‘Shoot Out the Lights’ With Ray Films

The American Cinematheque launches its “Shoot Out the Lights: The Films of Nicholas Ray” Friday at 7:15 p.m. at the Directors Guild with the iconoclastic director’s most famous film, “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955).

In his first film, James Dean instantly became an icon for a generation, the definitive misunderstood youth. It will be followed by “Party Girl” (1958), the gangster movie that became a key argument in behalf of the auteur theory, which holds that the best films are reflections of their maker’s personality, irrespective of whether he or she wrote the script. Both films will be shown in Cinemascope.

Regardless of your view of auteurism, the films of Ray, whose way with actors was matched with an equally fresh and dynamic sense of the visual, are indisputably personal. Ray, who died of cancer at 67 in 1979, lived up to his image of the film director as the ultimate romantic rebel, plagued by alcoholism and unable to launch a major film after the 1963 “55 Days at Peking.” He was a handsome, silver-haired man of leonine appearance and dry wit and charm. (At a posh Hollywood party in the ‘60s he noted the arrival of the venerable head of an even more venerable talent agency by remarking under his breath, “The hands you have to shake in Hollywood.”)

James Mason produced as well as starred in the 1956 “Bigger Than Life” (screening Saturday at 5 p.m. on a rare 35mm ‘Scope print), which is ahead of its time in its concern with the dangerous consequences of prescription-drug abuse yet reveals the anguished family life that could lurk beneath a well-manicured ‘50s suburban veneer, much in the manner of “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Mason, in one of the very best performances, plays a devoted husband and father, an underpaid schoolteacher who undermines his health by moonlighting as a taxi dispatcher. Prescribed cortisone, then a new drug, he quickly becomes addicted, transforming his personality with sarcastic, impatient delusions of grandeur. Ray’s widow, Susan, once told her husband, “This is your life before you lived it.” Barbara Rush is his perfect ‘50s wife, struggling to maintain a facade of normalcy at all costs.

“Bigger Than Life” will be followed at 7:30 p.m. with “In a Lonely Place” (1950), which reverberates with Ray’s own artistic intensity and integrity. Humphrey Bogart plays a respected, hot-tempered veteran Hollywood screenwriter whose simultaneous attempts at a comeback and a new romance (with a sultry Gloria Grahame) are undermined as he becomes a prime suspect in a murder case. It has been argued that the sense of paranoia Ray generates so effectively reflects the era’s growing anti-communist hysteria.

The stunning 1951 “On Dangerous Ground” (screening at 9:15 p.m.) develops adroitly into an unexpected confrontation between a burned-out big-city police detective (Robert Ryan), a rage-filled man who trust no one, and a gentle country woman (Ida Lupino) who, because of her near-total blindness, feels she must trust everyone. Ray manages a shift from violence and anger to love and tenderness that is at once convincingly and profoundly romantic. The subtlety, richness and poignancy of Bernard Herrmann’s score makes it easy to understand why it is said that he considered it his favorite.

It will be followed by Ray’s debut feature, “They Live by Night” (1948), a heart-tugging tale of star-crossed young lovers (Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, both immensely appealing and vulnerable) told with a terrific passion and immediacy.

It’s hard to convey how odd the 1958 “Wind Across the Everglades” (screening Sunday at 3 p.m. with a rare 35mm ‘Scope print) seemed upon its release--a Budd Schulberg story of a gutsy young game warden (Christopher Plummer) who fights to establish and protect a wildlife preserve in turn-of-the-century Florida, a time when ladies loaded their immense hats with feathers. Its concern for both Native Americans and endangered species, however, now strikes a highly contemporary note.

It’s a heady, lusty melodrama that nevertheless climaxes in an unexpectedly complex and ironic confrontation between Plummer and his formidable menace (Burl Ives), head of a gang of poachers, one of whom remarks of his leader, “He carries the freedom of the individual to its logical conclusion.” The Ray series concludes at 5 p.m. with Ray’s much-praised 1961 “King of Kings” (also ‘Scope).

Information: (213) 466-FILM.