SEARCHING FOR HOME
The Lusty Men
Nick believed The Lusty Men was about mans search for a home.
In the early 1970s Elia Kazan, realizing that Nick was practically destitute, introduced Nick to Jeanine Basinger, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University. She in turn invited him to come to Wesleyan and talk to her students about his movies.
“We were screening “The Lusty Men,” which was not a film a lot of people knew. He was so pleased we were showing it. I can picture him so clearly because he was such a distinctive presence. This is the memory I have of him: He was wearing some type of strange saffron colored pants and a kind of off-pinkish shirt and of course his famous eye patch and his wild hair. He dressed like no other living human being. The outfit was visually arresting. Of course, one of the great things about his work is his use of color. Instead of standing behind the podium he came around and stood slightly to the left of it leaning in at an off angle. He didn’t go behind the podium like other people did. He didn’t use the microphone like other people. He took an angle around the side approach. And I thought, he deals with it all on his own terms. He’s a man who comes from another place. He’s just from somewhere else. Like from another planet.”
The Lusty Men is my favorite of my father’s films. It’s also the first movie of his that I ever saw. Bernard Eisenschitz, who wrote the biography Nicholas Ray: An American Journey took me to see it at the Bleeker Street Theater in 1981, when I was nineteen. It was two years after my father’s death and at a time in my life where I felt disconnected from society, family and home. Watching the movie made me feel as though my father was talking to me, sharing about feelings of dislocation. How do you go home? Where is home? What is home? Where do you go when you’ve come to the end of?
In 1979, not long before Nick died, he spoke at Vassar before a screening of The Lusty Men. One of the questions he felt the film raised was, “What does it mean to go back home again?” He added a couple of possibilities, “Pieces of warmth, some of us find them, some of us get a rifle up our asses, too.”
I have often reflected on my first viewing of The Lusty Men, of Jeff McCloud’s (Robert Mitchum) placement within the frame during the scene where he is going back to his childhood home for the first time, the vastness of the landscape representing the world he inhabits, the life he’s lived so far. It’s as if my father is asking with all that is behind us can we go home again?
He poses this question within the frame of a story about a has-been rodeo star who is trying to find his place in the world. The script was developed from a Life Magazine article about he lonely, transient lifestyles of modern-day cowboys. In a way Nick Ray was very much like Robert Mitchum’s character in this movie. His home was a film set in the same way Mitchum’s is the rodeo circuit.
The Lusty Men was Nick’s eighth film in four years, not including the films doctored for RKO. He was the second director hired to direct the movie. The first was. There was no script when he came on board. Howard Hughes, who lusted after Susan Hayward, demanded she play the part of Louise Merritt because she would draw a female audience. He got 20th Century Fox to loan her out. She was only available for a month because she was scheduled to film The Snows of Killamanjaro. She didn’t get along with Robert Mitchum, who ate garlic before their intimate scenes and called her an old gray mare. When Andrew Solt, the screenwriter who had worked with Nick on In a Lonely Place, came in to fix the dialogue for Hayward she threw a fit, saying that the lines he wanted her to say were insulting.
Nick considered Arthur Kennedy, who plays Wes Merritt, the husband of Susan Hayward, a want-to-be rodeo cowboy. Nick said, “Kennedy was a beautiful actor to work with. Where it might have taken me five minutes with Mitchum and ten minutes with Susan Hayward between takes to get them in the right groove, when something went wrong in one of Kennedy’s scenes, by the time I’d cut, walked over, and gotten my arm around him, he’d know everything I was going to say. And the next take would be perfect.”
Robert Mitchum nicknamed Nick the mystic because he’d sit in the director’s chair for hours, just staring into space, speechless. When he did speak it was to ask the actors questions about the psychology of their characters. At first Nick’s style threw Mitchum off guard because he was used to coming in and hitting his marks but Nick wanted to discuss the scenes with the actors. Mitchum joked that he was out of the frame a lot because Nick kept the camera on the actor who’d listen most when he was going on and on about Stanislavsky.
When Nick held a private screening for Robert Mitchum, Mitchum was so proud of his performance he walked out of the room with his head held ten feet high. The two went across the street to celebrate at the Hollywood hangout, Lucy’s. They got drunk with a couple of FBI agents and Mitchum borrowed one of their handguns and went into the kitchen where he shot up the dirty dishes and made the cooks and dishwashers scurry for cover.
The producers made Nick shoot an ending that was a little more upbeat than the one he’d originally shot but it never saw the light of day because Mitchum got a hold of the footage and threw it in the incinerator. The ending we see today is the ending Nick intended us to see.
When I talked to the film scholar, Jeanine Basinger, about Nick she said, “The mark of a great filmmaker is that he/she takes you into a world that you would not be in without them and makes you live there and inhabit it in a very real way feel and believe where you are. And nobody does it better than Nicholas Ray.”
In 1974 Nick wrote, “I hope I will be long forgotten and then revived in the exaltation of the youthful knowledge of immortality by a flicker of film and a flash of hope.”
