A Light in the Dark by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson [Thomson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

9

THE GHOST OF NICK RAY

Once upon a time, Hollywood people had no interest in what was being made in Spain or Mexico. But in the 1960s, at film festivals, strangers began to meet and talk about different ways of doing movies. “Godardian” was an excitement that swept over frontiers: Alphaville was shot in Paris but it understood every modern city. When it was appreciated that the French New Wave was crazy about American pictures it became easier for young Americans—the film student, a new character—to rediscover their own archive.

One day in 1961, two directors shared a meal in Madrid. Without believing in any deity, it turned out they were both making films about God. That was something to chat over. They could hardly have been more different. Nicholas Ray was fifty, tall, handsome, American, and unquestionably a big man in town. He seemed seasoned, even if he sometimes behaved like a kid.

He had asked Luis Buñuel for a meeting. Ray had just made King of Kings, from a base outside Madrid. This was a big picture; it had to be, not out of any faith in its lead character, but because Hollywood money was still loyal to biblical epics rooted in what was supposed to be a widespread public allegiance. In 1959, Ben-Hur had won eleven Oscars plus a box office of $150 million. King of Kings had cost $5 million, and it would earn over $13 million.

Luis Buñuel was sixty-one, Spanish, hunched, reserved in his fatalism, going bald and deaf. He had come back to Franco’s Spain to make Viridiana, a transgressive parable that scorned the cultural cliché that had cast Jeffrey Hunter (a blue-eyed Catholic of Irish descent) as Jesus Christ, or Jesus of Nazareth, the K of Ks. On the cross, Hunter’s armpits had been shaved, so that the crucifixion should be wholesome. You likely have no reliable idea now who Jeffrey Hunter was. The legend of Jesus Christ himself is slipping. It’s hard to ascertain what Viridiana cost, because its budget was so modest. But it shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes and became a distinguished, heretical “outrage.” King of Kings won nothing, but it sustained the economy of Samuel Bronston Productions and Nicholas Ray for another year.

As Buñuel described the meeting, Nick Ray was perplexed. He “asked how I’d managed to make such interesting movies on such small budgets.” Ray did not know that Luis’s mother had paid for Un Chien Andalou. Buñuel said money had never been a problem for him. “What I’d had, I’d had. It was either that or nothing at all.” In other words, if you had $5 million for a King of Kings, you would have proceeded. But if you had just $50,000, well…make do with that. Wasn’t there a story about a few loaves and fishes feeding a multitude?

“You’re a famous director,” Buñuel said to Ray. “Why not try an experiment? You’ve just finished a picture that cost five million dollars. Why not try one for four

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