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Nicholas Ray (August 7, 1911 – June 16, 1979) was an American film director best known for the movie ''Rebel Without a Cause.'' Ray is also appreciated by a smaller audience of cinephiles for a large number of narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963 including ''Bigger Than Life'', ''Johnny Guitar'', ''They Live by Night'', and ''In a Lonely Place'', as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled ''We Can't Go Home Again'', which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death from lung cancer. Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded. Ray was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of ''Bitter Victory'', "cinema is Nicholas Ray." ==Early life and career== Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, Jr. in Galesville, Wisconsin, the son of Olene "Lena" (Toppen) and Raymond Joseph Kienzle, a contractor and builder. His paternal grandparents were German and his maternal grandparents were Norwegian.〔()〕〔http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1803478〕〔http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91jbcCsiuuS.pdf〕 He grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin.〔(Nicholas Ray:The Glorious Failure of an American Director ) Page 3, Published 2012.〕 A popular but erratic student prone to delinquency and alcohol abuse, Ray spent much of his adolescence with his older sister in Chicago, Illinois, where he immersed himself in the Al Capone-era nightlife and attended Waller High School. Upon his return to La Crosse in his senior year of high school, he emerged as a talented orator (winning a contest at local radio station WKBH that included a modest scholarship to "any university in the world") and gravitated toward hanging around a local stock theater. With strong grades in English & public speaking and failures in Latin, physics, and geometry, he graduated at the bottom (ranked 152nd in a class of 153) of his class at La Crosse Central High School in 1929. He studied drama at La Crosse State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse) for two years before earning the requisite grades to matriculate at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931. Although he only spent one semester at the institution due to excessive drinking and poor grades, Ray managed to cultivate relationships with Frank Lloyd Wright and dramatist Thornton Wilder, then a professor. Ray received a Taliesin Fellowship from Wright to study under him as an apprentice. Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington musical ''Beggar's Holiday'', in 1946. One year later, he directed his first film, ''They Live by Night''. It wasn't released for two years because of the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes' takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society’s young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray's films). Its subject matter, two young lovers running from the law, had an influence on the sporadically popular movie subgenre often called "love on the run". (Other examples are ''Gun Crazy'', ''Bonnie and Clyde'', ''Badlands'', and Robert Altman’s 1974 retelling of the novel used for''They Live by Night'', ''Thieves Like Us''.) The ''New York Times'' gave the film a positive review (despite calling Ray's trademark sympathetic eye to rebels and criminals "misguided") and acclaimed Ray for "good, realistic production and sharp direction...Mr. Ray has an eye for action details. His staging of the robbery of a bank, all seen by the lad in the pick-up car, makes a fine clip of agitating film. And his sensitive juxtaposing of his actors against highways, tourist camps and bleak motels makes for a vivid comprehension of an intimate personal drama in hopeless flight."〔Crowther, Bosley. "They Live by Night" New York Times November 4, 1949〕 Ray made several more contributions to film noir, most notably the 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie ''In a Lonely Place'', about a troubled screenwriter, and ''On Dangerous Ground'', a police thriller. Other minor noir films he directed in this period were ''Born to Be Bad'' and ''A Woman's Secret''. Ray's most productive and successful period was the 1950s. In the mid-fifties he made the two films for which he is best remembered: ''Johnny Guitar'' (1954) and ''Rebel Without a Cause'' (1955). The former was a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men. Highly eccentric in its time, it was much loved by French critics. (François Truffaut called it "the beauty and the beast" of the western). In 1955, Ray directed ''Rebel Without a Cause'', starring James Dean in what proved to be his most famous role. When ''Rebel'' was released, soon after Dean's early death in an automobile crash, it had a revolutionary impact on movie-making and youth culture, virtually giving birth to the contemporary concept of the American teenager. Looking past its social and pop-culture significance, ''Rebel Without a Cause'' is the purest example of Ray’s cinematic style and vision, with an expressionistic use of colour, dramatic use of architecture, and an empathy for social misfits. ''Rebel Without a Cause'' was Ray's biggest commercial success, and marked a breakthrough in the careers of child actors Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. Ray engaged in a tempestuous "spiritual marriage" with Dean, and awakened the latent homosexuality of Mineo, through his role as Plato, who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film. During filming it was rumored that Ray began a short-lived affair with Wood, who at age 16 was 27 years his junior. This created a tense atmosphere between Ray and Dennis Hopper, who was also involved with Wood at the time, but they were reconciled later. In 1956, Ray directed the melodrama ''Bigger Than Life'' starring James Mason as a small-town school teacher driven insane by the misuse of a new wonder-drug, Cortisone. In 1957, he directed ''The True Story of Jesse James'', which was supposed to have featured Dean but starred Robert Wagner instead. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nicholas Ray」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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