second Chances: Nicholas Ray (part IV) page 2

SECOND CHANCES

christopher funderburg

NICHOLAS RAY: Part IV

page 2

I'm overstating the problem of Leith's pretension maybe too much because I think I kinda loved this movie and its moments of on-the-nose, intellectual pomposity are my only major complaint. I have more affection for They Live by Night and Rebel without a Cause is the exemplar, but this is undoubtedly Ray's masterpiece. Part of the reason this is Ray's best film is that it has an aspiration to greatness – a lot of Ray's movies don't even feel like they're trying (uh Hot Blood, Wind Across the Everglades, Johnny Guitar). Having now seen exactly half of his feature length films, I can say that almost all of them are lacking in certain hard-to-identify qualities recognizably associated with cinematic, dramatic or intellectual ambition. When I said that They Live by Night finally felt like a real movie, part of what I meant is that so many of his other films feel tossed off, like half-formed ideas pursued without any particular focus or refinement. Bitter Victory opens with strikingly composed images, evocative sound design, crisp editing; a thoughtful and precise tone is immediately established and I can honestly say I've never seen anything else from Ray like this film. If you told me it was David Lean or Paths of Glory-era Stanley Kubrick, I'd buy it. And on several levels, this is a film that strives for Big Things.

Actually, Bitter Victory is interesting because it exists somewhere between the two prevalent modes of war film at the time: serious, art-y epics and gritty, B&W cheapies. On the one end of the spectrum, 1957 gave audiences David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai - Lean, of course, being the poet laureate of elegantly crafted, beautifully photographed, philosophically weighty war films. While on the down and dirty end of things, Anthony Mann delivered what's arguably his best non-western, Men in War. Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray sweat and grunt their way through that lean, tense b-picture, a setting in which Alec Guinness' beautiful, blue eyes would have been literally unthinkable. Bitter Victory splits the difference and gives us the gorgeous, dreamy-eyed, verbose intellectual Richard Burton squaring off against an inarticulate, perspiring Curd Jurgens; it's filmed with exquisite style but in doing so never sacrifices any of the nervy, hard-edged immediacy of the pulp-y plot.

The film came at end of the decade-long span from 1948-1958 when Ray made all but a handful of his 18 credited features. In 1957, he also put out The True Story of Jesse James, which itself had followed closely on the heels of Bigger than Life and Hot Blood. Even though he made Bitter Victory less than 2 years after the breakout success of Rebel Without a Cause, he created 3 films in the interim. In 1957, the Cahiers du Cinema was in full swing (just a few short years away from a couple of its critics' incredible success as filmmakers) and that year both Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut featured Nicholas Ray films on their end of year "Top Ten" lists. They chose different films, though: Truffaut picked Bigger than Life for his list while Godard labeled Bitter Victory the #1 film of the year. It's fitting that Godard chose the pretentious but more aesthetically impressive film while Truffaut went with the emotionally provocative but more cinematically staid film. Because, you know, one went on to make Pierrot le Fou and one made The Soft Skin.

Also, Godard lifted two small bits from Bitter Victory for Band of Outsiders: an awkwardly funny moment of silence and a character amusingly acting out behaviors with his fingers. Both films have their own unique take on the business, so it's not just a straight-up rip-off or some amazing improvement that diminishes the original.* But, of course, Godard definitely is paying homage to Bitter Victory – he even repeats the bits during a scene in a restaurant, just like in the original. Also, his infamously over-the-top statement "henceforth there is cinema, and the cinema is Nicholas Ray," only makes sense in the context of this film – coming after a decade of curios and melodramas peppered with moments of greatness**, Bitter Victory probably felt like Ray turning a sharp corner and heading into exciting territory: this is a First Great Work along the lines of The Crime of Monsieur Lange and it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that a Rules of the Game or The Grand Illusion would still be yet to come. "Henceforth" is the key word in that sentence but, unfortunately, Ray's career imploded almost immediately after Bitter Victory: Wind Across the Everglades immediately followed while Party Girl and The Savage Innocents are the only two films of any significant esteem he ever again directed. Instead of being a departure point, Bitter Victory is an aberrant apex at the edge of a cliff.

But let me reprint a longer section from Godard's essay on Bitter Victory:

"Never before have characters seemed so close and yet so far away. Faced by the deserted streets of Benghazi or the sand-dunes, we suddenly think for the space of a second of something else - the snack-bars on the Champ-Elysees, a girl one liked, everything and anything, lies, the treachery of women, the shallowness of men, playing the slot machines. For Bitter Victory is not a reflection of life, it is life itself turned into film, seen from behind the mirror where cinema intercepts it. It is at once the most direct and most secret of films, the most subtle and the crudest. It is not cinema, it is more than cinema."

I'm immediately struck by how eerily similar this statement is to the ones I made at the beginning of my piece last week on They Live by Night. I hadn't read Godard's essay (only the famous opening paragraph) before I saw Bitter Victory and I've got to say that reading his words sent shivers through me - for years, I've felt an increasing disconnect and irritation with Godard, a filmmaker who had once been my favorite, a guy whose films I spent countless hours watching and re-watching, his obsessions with b-movies and experimental cinema and Anna Karina gradually becoming my own. I can still even do The Madison by heart and, any time I have to say it out loud, can't help but pronounce "Croc-Odile" in imitation of his pun. Reading Godard's words and seeing in them my own sentiment about Ray made me wistful and happy and confused - like seeing an old girlfriend after years of estrangement. I actually immediately thought of Jean-Pierre Leaud's character in the epilogue of Truffaut's Two English Girls: the palpable absence of something (of someone?!) I once loved was overpowering.

It's amazing - when I started this project, I wrote a lot about how my connection to Ray is driven by my relationship with the filmmaking Cahiers critics and how I hoped maybe understanding Ray could salvage something. But, truthfully, I never, you know, expected anything like that to happen - I fully expected this experience to confirm and deepen my growing distaste for Godard. But really, I'm shocked at the jolt of reconnection: his writing about Bitter Victory stirred up something in me, something tender and lonely - like Leaud's character, I am suddenly staring at my reflection, wondering where everything went, thinking "God, I look old."

* Incidentally, the only two varieties of Tarantino homage.

** the first half of In a Lonely Place, some of Bogart’s stuff in Knock on Any Door, all of They Live by Night.

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