The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (342 page)

He stopped working in the decade that an American idealist would have found least endurable. He returned as the instigator of film studies at New York State University.
We Can’t Go Home Again
was made there—a plethora of images meant to be projected in unison about … alienated America, Ray, and cinema itself. Jonathan Rosenbaum called it “cinema at the end of its tether.” But Ray had always set himself as near the brink as possible.

In poor health in the seventies, Ray appeared with great aplomb and concealed courage in
The American Friend
(77, Wim Wenders) as an artist believed dead, but “forging” his own works—and in
Hair
(79, Milos Forman), as the General.

Nick Ray was a hero to many, and he loved the admiration of the young. He was also indulgent, irresponsible, wanton, sentimental, self-destructive. In other words, there are warnings in his life for the hero-worship of movie directors. Bernard Eisenchitz’s careful biography lays the groundwork for that confusion, but still celebrates Ray. I take the view now that Ray was—as well as everything else—a would-be actor and a fantasist. Those traits are not uncommon in Hollywood. But recognition of them helps us understand the beautiful, dangerous dreaminess of his films. Ray is the American director in whom greatness is inseparable from the refusal to grow up. It leaves him even worthier of study.

Satyajit Ray
(1921–92), b. Calcutta, India
1955:
Pather Panchali
. 1957:
Aparajito
. 1958:
Paras Pathar/The Philosopher’s Stone; Jalsaghar/ The Music Room
. 1959:
Apu Sansar/The World of Apu
. 1960:
Devi/The Goddess
. 1961:
Rabindranath Tagore
(d);
Teen Kanya/Three Daughters
. 1962:
Kanchenjunga; Abhijan/Expedition
. 1963:
Mahanagar/The Big City
. 1964:
Charulata/The Lonely Wife
. 1965:
Aranyer Din Ratri/Days and Nights in the Forest
. 1971:
Kapurush-O-Mahapurush/The Coward and the Holy Man
. 1966:
Nayak/The Hero
. 1967:
Chiriakhane/The Menagerie
. 1968:
Goupi Gyne, Bagha Byne/The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha
. 1970:
Pratidwandi/ Siddhartha and the City/The Adversary
. 1972:
Seemabadha/Company Limited
. 1973:
Distant Thunder
. 1975:
Jana-Aranya/The Middleman
. 1977:
Shatranj Ke Khilari/The Chess Players
. 1978:
Joi Baba Felunath/The Elephant God
. 1980:
Hirok Rajar Deshe/The Kingdom of Diamonds
. 1981:
Pikoo
(s);
Sadgati/Deliverance
(TV). 1984:
Ghare-Baire/The Home and the World
. 1989:
Ganashatru/An Enemy of the People
. 1990:
Shaka Proshakha/Branches of the Tree
. 1991:
Agantuk/ The Stranger
.

Satyajit Ray tended to produce superbly accomplished and humane studies of human failure or misunderstanding in which there is no immediate conflict between the miniaturist grace of the strokes and the cracks in the lives of people that they describe. I say “no immediate conflict,” but recollect that François Truffaut walked out of
Pather Panchali
, wearied by such precise care. That incident strikes oddly, for both Truffaut and Ray are thought of as disciples of Renoir, and directors with unusual tenderness for their own characters. And Ray has had many admirers, especially in the West, where he is celebrated as a central figure of humanist cinema, a Chekhovian artist of great refinement, and a director worthy of E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
. Perhaps the reference to Forster gives the game away, for it relies upon an essentially patronizing British view of India and on Forster’s tragic confrontation of English tolerance and Indian mysticism. In fact,
A Passage to India
is a book about passion, unfathomable mystery, and hysteria beneath the Bloomsbury delicacy. I suspect that its wildness would have been as elusive for Ray as it was for David Lean.

For Ray was an aristocratic Indian, an admirer of European literature and music, and a filmmaker deliberately aimed at the art houses of the West by the Indian government. He was born into a distinguished Bengali family, the son of a writer, painter, and photographer. After reading economics at Calcutta University, he spent two years with Rabindranath Tagore studying painting. This was the period when he found himself creatively; the influences of Tagore and of traditional fine art have been abiding. Thus, the warmth of his literary conception is as undeniable as a remorselessly tasteful sense of composition. The camera is all too easily the tool of pictorialism and Ray had an inbred reluctance to broach that persistent calm. He worked in advertising as a visualizer and did some illustrations for an edition of the novel of
Pather Panchali
. Advertising took him to London where he was bowled over by
Bicycle Thieves
. That vindicated his interest in realism, in everyday stories, and in nonprofessional actors. On his return to India, he was further encouraged by meeting Renoir and searching locations for
The River
. But Ray did not work on that film and, while admiring it, thought it not typically Indian.

But what is an Indian film? Was Ray the West’s notion of the worthy Indian artist? How did he relate to the vast, seething, naïve but censorious cinema for the Indian masses? How far did Ray seem to be working within one of the most agonized and contradictory countries in the world? It is not fair to blame Ray for smallness of subject, when Chekhov wrote country-house plays in the years before the Revolution. But Chekhov seems to feel external breezes, while Ray’s world too often closed in on itself. A Bengali, he confessed to the impracticability of his pursuing neorealism in modern Calcutta. Thus, while there is genuine and very moving individual pain in his work, there was not a great sense of India’s turmoil.

For all the acclaim that greeted the Apu trilogy, his best early work seems to me to focus on women
—Devi, Charulata, Three Daughters, Mahanagar
. Invariably, the personal factor in his films is beyond reproach. He devises richly credible people, surveys them with true charity, and encourages his actors into unaffected revelation. His own interest in music and painting adds to the feeling that sheer taste is eliminating flavor. The question remains as to whether he really advanced in thirty years’ work, or was the wonderful, beguiling skill and tenderness of, say,
Days and Nights in the Forest
simply a refinement of the first films?

Perhaps Ray was the victim of his origins; certainly that is often the predicament of his characters. For instance,
Jalsaghar
—a film about an aristocrat’s inability to shed his heritage—relates the man’s estrangement from reality to the obsession with art in a way that is more intriguing than the Apu trilogy. At various times
—Devi, The Philosopher’s Stone
, and
The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha
—Ray resorted to Indian mythology. It is possible that that was truer mate rial for what may be a visual sense torn between Western refinement and the profuseness of Indian art.

Ray once spoke of the Indian stress on detail, the pearl of dew that contains the world, and of the mystical references of that meticulousness, to be seen in the way extreme close-ups of cell life seem to describe passages from the Upanishads.

But can India’s myriad stories still be referred to such models? The most encouraging aspect of Ray’s later career was his troubled attempt to discover a modern Indian subject.
Company Limited
was about ambitious and successful young people in Calcutta; its human observation was sterner than Ray had usually managed, and there was a fresh sense of political background.
Distant Thunder
went further still. Set in 1942, it showed the effects of famine on Bengal. For the first time, Ray made a connection between the individual and the national plight.

The Middleman
was a further exploration of the muddle, corruption, and forgotten traditions of contemporary Calcutta, about a young man trying to make his way as an obliging assistant in the business jungle. But
The Chess Players
was a step backwards—into the safer, academic prettiness of the past. Taken from a Munshi Premchand story, it was Ray’s first film with Hindi and English dialogue; it also had color, and the starry participation of Saeed Jaffrey and Richard Attenborough. It had two stories that reflected upon each other a little too obviously for the rather cozy sense of irony.

In the eighties, he was hindered by poor health, and left exposed by the variety of Indian cinema. Still, his stature was established, and there he was, on video and on his deathbed, the recipient of a special Oscar in 1991 for “rare mastery of the art of motion pictures and for his profound humanitarian outlook.” The rhetoric had been earned, but Ray seemed more clearly than ever the projection of “our” India—not quite India’s India.

Stephen Rea
, b. Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1949
There’s something long-suffering, or self-denying, in Stephen Rea’s presence that may have made him easy casting as the husband in
The End of the Affair
(99, Neil Jordan). Yet I wonder: could that film have been any less depressing or empty if Rea and Ralph Fiennes (the lover) had exchanged roles? Are there smothered feelings behind Rea’s starched face, or just that creased, constipated look?

Trained for the stage, Rea came into pictures (after years in TV) at the behest of Neil Jordan in
Angel
(82). Thereafter, he did
Loose Connections
(83, Richard Eyre);
The Company of Wolves
(84, Jordan);
The Doctor and the Devils
(85, Freddie Francis);
Life Is Sweet
(91, Mike Leigh); earning an Oscar nomination as the IRA man in
The Crying Game
(91, Jordan); very good with Sinéad Cusack in
Bad Behaviour
(93, Les Blair); as Lovborg in a TV version of
Hedda Gabler
(93, Deborah Warner);
Angie
(94, Martha Coolidge);
Princess Caraboo
(94, Michael Austin);
Ready to Wear
(94, Robert Altman);
Interview with the Vampire
(94, Jordan); as the Russian cop in
Citizen X
(95, Chris Gerolmo); on TV in
Shadow of a Gunman
(95).

He had perhaps his best role, for TV, as Bruno Hauptmann in
Crime of the Century
(96, Mark Rydell); as the traitor in
Michael Collins
(96, Jordan);
Trojan Eddie
(96, Gillies Mackinnon);
The Van
(96, Stephen Frears);
The Last of the High Kings
(96, David Keating);
The Butcher Boy
(97, Jordan);
Fever Pitch
(97, David Evans);
Still Crazy
(98, Brian Gibson); as a terrorist in
The Break
(98, Robert Dornhelm), which began as his idea;
In Dreams
(99, Jordan); very good in
Guinevere
(99, Audrey Wells);
This Is My Father
(99, Paul Quinn); as Cardinal Richelieu in
The Musketeer
(01, Peter Hyams);
Armadillo
(01, Howard Davies).

He was in
FeardotCom
(02, William Malone);
Evelyn
(02, Bruce Beresford); as Leopold Bloom in
Bloom
(03, Sean Walsh);
Control
(04, Tim Hunter);
The Confessor
(04, Lewin Webb);
Breakfast on Pluto
(05, Jordan);
Tara Road
(05, Mackinnon);
River Queen
(05, Vincent Ward);
V for Vendetta
(05, James McTeigue);
Sisters
(06, Douglas Buck);
Sixty Six
(06, Paul Weiland);
Until Death
(07, Simon Fellows);
The Reaping
(07, Stephen Hopkins);
Nothing Personal
(09, Urszula Antoniak);
The Heavy
(10, Marcus Warren).

Ronald Reagan
(1911–2004), b. Tampico, Illinois
It was the greatest career move in the history of entertainment—simple, audacious, revolutionary. Washed up as a movie actor, spun desert dry over the years on television, he had secured a West Coast daytime talk show,
Ask the Governor
, from 1966 to 1974. But he was vigorous and amiable still, and advertisers could imagine a bigger audience. He could learn lines overnight; even when he forgot them, he spoke naturally in movie-ese. Only occasionally did he confuse camera right and camera left, and his double-take recovery was an unfailing delight. His walk across the White House lawn, his cupping of a deaf ear to catch questions, his humble “Well …”—these strokes became epic. Babies had them down flat. And so, he made it as a nationwide series in which, for eight years, he played
Mr. President?—That’s Me!
, amassing more camera time than anyone else in the Actors’ Guild and deftly feeding the lines and situations of Warner Brothers in the 1940s back into world affairs.

He was a hugely successful and evasive president, as blind to disaster, iniquity, and humiliation as he was to the Constitution. And he was as lucky as he had been a loser in pictures. Thus, in the years 1981–88, America made a gentle transition—from nation to show—that disturbed no one’s fun. Especially not the president’s. If he ever woke in the night, or the day, and murmured “Why me?” to the nanny, he knew the answer—he’d have seen it in
Network:
“Because you’re on television, dummy.”

As a younger man, at Eureka College, he was as noted as an athlete as for his acting. He became “Dutch” Reagan, a sports commentator on local radio, and then worked for NBC. In 1937, Warners signed him up, and he had some ten years in B pictures first, then as a reliable support and a hero’s stolid pal:
Love Is On the Air
(37, Nick Grinde);
Boy Meets Girl
(38, Lloyd Bacon); with his wife-to-be, Jane Wyman, in
Brother Rat
(38, William Keighley);
Cowboy from Brooklyn
(38, Lloyd);
Swing Your Lady
(38, Ray Enright); an insurance-claims adjuster in
Accidents Will Happen
(39, William Clemens);
Angels Wash Their Faces
(39, Enright);
Dark Victory
(39, Edmund Goulding);
Hell’s Kitchen
(39, Lewis Seiler and E. A. Dupont);
Naughty But Nice
(39, Enright);
An Ang l from Texas
(40, Enright);
Brother Rat and a Baby
(40, Enright); as footballer George Gipp, urging on the team as he fades away, “Just win one for the Gipper,” in
Knute Rockne, All American
(40, Bacon);
Murder in the Air
(40, Seiler); as Custer in
The Santa Fe Trail
(40, Michael Curtiz).