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If not Nicholas Ray's greatest film, then certainly the most rapturous manifestation of his desire to do a musical. The Romani community in California is a fevered mirror of the gadjo domain, it has its own ritualistic strictures yet it's awash in music and dance and flashing emotion. The Gypsy King (Luther Adler) is weary and ailing (the x-ray machine from Bigger Than Life makes an early appearance), he seeks a successor but his brother (Cornel Wilde) is a roving hothead introduced leaping off a blonde's cerulean convertible, "so stubborn he double-crosses himself." The arranged marriage to the girl from Chicago (Jane Russell) is meant as a ruse, when the time comes at the altar the absconding bride and the willing patsy become wife and husband, love is strange like that. "We're thrown together, it's our fate / The deal was made and here we are." The Quiet Man, then, sketched not with green patches but with furious swirls of crimson and orange and black. A widescreen of colliding textures for the gypsy world (beaded curtains alongside neon, whips and roses encircled by operatic crowds), sometimes close to abstraction but always brought back to earth with a jangly gesture or two. By contrast, the mainstream is a band of trailers or, when Wilde confronts a dance impresario with a defiant jig, a glass window to be grandly shattered. Too marvelous for words, though Godard the young critic gave it a valiant try, invoking D.H. Lawrence, Jean Renoir and Van Dongen before proclaiming it "rien que le cinéma." Ray's own statement on his filmic approach, meanwhile, is voiced smilingly by Adler in the middle of a melodic orgy: "Not to get burned is not to live!" With Joseph Calleia, Nina Koshetz, Mikhail Rasumny, Jamie Russell, Helen Westcott, Wally Russell, and Nick Dennis.
--- Fernando F. Croce |