just when I think he can’t get any more demented (after Johnny Guitar & Bigger than Life), along comes WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES…it was Fellini meets Lil’ Abner
LOL! i enjoyed it despite cheesy music and some loose plot threads.
and thx, matt parks, i’ll check that one out too. i love cagney xD
@ Matt and Ruby: Do it. Do it now.
ok!
Just DVRed Hot Blood. Anyone else planning on watching it? :)
Is ‘We Can’t Go Home Again’ really playing on TCM? Oh man, I’d love to see that.
Goddamn, all these Ray films are suddenly appearing and I can’t find any of them…
“Do it. Do it now.”
Uh . . .he’s talking about watching the films, right?
“Just DVRed Hot Blood. Anyone else planning on watching it? :)”
I recorded it too and will probably be watching it again soon . . . it’s been awhile.
and, yes We Can’t Go Home Again Tuesday October, 25 2011 at 11:00 PM and Monday December, 26 2011 at 03:30 AM.
Nice. The time zone difference won’t let me catch the 25 October showing but 26 December looks to be perfect…assuming I can tap into TCM through one of my online sources…
@Matt: ya
haha. ^ had to put it off last night but i’ll try again now
Actually just watched Run For Cover last week.
For reasons unrelated to the film I dozed off slightly a few times and thus don’t have the confidence to really assert it, except exclaiming that Cagney is great in it.
Also, prepare yourselves for horrendous full-screen. Cineramascope, mutilated.
I’m really hyped 4 TCM 2 be doing this,now I can see a lot of the lesser appreciated/seen nick ray films….plus ill b watchin soon johnny guitar(its on the DVR along with a mess of other good shit lol)…..i have 2 say that I was really taken aback with"they lived by night" especially the last scene,vary moving and just really unexpected with his style and composition of his shots in that film and what he got out of the actors in that 1 4real,a film that sould get more props…..prob gonna tackle The Lusty Men next…..we need some more Nick Ray discussion on mubi yo
i cannot get quinn the eskimo out of my head!!!! aaggggggggggghhhhh
Back when I used to play in a band, I wrote a song whose lyrics were entirely comprised of titles of Nic Ray films and it was undoubtedly – at least lyrically – my best song (and, no, I didn’t include Rebel Without A Cause). The chorus may have been “Knock on any door/A woman’s secret”
Hopeful it’s at least the Basement Tapes version and the Manfred Mann, Ruby.
yeah i think it’s manfred mann :\
ari, that’s pretty cool but u coulda called it party girl!!!
was your stage name johnny guitar :P
k sorry lol
Perhaps the bandname was Johnny Guitar & The Lusty Men?
Anyway…
Now that would have been a good idea. Although perhaps too rockabilly?
Man, I’d love to see We Can’t Go Home Again. What’s the word on it? Is it a mess?
Why start a comment with “Man” ?? How about “Person” ?
@ ari
On the 1 program on TCM that previews what the theme and strar of the month is they showed a clip of the film and the girl actor they showed crying in the film and appears 2 be talkin 2 ray in the clip…..her performance 2 me anyways seemed vary amateur ish and well….kinda bad lol,so it appears 2 be a mess,but a interesting mess nonetheless lol ;)
Moderated
Moderated
Jonathan Rosenbaum on the film, writing in 1980:
“The first of these is We Can’t Go Home Again, an epic 35mm feature made by Ray in collaboration with his wife, Susan, and his film students in the early ’70s. Susan is trying to raise money to complete the film, and I’m hoping that she can find it. When she showed the tattered workprint to me and a few other interested parties on a Steenbeck early last July, pieced together from about 30 percent of the material, it was apparent that this remarkable, impossible, impressive and irritating work in progress is all of a piece — unlike the version that I’d seen at the Cannes Festival in 1973.
At the time I’d written about the film for Sight and Sound within the wider context of an appreciation for (and some ambivalence about) Ray’s work:
“Surfacing in Cannes in the worst of conditions — not quite finished, unsubtitled, shreiking with technical problems of all kinds, and dropped into the lap of an exhausted press fighting to stay awake through ther 15th and final afternon of the festival — Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again may have actually hurried a few critics back to their hiomes; but it probably shook a few heads loose in the process. Clearly it wasn’t the sort of experience anyone was likely to come to terms with, much less assimilate, in such an unfavorable setting, although the demands it makes on an audience would be pretty strenuous under any circumstances.
“Created in collaboration with Ray’s film class at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and featuring Ray and his students, the film attempts to do at least five separate things at once: (1) describe the conditions and ramifications of the filmmaking itself, from observations at the editing table to all sorts of peripheral factors (e.g., a female student becoming a part-time prostitute in order to raise money for the film); (2) explore the political alienation experienced by many young Americans in the late ’60s and early ’70s; (3) demystify Ray’s image as a Hollywood director, in relation to both his film class and his audience; (4) implicate the private lives and personalities of Ray and his students in all of the preceding; and (5) integrate these concerns in a radical form that permits an audience to view them in several aspects at once. Thus, for the better part of two hours, six separate images are projected on the screen together, juxtaposing super-8 and 16mm footage against a 35mm backdrop (with the aid of a video synthesizer) in one crowded fresco.”
Today, thanks to further work done on the film by Ray in the mid-’70s — editing, labwork, and a narration that he added himself — the film is in a much more coherent and lucid shape. Susan estimates that it needs about nine more months of editing. This means incorporating material that wasn’t available when Ray was doing his last assemblage in 1976, “researching 40 boxes of film and sound to do full justice to the material and to insure technical consistency.”
“It’s funny,” she said to me last June, “there’s a lot of work, and there’s not a lot of work. The film has a life of its own which can’t and won’t be tampered with. It’s a complete statement. It’s just grammatically inexact.”
As before, the film oscillates between the lives, political engagements and problems of the students and Ray’s own problems and ambivalent stances in relation to them and himself. Early on, wearing a red jacket that inevitably recalls James Dean’s in Rebel, he’s shown going into a barn with a rope, bent on hanging himself — a project that he fumbles. (”I made 10 goddam Westerns and I can’t even tie a noose,” he mutters hyperbolically after the noose slips free.)
oon afterward, dressed as a Santa Claus on a highway, he mutters some more — about needing a drink and “Who the hell ever invented zippers?” — when he’s hit by a speeding car. After a mock funeral performed by his students, he’s discovered back in the hayloft by one of them, Leslie, who listens sympathetically to his woes. (”Have you ever been to a faculty party?”) Richie, who lives with Leslie, invites him to stay at the house they’re sharing with some other students.
The story continues well past graduation and into the Republican convention in Miami in the summer of ‘72, introducing additional students along the way, before Ray is shown attempting suicide again — this time successfully. (Or is it an accident?) His parting message to his students: “I was interrupted….Take care of each other…all the rest is vanity…and let the rest of us swing.”
It’s hard to know how to respond to his parable of self-destruction, filmed almost a full decade after Ray’s last commercial feature, 55 Days at Peking — except to assert without a moment’s hesitation that its formal interest far surpasses that of the Samuel Bronstein spectacular that finished off Ray’s “official” career.
The multiple images that were combined via rear projection photography are often extraordinary, and the total effect of this graphic, innovative, agony-ridden document seems to be somewhere between the Guernica of disaffected America that it clearly aims for and the shattered bathroom mirror in which James Mason examines his fragmented features and identity in Bigger Than Life, his most disturbing Hollywood film. The dialectic between cracked self and atomized other is a central theme throughout, perhaps exprssed most poignantly — and bitterly — in the film’s title, We Can’t Go Home Again, as well as its punning credit signature, “by US”."
“In a Lonely Place” is devastating, “They Live by Night” is noir with a poetic conscious, “Johnny Guitar” just may be my favorite feminist/socialist meta western of the the 1950’s, “The Lusty Men” accomplishes the implausible in that it makes a story with a rodeo background compelling, “On Dangerous Ground” is another solid noir with an empathetic soul,“Knock on any Door” has fine moments and great atmosphere but is a little overbearing in it’s social consciousness,Ray’s touch was usually a little more delicate with the noirs and that’s why he made some of the best of the genre.
so who watched we can’t go home again? and what did they think? i liked the collage effects, quite beautiful much of the time. messy with amateurish acting sure but still very interesting
TCM is the only thing that will ever make me grieve not having cable.
Ugh.
Saw it for the second time tonight, re-confirms my thoughts about it. It’s probably the most ambitious and personal film Ray ever made.
Anyways, personal favorites are:
They Live By Night
On Dangerous Ground
Johnny Guitar
Rebel Without a Cause
Bitter Victory
Wind Across the Everglades
The Savage Innocents
King of Kings
We Can’t Go Home Again.
Would love to hear more opinions on it. I’m still waiting to see it myself.
Matt Parks
oooooh. Run for Cover is also streaming on Netlix now. I haven’t seen that one.