Nicholas Ray, Auteur

Mark Goldstein

Dennis Hopper and Nicholas Ray, circa 1971

By Jean Tamarin

Nicholas Ray (1911-79), director of two of the most famous movies of the 1950s, Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), "had a remarkable ability to find the emotional and narrative heart of a story," says Steve Wilson, a film curator in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Ray has influenced generations of filmmakers, from those of the French New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed, "Cinema is Nicholas Ray") to Martin Scorsese, Wim