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Fred Holywell wrote:I'm not so sure that the crucifixion scene should seem less significant than other moments in Christ's life, but that's me.

I say that as a non-Christian, so my interest in Christ is geared more towards the moral and social aspects of his teachings rather than Christian theology (where the crucifixion would indeed be central; although I do have an interest in that as well.) As Domino noted, King of Kings takes a skeptic's approach, so its depiction of a disillusioned world and Christianity as a new way, something apart but ultimately unfulfilled, speaks strongly to me (and I suspect this is why Nicholas Ray was interested in doing the film.) Rather than it being less significant, I should say the crucifixion is significant in a different way - I think in King of Kings the crucifixion is less the fulfillment of Christ's promise of redemption and more the end of that promise (which is getting into my more personal view of the film: Christianity is assimilated into the mainstream and unable to fulfill the role of a "new path" but the story itself nonetheless will always hold that great appeal.)

King of Kings is unique as a Christ film in that instead of just being an affirmation of Christian teaching (as Ben-Hur is) it takes the outsider's position; people like me, perhaps, who can't give themselves over to religion but who admire religious feeling and sentiment and who would like to be part of it.

After years of nothing but boots, 55 Days at Peking out in region-free Blu-ray in France, coming to UK next month

Hopefully the UK disc will be as good as the French, but it is Anchor Bay which could go either way...

If it's like the Night Porter, the transfer will be OK but the extras will be almost non-existent compared to the French version.

But if it turns out like Lion Of The Desert...

Why is it after all theses years "Lusty Men" still not be available in DVD anywhere in the world?

henry001 wrote:Why is it after all theses years "Lusty Men" still not be available in DVD anywhere in the world?

Warner Bros have just restored it and it will be released through the Warner Archive this year

Once more with smilies:

Calvin wrote:

henry001 wrote:Why is it after all theses years "Lusty Men" still not be available in DVD anywhere in the world?

Warner Bros have just restored it and it will be released through the Warner Archive this year ](*,)

The Film Foundation (Scorsese's organization) was involved and they showed it paired with their previous restoration of Ray's They Live by Night at the NYFF this past fall. Shame that it would get such a nice unveiling only to be relegated to Warner Archive.

Typical WB. But I'm sure the Warner apologists will come up with some excuse.

If it gets a Blu-Ray then I'm not going to complain!

I've taken a shot at updating the list of releases in the opening post. All are DVDs unless specified as Blu. Let me know if I've overlooked any worthwhile releases.

Lightning Over Water (1980) – Anchor Bay (R1)
Marco (short) (1978) – rushes included on Oscilloscope’s We Can’t Go Home Again
We Can't Go Home Again (1976) – Oscilloscope Laboratories Blu-ray (R1)
Wet Dreams (1974) (segment "The Janitor") – extra on Oscilloscope’s We Can’t Go Home Again
55 Days at Peking (1963) – Anchor Bay Blu-ray (R2)
King of Kings (1961) – Warner Blu-ray (R1, R2, etc.)
The Savage Innocents (1960) – MoC (R2) – (beware of 1.33:1 ITV release)
"On Trial" (1 episode, 1959)
Party Girl (1958) – Warner France (as Traquenard) (R2), Warner Archive (R1)
Wind Across the Everglades (1958) – Warner Archive (R1); R2: Spain (as Muerte en los Pantanos), France (as La Forêt interdite)
Bitter Victory (1957) – Columbia (R1)
The True Story of Jesse James (1957) – Fox (R1)
Bigger Than Life (1956) – Criterion Blu-ray (R1)
Hot Blood (1956) – Sony (R2, R4, R5), and Sony (R1) MOD
Rebel Without a Cause (1955) – Warner Blu-ray (R1, R2, etc.)
Run for Cover (1955) – Olive Films Blu-ray (R1)
"General Electric Theater" (1 episode, 1954)
Johnny Guitar (1954) – Olive Films Blu-ray (R1)
Androcles and the Lion (1952) (uncredited) – Eclipse 20: George Bernard Shaw on Film
The Lusty Men (1952) – Warner Archive (R1)
Macao (1952) (uncredited) – Warner (R1, R4)
On Dangerous Ground (1952) – Warner (R1)
The Racket (1951) (uncredited) – Warner (R1)
Flying Leathernecks (1951) – Warner (R1, R4), Universal (R2)
Born to Be Bad (1950) – Editions Montparnasse (as La Femme aux maléfices (R2), Warner Archive (R1),
In a Lonely Place (1950) – Columbia (R1, R2, R4, R5)
Roseanna McCoy (1949) (uncredited)
A Woman's Secret (1949) – Editions Montparnasse (as Secret de femme) (R2), Warner Archive (R1)
Knock on Any Door (1949) – Columbia (R2), Sony Choice Collection (R1), TCM Vault Collection Humphrey Bogart set (R1)
They Live by Night (1948) – Warner (R1)

Isn't there a Columbia R1 DVD of Hot Blood which is now distributed through Warner Archive.

http://shop.warnerarchive.com/product/h ... rom=Search" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

After spending the better part of the week listening to the fantastic Bernard Herrmann score on my ipod, I took another look at On Dangerous Ground and was, once again, absolutely floored.

And yet, that DVD is just dreadful looking. I posted in the Warner Archives Facebook to ask if there were any plans to bring it out on bluray but they said no.

A key work by one of the greats and we're left with a DVD that's essentially VHS level quality.

Nicholas Ray is a name that I've long taken notice of, as most of the critics I admire seem to hold him in as high esteem as any American director of the 50s (or any time, for that matter). And also, especially, thru my love of Abel Ferrara's films I have encountered praise for Ray both from Ferrara himself (verbally and via his films) and from people comparing the two's subversive cinematic sensibilities and generous, democratic manner with directing actors.

Yet the only Ray picture I've seen in full is In a Lonely Place. That was about five years ago, though, and I neither loved it nor disliked it; I have the feeling if I watched it again today it'd seem a completely different, and likely superior, film. I don't think I was paying it full attention, either, sadly. I've also seen about half of Rebel Without a Cause more recently and loved the lush and intelligent 'Scope compositions, the nuanced acting and subtext, and the surprisingly "free" feeling provided by the film's looser, more improvisational conception of cinema despite being a very carefully composed work.

So I just did something I virtually never do, and blind-bought four Ray films: Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger Than Life and Party Girl. Whether or not I love every one of these, I'm willing to bet on the odds, as I actually love blind-buying and both getting that amazing first-viewing revelation and not having to then go and buy the thing so you can watch it over and over. I suspect I'll be bowled over by at least one or two of these, and even if it's a total loss there's always the gorgeous Technicolor and/or 'Scope compositions to admire. From the clips I've seen of these films it seems Ray had a real sharp eye, a real unique talent for these incisive geometrically-arranged frames which both please on a base level and comment on character relationships, subtext, themes, etc.

Anyway, if I end up really digging the four aforementioned Rays, what other works of his would you guys recommend next? I've heard a lot of good things about They Live By Night and On Dangerous Ground in particular. (It's weird how the former is only available in R1 on one of those two-movie, one-disc [!] sets, though then again it seems most Ray isn't very available in R1 at all).

You need to see The Lusty Men before Party Girl. Bitter Victory too, come to think of it. All the others you mention are pretty extraordinary.

What does one have to do with the other? Party Girl and Bitter Victory are about as different as two films by the same director can be from aesthetic, narrative, and even most thematic points.

I recently saw They Live By Night for the first time and it knocked me out. I immediately started it over and watched it again. It's surprising this film isn't better known. Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell are great, but it's the sensational supporting cast that really make this one sing. Howard Da Silva and Helen Craig are particularly strong. I would easily put this at or near the top of Ray's output -- but I may be biased. I have a strange fascination with Granger. (It's so nice to see him in a good film with a decent script! There aren't a lot of examples of that in his career.)

Since discovering TLBN, I've been seeking out Ray's films I haven't seen and rewatching others. Like you, In a Lonely Place didn't leave much of an impression on me before, but I look forward to revisiting it. I thought Bigger Than Life was really interesting with yet another great James Mason performance and terrific photography. I've revised my opinion of Rebel Without a Cause significantly upward. I previously found the heightened angst off-putting, but I understand the tone better now. While there's a lot about Johnny Guitar I can appreciate -- mostly the photography, colors, compositions -- all the elements don't come together for me. I'm a huge fan of a lot of films considered campy by others, but something about this one hasn't clicked for me... yet.

Well, I've now watched every Ray film that I mentioned in my initial post, seven total, and he's easily one of my favorite directors on the strength of all of them.

They Live By Night knocked me out as well. I can't believe how fully-formed this is for a debut feature -- for me, it may be the best first film in cinema. Above all, though, the romance between O'Donnell and Granger is just beautiful and moving; typical Ray romanticism tinged with bittersweet feelings for what could have been. There's a tenderness here that's not quite seen even in his other films, not to this extent, and this tenderness -- along with the film's poetic-realism, 30s-inspired visual schematics -- is what makes the film so remarkable. Compared to this, Altman's later riff just seems like meaningless fun, an excercise in postmodern genre deconstruction for the sake of it.

In a Lonely Place proved incredible on the second viewing. I think I was too hung-up on the film supposedly being a noir the first time around, and was a bit disappointed that it didn't live up to my expectations of such. In fact, it's not a noir, not really, just like TLBN isn't really a noir despite some similarities. These films focus on the relationship between the man and woman above all else, really they are melodramas and the melodrama seems to me Nick Ray's primary generic mode. And the relationship explored here is just devastating. It's hard to believe a film so brutal, a film so dark and violent (not literally, but in feeling; Bogart just oozes seething repressed rage and hatred) could've been made by a major studio in 1950. This is one sad and magnificent film.

On Dangerous Ground is the only one in the bunch here that falls short of greatness for me, though it's still a mighty fine piece of work. I suppose that, whether it's because of studio interference or not, the picture just feels incomplete or misshapen or not entirely cohesive/coherent. The idea of two different halves is fascinating but they just don't quite gel and the ending, while totally Ray-ian (?) in its passionate optimism and romanticism, still feels a bit unearned and false. The gritty noir opening of the picture is excellent, basically, but I just found myself a bit restless during the rural second half, which seems to go in circles without doing anything particularly interesting. Still, that first half is enormously powerful and ahead of its time, and there's lots to like here.

Johnny Guitar is my favorite of the bunch, though In a Lonely Place and They Live By Night are very close behind. As I wrote in its dedicated thread here after viewing: I feel comfortable saying this is one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Crawford here gave one of the most magnetic performances in the cinema -- her eyes alone are like steely blue lasers that may as well fire real bullets at each person she strikes their gaze at. The use of Trucolor, in this relatively low-budget flick, is simply astonishing -- even more eye-popping than many lavish Technicolor films, yet with an alien beauty to it that's unlike anything I've seen before. I like the way Scorsese put it in his introduction: this really is more of an "operatic" film running on pure cinema, just colors and shapes and sound and movement, than it is the plot-driven Western most audiences expect. It's most apt to say that film just takes the Western genre, the iconography of it and the narrative tropes, and uses it to create a sinister, dreamlike, romantic, ominous tone-poem that abstracts such conventions to the point that they don't matter anymore -- they've been overtaken by the hypnotic clicking sound of the roulette wheel, or a shimmering yellow shirt, or a black mass of enemy gunslingers flanked in perfect formation. More than anything else, color drives the film, yet it's also an incredibly verbal film with the kind of cynical-smart witticisms that recall noirs like Out of the Past. But it's hard for me to put into words the enchanting, intoxicating effect Johnny Guitar had on me, except to say that -- to paraphrase a line from The Wolf of Wall Street -- watching it was like mainlining pure cinema.

Rebel Without a Cause has some of Ray's most beautiful compositions, but let's not kid ourselves here... this is Dean's film, in most respects. It's super-charged with a special poignancy not just because of his death but because everything feels so charged. Ray brings out such great angst and yet such great optimism, the hope for a better future, and that's why he's so interesting -- he never made a real noir, because his films almost always had a glimmer of hope or swooning romance even in the darkest times. What's most striking in this film is the short time-frame, further heightening the emotions and the urgency; as far as melodramas go, few pack such a punch as this one.

Bigger Than Life is a staggering and exhausting masterpiece. It's pretty much Douglas Sirk meets The Shining, or whatever. But really, it seems to me that this is one of the more influential of Ray's films. The whole suburban dad awakening to the dullness of his bourgeois life thing has been done many times, same for the whole addiction turning a family man into an unrecognizable monster, etc. But, again, Ray injects such life and power into his work that I'm almost wondering again how something like the scissors/staircase scene could've been made in 50s Hollywood. There's a real sense of things at stake here, and the "happy ending" only further increases the queasy feeling even if it was forced on the film -- it works better than any ostensibly downbeat conclusion would have in implying the impossibility of reconciling the evil father with the good one. Additionally, this may be the most impressive of Ray's films here in terms of the sheer framing, the use of 'Scope; it seems to have been composed with great care, and every shot has multiple possible areas of interest. Ray's thought of as a formally kind of casual director in some circles but really he put a lot of thought into the form of his films. I also like how this film can be read in many different ways, analyzed from a number of different angles; on the one hand, it's the scathing critique most people say it is, but on the other hand it's also a kind of strange metaphor for drug addiction (particularly stimulants, I suppose), and how it can change a person temporarily for better but ultimately for worse.

Party Girl is improbably great, though certainly the second-weakest here. Wonderful use of color and an overall intelligent and lively mise-en-scene help make up for a pretty uninteresting screenplay and a semi-wooden Robert Taylor, who's competent but irritating because you just know someone else could have filled the role so much better. If the film leaves one with less to think about, and less to feel, than the other ones mentioned here, it's still a pretty terrific genre movie and a terrific example of a great director elevating not-so-great material. I kind of wish that this was a musical, like Ray so badly wanted to make, as the two numbers with the wonderful Cyd Charisse are easily high points of the film. In fact, looking back it's interesting how key music and live performances in particular are in Ray, how many memorable scenes in his flicks are focused on a nightclub performance or the like -- e.g. the beautiful "Your Red Wagon" in TLBN, another chanteuse I can't recall the name of in IALP, or the various guitar and piano performances in Vienna's saloon, etc.

Anyway, I also have The Lusty Men on DVD and am going to have to watch that very soon. I'm very keen on seeing The Savage Innocents but I don't know where to find a copy and sadly the version streaming on Amazon Prime for free is pan-and-scan! Run For Cover doesn't appear terribly great (the opening theme song is pretty hilarious) but it's also on Prime in a good print so I might as well. Wind Across the Everglades and Hot Blood are both available on MOD DVDs, though I'm not sure from what I've heard if either is worth blind-buying for $20 or whatever. Knock on Any Door is $50 for a MOD DVD on Amazon and not supposed to be very good but I'd still like to catch it sometime. I suppose that Bitter Victory is my likely next pick after The Lusty Men, as it's so acclaimed by Ray fans. From there, it'll be onto the various odds and ends (I suppose King of Kings looks somewhat intriguing, if only visually, too...)

oh yeah wrote: I'm very keen on seeing The Savage Innocents but I don't know where to find a copy and sadly the version streaming on Amazon Prime for free is pan-and-scan! Run For Cover doesn't appear terribly great (the opening theme song is pretty hilarious) but it's also on Prime in a good print so I might as well. Wind Across the Everglades and Hot Blood are both available on MOD DVDs, though I'm not sure from what I've heard if either is worth blind-buying for $20 or whatever. Knock on Any Door is $50 for a MOD DVD on Amazon and not supposed to be very good but I'd still like to catch it sometime. I suppose that Bitter Victory is my likely next pick after The Lusty Men, as it's so acclaimed by Ray fans. From there, it'll be onto the various odds and ends (I suppose King of Kings looks somewhat intriguing, if only visually, too...)

Re: Savage Innocents, I've got this South Korean import with removable subtitles, which, awaiting a proper release, is of tolerable quality: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0048N ... -tv&sr=1-1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It sounds like I'm maybe not as strong a fan of Ray's entire body of work as you are (Party Girl, Run for Cover, Born to Be Bad, Flying Leathernecks, On Dangerous Ground, the two early 60s epics - all aren't keepers for me), but Bitter Victory is definitely in my top 6. Also, though it isn't as original or visually striking as Johnny Guitar, The True Story of Jesse James is very likeable, and it continues the theme of the youthful rebels/outsiders. Re: Hot Blood (dazzling colors, but as a film near-awful), it's in my bottom two, along with Knock on Any Door. Wind Across the Everglades is a rare Ray I haven't seen and have just purchased on Warner Archives. Geoff Andrews' The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of NIghtfall is a good companion, and he has very good things to say about it.

Today, I saw a 4K restoration of Johnny Guitar. It was absolutely stunning. The exteriors look great but Vienna's saloon looks absolutely stunning. The detail was amazing. Colors are right on.

I'm not sure if this is headed to the home entertainment market but it should. Maybe one of the UK co. will pick this up.

I recently got the Japanese release of They Live By Night on blu-ray. I never owned this on DVD so it's kind of hard for me to compare but I love the film and I'm very pleased. Below is a resized screenshot and an image of the DVD from DVDBeaver above it.

Wow. I have the DVD, but I guess they boosted the contrast? Shame, it is indeed a great film, one of those rare debuts where the director makes a masterpiece right out of the gate.

Does anyone have the Spanish "Nicholas Ray en RKO" set and can comment on it? Especially if the Spanish subs are removable.