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“... What​ does it mean for a romance to take the shape of a murder investigation? In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray’s elegantly bitter film about damaged trust, throws that question at its viewers. If all love stories are inquiries of one kind or another, the movie seems to suggest, perhaps they differ only in their relative violence ...”

“... drama. I was possibly the only Englishman there. I remember interviewing the American director Nicholas Ray in his small hotel room – he began the interview by sweeping his dressing table clear of all his pill bottles – and I remember a meeting in a cinema in Paris. Renoir was there, bald-headed and wearing a mac, and Truffaut and Simone Signoret ...”

“... or, if you like, in a reflective Godard movie rather than a darker or more dramatic one by Nicholas Ray or Michael Curtiz, or Mark Robson (the director of The Harder They Fall, the poster for which appears in Breathless and entrances Belmondo). Godard himself said he used to think of the film as being in the line of Scarface, but had come to see ...”

“... Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New Deal Democrat at the time (and an FBI informant ...”

“... And by doing so, these critics proved it was so. They wrote as if Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray et al were as sophisticated and as consistent in their styles, worldviews, personal ‘signatures’ as, say, William Faulkner – and thanks to Cahiers, few cinephiles would today think of disputing that. They were, however, less successful in ...”

“... of a Chambermaid in 1964, and Dudley Nichols’s idea of making Thieves like Us was taken up by Nicholas Ray in 1948 and by Robert Altman in 1974. All these stories, of course, were originally novels written by someone else, but we do get a sense that in Hollywood this process is less like recycling and more like playing a jazz standard, done with a ...”

“... Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles, but also Robert, Aldrich, Frank Tashlin, Robert Wise and Nicholas Ray. Characteristically, his best remarks about them home in on technique. ‘Hitchcock’s mastery of the are grows greater with each film and he constantly needs to invent new difficulties for himself. He has become the ultimate athlete of ...”

“... unobtrusively spreading out the surface of their world for ninety minutes and nothing else’. And Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel without a Cause and The Lusty Men, the darling of the Cahiers, is Wenders’s favourite; he used him as an actor in The American Friend (1977) and filmed his dying in Lightning over Water (1980). There is here a 1983 essay on ...”

“... character. Bogart made another fine film in that period: In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray, opposite Gloria Grahame (Bacall had wanted the role). It’s the story of an embittered screenwriter who has a violent, if not murderous, edge. No other film used Bogart’s hostility or self-loathing so well. The loneliness must have been ...”

“... the happiest of his relationships with a major director, though he did remarkable work for Nicholas Ray (Born to Be Bad, On Dangerous Ground), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night) and Jean Renoir (The Woman on the Beach). Lieutenant Benson is fighting in Korea because he has to, and the progress of his platoon is by inches, through a mined road and enemy ...”

“... Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950) stood Neorealism on its head. The Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s first feature, Pather Panchali (1955), is a masterpiece of non-Italian Italian Neorealism. So is John Cassavetes’s first movie, Shadows (1959), populated by underemployed jazz musicians and shot in and around Times Square. Neorealism was the inspiration ...”

“... on himself the facade of the character with whom he had become identified. The great Bogart/Nicholas Ray/Gloria Grahame noir, In a Lonely Place, metamorphosed that character back into film, for the movie knows, as the Marlowe novels do not, that the problem is the hero’s violence against women. The Big Sleep went the other way. Twinned with ...”

“... advertisements for kitchenware. It is worth emphasising how far Penn, Anthony Mann, Fuller, Nicholas Ray and Peckinpah have disproved those rosy, statuesque images. Could Ford match the harrowing historical perspective of Little Big Man, the moral ambiguity of The Far Country, the painful violence of Run of the Arrow, the passion of Johnny ...”

“... Like Godard, Raworth is fond of quoting from Samuel Fuller (Pick Up on South Street) and Nicholas Ray – and to hell with the subtext. The film-influenced books, westerns watched to survive the low-pressure weather systems of Colchester, shadow Godard’s career curve; until the lushness is burned out of both of them and the audience has to sit ...”

“... Papers. This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a similar genesis, although in terms of philosophical sophistication and scholarly meticulousness it is a much weightier proposition. Griffin is a philosophy professor at McMaster and was one of the ...”