The Directors: Nicholas Ray

There's no denying here is a man who marched to his own tune.  His personal life more than matched what he put on the screen.  A former student of Nick Ray's, director Jim Jarmusch, said that Ray was my idol, a legend, the outcast Hollywood legend, white hair, black eye patch, and a head full of subversion and controlled substances.  French director François Truffaut called him the poet of nightfall.  We offer you this to get you in the best frame of mind for all that follows. 

Raymond Nicholas Kienzle was born in Wisconsin, near La Crosse, in 1911.  His background was German and Norwegian.  He was the youngest of four children and the only son of an alcoholic contractor/builder and a smothering mother who had some artistic leanings.  Though popular in his youth, he was an erratic student who was largely a delinquent and who abused alcohol at a young age.

He was hung up all his life on his parents and could seemingly never forgive them for the lousy job he felt they did.  His mother's attentions were strictly on her daughters and she insisted her husband assume the rearing of Nick... and Dad didn't.  As a result the kid ran wild.  One of Dad's mistresses got in touch with young Nick and asked him to come to a hotel room and collect the old man, not appearing to be well.  Nick somehow got him home and cared for him through the night but the next day Dad died.  It was quite traumatic for the young kid, despite how he felt about his dad.

He thought being the son of his mother was pretty traumatic, too.  He grew up to be a person hungry for love but wary of involvement.  It was said over the years, apparently by a very drunk Nick himself, that he hated women.  Nick didn't hate what women had to offer which may explain his four marriages and countless affairs and one-night stands. 

At 16 he was sent to Illinois to live with an older sister to see if she and a change of locale could shape him up.  (We know now that Ray really never shaped up.)  Despite being under 18, he became a denizen of Chicago's seedy nightlife.

He returned to his parents' home for his senior year and became a talented speaker, winning a contest on a local radio station. Despite this and good grades in public speaking and English, he barely managed to graduate.  He studied drama at a local college and raised his grades to the point that he was accepted at the University of Chicago where he cultivated a relationship with then-professor Thornton Wilder.  

He also had another experience with a male professor.  He sat in a car with one in various states of undress but he was too nervous for it to go too far.

He had big plans for his stay at the university but those poor grades were again in evidence and the boozing returned with a vengeance. He left after just one semester.  School was too regimented for Ray.  He was a great fan of learning but certainly not in any conventional way.

He rarely fit in and was generally proud of it.  He could get very down on himself and others but he bounced back not by learning much but because of his own romantic vision of himself.  He was an outlaw and ain't that cool?

Still not greatly focused on what he wanted to do if and when he grew up, he returned home.  He formed a community theater group and wrote a column called The Bullshevist and tried to organize a local chapter of the Communist Party. 

Nick & Marilyn, friends with benefits

When Ray learned that Thornton Wilder knew architect Frank Lloyd Wright, he did all he could to get the future dramatist to wangle an invitation to Wright's communal school, Taliesin.  It all went according to Ray's plan.  Wright was set to have Ray organize various performances at the newly-built playhouse on the property.  After a few productions, the two men had a dramatic falling out, apparently over politics.  Ray slipped out under mysterious circumstances.  By the time of his departure, he'd changed his name to Nicholas Ray.  He would always be known as Nick.

He moved to Mexico for a year to gather his thoughts, drink tequila, partake in drugs, have indiscriminate stoner sex, maybe find somebody to help finance his stay.  Oh, did I forget to mention Nick rarely had any money or if he did, he didn't have it for long?  

Ray had visited New York before and in 1934 he decided that's where he needed to be.  He almost immediately became involved in radical theater... largely a response to the Depression.  He became good friends with Elia Kazan... it would have been odd had they not become friends.  They were part of the same theater group (first called Theater of Action and then The Group Theater).  Ray acted, directed, wrote, moved scenery, went for coffee and sandwiches.  He lived a bohemian lifestyle while being involved in the Communist movement.  Ironically, he would escape the Red Scare in the years to come.  He said this period was among the happiest of his life.

In 1936 Ray married a writer, Jean Evans.  The marriage would last six years and produce a son, Tony.  We'll hear more about the son later.

In the early years of WWII Ray directed radio propaganda programs for the U.S. Office of War Information and the Voice of America broadcasting group under the auspices of John Houseman who would become a good friend.  Ray was investigated by the FBI but was ultimately considered a small fish.

Ray learned that Kazan was going to Hollywood in 1945 to direct his first film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and he wanted Ray to join him on the production as an assistant.  Ray's eyes were wide open to the possibility of becoming a Hollywood hotshot director.  

His first year in Hollywood, he said, was rather frustrating.  There were lots of almosts but he didn't seem to be able to make it up to bat.  Good friend Houseman had just signed on as a producer for RKO, was off to Broadway to steer Mary Martin and Yul Brynner in Lute Song and asked Ray to join him.

Back in California and at RKO, Houseman or Ray came across the story Thieves Like Us and both were excited about its prospects as a film.  Houseman would, of course, produce and Ray would write the screen adaptation.  He came up with a good script but it was fraught with censorship issues, at various times deemed unacceptable and even enormously dangerous.

Naive, young criminals, Granger and O'Donnell

Ultimately called They Live by Night (1948), it is the story of a young fugitive, Bowie, who is the getaway driver for a pair of smalltime bank robbers.  The trouble really gets moving when Bowie falls in love with the niece of one of the robbers.  After a hasty marriage, the youngsters break off from the robbers and hide out in a mountain cabin trying to avoid her family and the law.

Houseman liked how Ray attacked the writing and decided he also wanted Ray to direct his first picture but it came with a condition.  He had to sign a contract with RKO.  It was something Ray hadn't counted on and while he was a little reluctant, he decided to do it.  Working for the new RKO boss, Howard Hughes, excited him.  He hoped he was a visionary.  It wouldn't be long before he changed his mind.

Despite his friendship with Ray, Houseman seemed pretty objective about his overall views, some of which were shared by a significant number of others.  He was a handsome, complicated man whose sentimentality and apparent softness covered deep layers of resilience and strength.  He made for a stimulating and sometimes disturbing companion, garrulous and inarticulate, ingenuous and pretentious.  His mind was filled with original ideas which he found difficult to formulate or express.  Alcohol reduced him to rambling unintelligibility; his speech, which was slow and convoluted at best became unbearably turgid after more than one drink.

Ray personally hired the epicene Farley Granger and the perpetually wan Cathy O'Donnell for the leads and they both did a fine job as the rather naive, doomed pair.  The little film noir is an engrossing slice of entertainment and considered one of Hollywood's most impressive directorial debuts.

Granger was most impressed with Ray, calling him one of the best and most sensitive directors I ever worked with.  Granger first met Ray socially and found him to be most inarticulate but said that all changed on the set.  He always wished he could have worked with Ray again. 

In time some would consider him a brilliant auteur but a man who was deeply flawed.  He worked with very few actors more than once.  For a man who once earned honors for speaking, he often had a hard time expressing himself, not a trait a director would wish for himself.   In time he was considered the bard of expressionism but a director who never lived up to the hype, never experienced his full potential.  He would have a very difficult time with studio execs.  Neither he nor they much cared for the other's bs.  He was silly to think he would win that battle.  Maybe if he were Ford, Hitchcock, Mankiewicz or a couple of others, he might win.  But Ray was not one of them.  

Nonetheless, the public would come to admire his best films.  There were, as I see it, three that were endowed with classic status and maybe three more that deserve honorable mention.  Overall, however, he is a director whose films I have rarely missed. 

His second directorial effort, A Woman's Secret (1949), would end up being released before They Live by Night.  It wasn't at all the type of film he wanted to do, although it is another noir and he was mighty good at making them and would get better.  This movie might not be included here or in many articles on Ray were it not for one thing... Gloria Grahame enters his life.

She plays the shooting victim of Maureen O'Hara which is explained in a series of some of the most confusing flashbacks I've ever seen.  It's not a good film and even a bit frustrating but I saw it years later after sufficiently falling in love with both Grahame and O'Hara and  admiring leading man Melvyn Douglas.  The actor thought Ray was neurotic about Grahame.

They got them to smile for the camera

She discovered she was pregnant so eight weeks after filming completed she and Ray were married in Las Vegas.  That is, after her divorce.  She came out of one building having divorced actor Stanley Clements and into another marrying Ray.  He would later say that while he was infatuated with her, he never liked her.  It's been said he was mean to her.  It's not difficult to figure out what the basis for their marriage was.  Grahame, always hot to trot, must have been eagerly anticipating her wedding night and was none too pleased that he spent the entire night gambling while she stayed in their room.

He soon made the decision that she just wanted his money (he had money?) so he decided to gamble it all away so when the inevitable divorce came, she wouldn't get any.  He didn't trust her at all, finding her shrewd, calculating and vindictive... all traits he knew quite well.  Both were self-destructive paranoids.  This could have been a comedy had it not been so sad.

Ray would next do two films, both noirs, with Bogart and both were made for the actor's Santana Productions.  It was Bogie who chose Ray as director based on his work on They Live by Night.  Their first, Knock on Any Door (1949), was Ray's second foray into juvenile delinquency, a subject near and dear his heart.  Bogie is a socially-conscious attorney who defends a murderous punk (John Derek) on the grounds that his slum background never gave him a fair shot at life.  It bore none of Ray's stylistic touches, many of which weren't realized until a few years later.  When they were, Knock was re-examined and didn't make the cut.

Ray became rather admired around Tinseltown for helping out on directing chores for four films because the original directors fell sick or couldn't complete their assignments for one reason or another.  Though he received no screen credit these films are Roseanna McCoy (1949), The Racket (1951), Macao (1952) and Androcles and the Lion (1952).

In a Lonely Place (1950) is a magnificent noir, packed with exciting suspense, offering a sad peek into Hollywood lives with the focus on a screenwriter who is bent on self-destruction.  Also suffering with an obvious mental illness he may have strangled a young woman after she left his apartment.  This was a character Nick Ray knew a thing or two about and one of the reasons the film is so damned good.

It is arguably the best acting of Bogie's career and I would say the same for Grahame.  It is my favorite Ray film and has always been considered one of his best.  Ray and Grahame were not getting along at all while making the film and generally did not speak to one another.  Asked why he hired her, he said no one could play the part better.  Bogie opted for his own wife for the part but Ray won out.  It was reviewed earlier in these pages.

He hated making Born to Be Bad (1950), also reviewed here earlier, a film he would never have been a part of except that his RKO bosses insisted.  It is a woman's picture and he clearly wasn't right for it.  He couldn't stand working with the haughty Joan Fontaine (and she was afraid of him) but he got a buddy in Robert Ryan, the first of their five collaborations.  One of those was his next film, Flying Leathernecks (1951) a rah-rah pro-war film with John Wayne, another film and star Ray wasn't right for.  

In the summer of 1951, Ray's son with Jean Evans, Tony, age 13, was visiting Grahame at the Rays' Malibu home.  Both were very angry with Nick at the time.  The marriage was at a very bad place and Ray had detectives trailing Grahame.  (He was angry that she slept with one of the elephant trainers while making The Greatest Show on Earth.)  He came home one afternoon and caught his wife and son doing the deed.  Never mind that he must have felt a little odd considering he once set out to sleep with his father's mistress... he was livid.

The news could hardly be contained and, of course, it came down heavily on Grahame.  Her friends said she was a nymphomaniac and had no boundaries (oh?).  Interestingly, not only did her career not seem to suffer that much, she would win an Oscar.  Ray made all the necessary noises but managed to hide the fact that for years he wanted to have a sexual relationship with one of his sisters.  He and Grahame would divorce the following year.

On Dangerous Ground (1951) stars Ryan as a brutally violent detective on a city police force who is sent into a rural community to help a cop (Ward Bond) investigate a murder.  Almost immediately he meets and falls in love with a blind resident (Ida Lupino).  She directed some of it when Ray took sick.  It contains a riveting performance from Ryan.  It is also considered to be one of Ray's best films although not in the top three.

Ray's last film for RKO was the rodeo yarn The Lusty Men (1952) with Robert Mitchum, Susan Hayward and Arthur Kennedy.  Ray was only interested in Mitchum's role... a rebel, a limping rodeo rider who's seen better days and who agrees to mentor a young ranch hand on the circuit while romancing the man's wife.  Ray loved rodeos, outsider stories and shining lights on relationships that don't work.

Trying to stand up to Susan Hayward

Hayward resisted coming on board because she considered it a guy's movie.  Ray didn't care one way or another (he wanted Bacall) but told Hayward he would beef up the role for her.  She knew before long nothing of the sort happened and the famous Hayward temperament erupted.  She became sullen and profane when she talked.  She didn't like Ray's direction at all and couldn't abide Mitchum who retaliated by constantly pranking her.

Ray also didn't finish the end of this film because he had fallen and injured himself.  Robert Parrish completed it.  I think there was a good story in there somewhere but the final product had too much emotionalism that seemed stagey and forced.  The film didn't do well.   

Johnny Guitar (1954) was made at lowly Republic Pictures and is the second of the director's best films... and he loathed it.  He detested making it and watching it and got all twitchy when people complimented him on it.  For one thing he felt he had to surrender control to the star Crawford (she had actually bought the property and sold it to Republic with some provisos).  He said filming was so overwrought that he frequently had to pull his car over on the way to work to vomit.  Crawford also disliked Ray, although, of course, early on they engaged in a sexual romp or two.  He liked to say... as a human being, Joan Crawford was a great actress.

Crawford directing Nick on how she wants to play the next scene

The on-set feud between Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge became so written about that it caused people to see the film, which is, of course, about two women feuding.  It got some dreadful reviews in the beginning but things changed over the years and it has been considered a western classic for years, a cult favorite.  It has always been a gay favorite.  It is one of a kind for the genre... two butch women at the heart of the story, meeting one another for the final shoot-out at the end... Freudian, full of sexual tension, a hallucinatory western.  A full review was done earlier.

Let there be no doubt, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is his masterpiece.  Everything about it, except for the always interfering Warner Bros, was what Ray considered moviemaking to be all about.  He loved the story, he loved his stars, he loved the message, he loved the attention it thrusted upon him.  It allowed him to stop thinking so much about Joan Crawford, Johnny Guitar and Gloria Grahame.

It was the king of juvenile delinquent movies (although I've always thought the same year's Blackboard Jungle gave it a good run for its money) and juvenile delinquency was something Ray knew a great deal about.  As everyone knew, Ray was by then an adult delinquent and would always remain one.  The boy's relationship with his parents was like a page out of Ray's own life as were a number of other things.

Of course, James Dean had the title role but really, it was Ray.  Dean was decidedly a rebel, too, but he had a cause.  He wanted stardom but he wanted it his way.  Both Ray and Dean were deeply introverted loners, mavericks who quickly formed a mutual admiration society.  Before shooting commenced the pair hung out together, even traveling back to New York.  There were those who thought Dean's acting in the film was more just simple aping of Ray.  He was the only one of Dean's three main directors who liked him and I suspect it's true that Ray loved Dean and perhaps vice-versa. They planned to set up a production company and make more films together.  It's been said more than once that Dean's sudden death devastated Ray and shut down something within him that never opened again.

Three rebels

Natalie Wood rather seduced her way into getting the coveted part of Judy.  From the time she interviewed for the role she was determined to have it.  She was desperate to become a teen star and leave the child actress far behind.  At age 15-16 she rendezvoused several times with 42-year old Ray in his poolside bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, an affair that continued throughout the shooting of the movie.  

Warner Bros had little faith in the film.  The studio disliked Dean and wanted Robert Wagner, Tab Hunter or John Kerr for the lead.  But Ray fought for Dean.  Of course, the studio changed its mind on the film when it brought in the dollars and later became the classic it has always remained.

Most reviews were stellar although some liked to point out that Ray's protagonists were often troubled loners who cannot fit into society and that he was often too sympathetic in his treatment of them.  

French filmmakers developed quite the crush on Ray.  Those French writers who became directors in the early 60s with the New Wave held Ray up as their idol.  He said they comment so favorably and so often about Johnny Guitar that he almost came to like it.  They seemed to know everything about him, including issues in his personal life, and nothing could lessen their gravitational pull toward him.  Godard said there is cinema... and the cinema is Nicholas Ray.

Around the time Ray went to work on his next film, part of a two-picture deal with Fox, he met young British critic Gavin Lambert.  Ray introduced himself to Lambert saying I'm a new director of a very remarkable talent.  While they both laughed, the gay Lambert sized up Ray as a man with powerful shoulders, a leonine head and graying, blond hair, very handsome but gloomy.  

They got together to go over some scripts at Ray's apartment.  At one point Lambert had been wondering if Ray was coming on to him and as he was about to dismiss the notion, he and Ray passing one another outside the bedroom, fell into each other's arms and didn't make time to look at those scripts.  

As the two men chatted later Ray said he was not really homosexual, not even bisexual.  He said he'd bedded many, many women but only two or three men.  Well, which was it... two or three?  A guy who's only had sex with two or three men knows which it is.  It seems a little disingenuous to me.  I don't think Nick Ray knew diddly squat about restraint AND he was a sex maniac (not that that makes you a bad person).  He immediately told Lambert that no one in Hollywood was to know.  It was their secret.  His main point is well made, however.  I think he was mainly into having sex with women.  Nonetheless, Ray and Lambert lived together for months.

Good buddy Houseman had this to say... Reared in Wisconsin in a household dominated by women, he was a potential homosexual with a deep, passionate and constant need for women in his life. This made him attractive to women for whom the chance to save him from his own self-destructive habits proved an irresistible attraction of which Nick took full advantage and for which he rarely forgave them.  He left a trail of damaged lives behind him as a husband, lover and father.

The script that Ray wanted Lambert to check out, he said, was one that James Mason was producing called Ten Feet Tall.  Mason was also scheduled to direct until he saw Rebel and then he asked Ray to handle those chores.  

Its title would change to Bigger Than Life (1956).  If I were to change talk of Ray's three best films to include four, I would add this one.  It is an important story, especially today.  It is based on a nonfiction account of a history teacher, suffering from a degenerative artery disease, who is treated with a new drug (cortisone).  The drug helps the man with his symptoms but transforms him into a monster and a danger to his wife and son.

Lambert helped with the script.  Everyone was pleased except for the ending.  Ray always loved bleak endings but the studio brass wanted the old American uplift and he was further displeased.  He got on well with Mason but despite their spending a lot of time together, they never got close.  The actor said I could never be the big brother Nick was looking for.

All through his career Ray came across projects that he wanted to film but for one reason or another they didn't work out.  Usually it had to do with money and often he couldn't get anyone else to see what see saw in the material.  He was always torn between the creative independence he sought from the big studios and the money he needed from them.  Despite the acclaim he received from Rebel, Ray's rather unsavory reputation preceded him.  His penchant for annoying studio execs continued because he was always distrustful and paranoid.  He was always at war with authority.  He would still make a couple of interesting films but his days of razzle-dazzle were gone.

Why Ray got involved with The True Story of Jesse James (1957) is beyond me.  First off is the title which is a lie.  It was made for no reason other than for Fox to showcase three of its brightest stars, Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter and Hope Lange.  Ray must have been drunk.

He apparently was frequently drunk and on drugs while making Bitter Victory (1957).  During WWII tension revolves around an untested major (Curt Jurgens) leading a raid into German-infested Benghazi and his second-in-command (Richard Burton) who was the former lover of the major's wife (Ruth Roman) who is on duty herself at the base of operations.

It seemed like a project that Ray would not be interested in but Lambert's script likely had a lot to do with Ray signing on.  Great acting made one dismiss the frequently incoherent story.

I didn't find watching Wind Across the Everglades (1958) to be a horrible experience but for many it was.  It was apparently one hell of one to make.  The story, written by Budd Schulberg, focuses on game warden in the early 1900s whose efforts to save the Everglades' bird life from poachers is compromised by booze and loose women.  

Ray, in the deep well of drink and drugs, apparently botched things up enough to incur the wrath of stars Burl Ives and Christopher Plummer and Schulberg himself by rewriting scenes.  The rancor got so great that the brass at Warner Bros fired Ray.  Schulberg took over direction but couldn't save the film and it bombed at the box office.

I'm also not sure that Ray was right for Party Girl (1958), a Roaring 20s gangster flick with musical numbers.  It's a lively piece with Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse and Lee J. Cobb that's been done a million times.  MGM insisted that, as part of Ray's contract, he must maintain acceptable, professional behavior during the shoot and no booze or drugs.  It's surprising, given Ray's political background, that he enjoyed working with Taylor who named names during the Commie witch hunt and Cobb was one of those he named.  He met his third wife, Betty Utey, on the film.  Party Girl would turn out to be Ray's last American film.

The horrors of Ray's marriage to Grahame raged within him again in 1960 when she married his son Tony.  Between marriages to father and son, she was married and divorced from a third husband.  It highlighted an already fraught time for Ray.  He knew his career was going nowhere, at least in the states.  It seemed his good work was no longer outweighing his bad behavior.  Grahame's career no longer flourished after the marriage.

The Savage Innocents (1960) was quite a departure for Ray, an international production shooting in Greenland, Manitoba and at British studios.  Anthony Quinn portrays an Eskimo trying to keep his family together under the most challenging conditions imaginable.  To make matters worse, most of the footage was lost in a plane crash.  Audiences found the final film plodding with too much of a documentary approach.

Ray's last two films were for that producer of epics, Samuel Bronston.  King of Kings (1961) was the first and the irony, if not gall, was trumpeted about Nicholas Ray was making a film about Christ. It would star two actors who had worked for Ray before.  Jeffrey Hunter would portray Jesus and Robert Ryan was John the Baptist.

Its success may depend on who one asks.  Hunter took a lot of flak for being too young (he was 33, the same age as Jesus when He died) and for the blue eyes.  Ray got his own guff for portraying Jesus as a rebel.  Imagine that.  It's the only one of Ray's films mentioned here I've never seen.  It was a monumental undertaking... Ray had never worked on such a movie and he ended up having a nervous breakdown and old MGM reliable, Chuck Walters, completed the film.  

I never found 55 Days at Peking (1963) to be as bad as some said it was but it was a helluva mess to make.  The story of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China was filmed entirely in Spain.  It was a big, lumbering affair that got out of hand.  Ray and Bronston did some serious arguing over the direction of the film and more than likely over Ray's constant substance abuse.  Ava Gardner was frequently drunk and never more disagreeable on a film set. She had raging fights with Ray (the only one who wanted her in the film).  She didn't get along with Charlton Heston at all and he claims she was killed off earlier than originally planned because everyone wanted her out of there.

Heston said Ray didn't direct but rather pretended to direct.  It got to be so serious with and for the director that with about 35% of the film completed, Ray had a serious heart attack (?) and left the production for good.  Two directors, Andrew Marton and Guy Green, completed the movie but Ray received sole screen credit.  He would never direct another mainstream film.

No longer able to work within the studio system, he wandered through Europe, drinking and gambling recklessly,.  At this point there was a fourth wife, Susan.  Despite the heart attack, Ray still loved his vodka, amphetamines, acid, cocaine, weed and whatever else he could swallow, smoke, sniff or inject.  A nurse-friend once got him crystal meth to help cure him of his alcoholism (!).  He was by now wearing a black patch over his right eye due to an embolism that robbed him of his sight in that eye.  His life was in tatters but he remained self-destructive to the very end.

I've never seen We Can't Go Home Again (1973), a documentary-like look into Ray's life as a director.  He did direct it and appears in it as himself.  It was based on a book by his wife.  I have only heard the most devastating things about it.  Note the line on the poster under the word "again."

Living once again in New York, he managed to do some teaching at a couple of institutions.  His students purportedly loved him and he conducted a number of classes at his home.  Ray scorned his own generation because they scorned him and he took to loving young people because most adored him.  He was always thinking and talking about his next great film.

Oddly, I thought, Ray was onscreen in a brief scene as a general in 1979's Hair.  All throughout that year Ray and his friend, German director Wim Wenders, worked on a documentary about his life that was called Lightning Over Water. They both wrote and directed it.  Ray was in the throes of dying of lung cancer (he also had a brain tumor) and he wanted to make the film while he still could.  I have also not seen this film but confess I have heard good things about it.

The film came out in 1980 but Ray had passed away in 1979 at age 67.

Nick's coda was live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.  He managed to accomplish two of them.

My primary interest in Ray has always been the exceptional work he did in film noir.  They Live by Night, A Woman's Secret, Knock on Any Door, the exquisite In a Lonely Place, Born to Be Bad, The Racket and On Dangerous Ground all contributed something winning to the noir genre.  Noir is dark, shadowy, not always coherent, menacing, populated with slippery creatures, full of sexually-tinged moodiness, moral ambiguity, wrong relationships.  Oh, and of course, the best ones have a bad girl.  It shouldn't be too hard to get why Nick was made for noir.  He lived noir.  And so, of course, did Gloria, one of the undisputed queens of the genre.  It almost surprises me their marriage didn't work.  Perhaps it's a case of two people being so much alike.

Next posting:

about a town populated

with great character actors

(and 5 Oscar winners)