Love this not entirely new, but worthy observation by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice’s celebration piece of Nicholas Ray’s “In A Lonely Place” (an incredible picture we also wrote about) which is really on-the-mark. After all the French New Wave did adore these guys.
Ray’s cohorts include Robert Aldrich (“Kiss Me Deadly,” “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”), Budd Boetticher (“Seven Men from Now, Comanche Station”), Samuel Fuller (“Pickup on South Street,” “Shock Corridor”), Anthony Mann (“The Naked Spur,” “The Furies,” “El Cid”) and Don Siegel (“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “The Killers” and later on “Dirty Harry”) as well as the exiled Joseph Losey and blacklisted Abraham Polonsky. In a sense, these infected were an unrecognized Hollywood new wave. All were championed during the ’50s by the young critics (and future directors) at Cahiers du cinéma; none more so than Ray, whose position as a nouvelle vague hero derives from his stylistically bold, sometimes iconoclastic, approach to genre and, even more crucially, his heedless romanticism.
But while the the Truffaut’s, Godard’s, the Rivette’s and Rohmer’s of the nouvelle vague did looooove these directors (you’d probably have to include Howard Hawks and to a lesser extent, Douglas Sirk in this group as well, though Sirk is German, but did his best, very-American, ’50s melodrama work in the U.S.), and through their affection for these filmmakers helped to propagate the auteur theory, none of them really got their due as a collective in the same electrically charged manner in which the French New Wave was thrust onto the cinematic map.
Housing these American directors in one group isn’t a spankin’ new concept, but we like Hoberman’s “unrecognized Hollywood New Wave posit. These guys influenced and spawned the French movement, but never had the same recognizable banner. The Unsung ’50s American New Wave? Doesn’t somebody need to contextualize this era and these filmmakers in a book? Did we just throw away a good idea? Maybe there is such a book, but we haven’t seen it (Biskin himself did write, How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent definitive book on the era and filmmakers).
Yeah, none of these American directors are unknown or underappreciated in some circles, but the American ’70s denim and sideburns gang got their due more than once — “Raging Bulls & Easy Riders” has seemingly been written over and over again, see the most recent example –, (as did the French in the ’60s), so shouldn’t the ’50s auteurs, pioneers and mavericks who put got the ball rolling also get the same amount of novels, biographies, documentaries and appreciation pieces on the too? Something we’ve had on the brain. Maybe it’s too TCM crowd?
The Nicholas Ray retrospective runs from July 17-August 6 at New York’s Film Forum. Hopefully it’ll be touring around the rest of the country at repertory theaters, but we honestly have no clue how that works.