ONLY THE LONELY.(films by Nicholas Ray)

I blame the French. In the nineteen-fifties, the young guns of Cahiers du Cinema turned their sights upon American film. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, among others, declared their immortal love for certain American directors. "Cinema is Nicholas Ray,"Godard wrote. Then, as now, French dreaminess about America was nicely entwined with disdain, allowing a critic of the Old World both to laud his master in the New and to sneer at the society that failed to share such reverence. The viewers who stayed away from Ray's "Johnny Guitar,"say, didn't know what they were missing.

Poor Nick Ray. No artist should be asked to weather such ...