In the Beginning…
When speaking of Nicholas Ray’s beginnings, it is impossible not to mention John Houseman. I don’t know if there would have been a Nicholas Ray without him.
Houseman had the kind of heft needed to propel an unknown’s career. He, along with Orson Welles, founded The Mercury Theatre, whose critically acclaimed productions of such plays as The Cradle Will Rock and George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House garnered them a contract to produce a weekly CBS radio series sponsored by Campbell’s Soup, called The Mercury Theatre on the Air. This led to their sensational broadcast of The War of the Worlds, the infamous show about a Martian invasion done in the manner of a newsflash so believable that at least 1,750,000 listeners ran for their lives. “The War of the Worlds” led to Hollywood and Welles directing his masterpiece, Citizen Kane, and eventually the bitter breakup of Houseman and Welles partnership.
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 17, 1941 Houseman got a call from the Office of War Information asking him to take charge of the overseas division of the Voice of America radio broadcasts. Houseman had kept an eye on Nick after first encountering him in the 1930s New York City theater scene, and it was Nick’s work with the folklorist, Alan Lomax, on the CBS radio show, Back Where I Come From, featuring the music of Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Aunt Molly Jackson, Woody Guthrie and more, that convinced Houseman that Nick was the perfect person to head the Folk Music Division of the Voice of America. It was their feeling that music could help bridge the gap between American and European soldiers. When government funding for the Voice of America was pulled and staff was questioned about their association with the communist party, Houseman resigned. Not long afterwards he was asked by the Office of War Information to direct a seventeen-minute documentary about the electoral process called Tuesdays in November. He hired Nick as a sound editor and called Nick’s contribution “absolutely brilliant.”
From this point on it appears that Houseman was grooming Nick to be a director, hiring him to direct a thirty-minute show with CBS’s fledgling television department and to collaborate on the Broadway production of Lute Song.
Eventually Houseman showed Nick a dime-store novel called Thieves Like Us. Nick fell “madly in love” with the story of the two young lovers, escaped convict Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), an innocent raised amongst a family of criminals, who, are forced on the run after a bank heist goes bad. Houseman, forever Nick’s advocate, insisted Nick had to write the screenplay, because he was the only person who could capture the story’s locale, the Southwest during the 1930s. Nick, while working for the Workers Progress Administration, had traveled the country collecting stories of those hit hardest by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.
Houseman, who was living in the hills above the Sunset Strip in a house that had once belonged to Peter Lorre, the actor with the big wily eyes who starred in the 1930 and 1940s classics, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca, moved Nick into the guesthouse that was located at the end of the garden pathway, and Nick went to work on adapting the novel for the screen.
The actor, Norman Lloyd, a lifelong friend of John Houseman’s, told me of a time when he was at Houseman’s with Nick and his then girlfriend, Judy Holliday. “Houseman went off with his date, Joan Fontaine… They went off to dinner, leaving Judy, Nick, and myself. And that’s when Nick, who somehow got drunk, ran off with Judy’s car. He said, ‘I’ll be right back.’” Nick got up from the couch in the middle of the conversation and without explanation disappeared with the keys to Judy Holliday’s 1920s limousine. Thirty minutes later, Lloyd said that he and Holliday, “went out on a street corner and kept looking for Nick. We couldn’t believe what he’d done. And I said to Judy, ‘I’ll have to take you back to your place.’ You know, since my car was still intact. And lo and behold here comes Nick driving around with the car. He presented her with the key. We went to eat dinner at Mama Weiss’s, a Jewish Hungarian restaurant. He acted as if nothing had happened.”
Farley Granger recounted his first meeting with Nick at the Hollywood home of the composer, Saul Chaplin and his wife, Ethyl. “At first, I thought that he was very strange, because he didn’t say much at all about anything. And he kept staring at me. I thought, what does he want? That’s very strange. Then, Ethyl told me he was interested in my doing his movie.”
According to Granger, Nick cast Cathy O’Donnell on his recommendation. “Nick said, ‘Do you have any idea who you’d like to work with? Who you’d like to play the female part?’ I said, ‘I’ve worked with Cathy O’Donnell. Talk to her. See if you like her or not.’ He did and we did a test and she got the part.”
John Houseman hired Charles Schnee, an old friend from the Mercury Theater days, to turn Nick’s treatment into a screenplay. It took Schnee and Nick six weeks to finish. Dore Schary, the head of production at RKO, was eager to get into production, but not so quick to sign Nick, whose only film experience was as Kazan’s second assistant director on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, on as director,. So, to prove himself to Schary, Nick directed the screen tests of the actors who played the three bank robbers in the film: Howard Da Silva, cast as Chicamaw, Jay C. Flippen who played T-Dub, and Will Wright, in the role of Mobley. He signed a one-year contract, with the option to renew, with RKO on February 10, 1947. Shooting began on June 23, 1947.
Houseman watched him emerge “as an autonomous creator with a style and work pattern that were entirely and almost fiercely his own,” as he wrote in his autobiography, Front and Center. In this, Nick’s film directing debut, he used a helicopter to film the opening sequence of a prison escape. There is no record of anyone shooting from a helicopter before this point.
Farley Granger remembered “it was exciting to see what was being shot. Unfortunately, I sprained my ankle running and stepping into a gopher hole. I had to have it bandaged up, but we didn’t stop shooting. Nick just incorporated the injury into the scene. Oh, and then, Nick had a terrible time with the helicopter because it kept blowing Howard Da Silva’s toupee off. They had to shoot the scene over and over and over again. Finally, they got some glue to keep it on his head.”
Houseman kept the studio heads at bay allowing Nick to listen to his intuition and take the risks he needed to create the mood and tension he wanted. “It became my function as producer to maintain a climate within which he could work freely and creatively, without unnecessary interference from anyone—including myself,” he said.
Sources:All Farley Granger quotes from interview conducted by myself and Stacey AsipAll Norman Lloyd quotes from interview conducted by myself and Stacey AsipAll John Houseman quotes from Front and Center, John Houseman, Simon and Schuster, 1984