Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray, born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

Ray’s cinematography, direction, and use of color remain highly regarded within film circles to this day. Ray was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard, its foremost figure, famously writing that “cinema is Nicholas Ray”.

In 1946, Ray directed his first film, They Live by Night. It was not released for two years due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes’s takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic spin on film noir, it was notable for empathizing with society’s young outsiders, a recurring motif in Ray’s work.

Ray’s most productive and successful period was the 1950s, especially the two films Johnny Guitar (1954), a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men, and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) starring James Dean in a bi love triangle with Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood. Both films were eccentric for their time, and much loved by French critics. When Rebel was released, soon after Dean’s early death, it had a revolutionary impact on movie-making and youth culture, reinventing almost on its own the concept of the American teenager.

Ray never openly identified as bisexual, however, he had begun to sexually experiment with men during his stint at the University of Chicago, and was known to have slept with both women and men over his life.^[1]