sloth unleashed

In 1955, Nicholas Ray made the technicolor family drama REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, which focused on the experiences of teenagers in the seemingly perfect confines of postwar suburbia. The film was not only a huge success, but it helped to make its star, James Dean, a household name, as well as leaving a significant mark on American culture. The following year, Ray revisited suburban middle America with BIGGER THAN LIFE (’56), a melodrama starring James Mason, Barbara Rush and Walter Matthau. Unlike REBEL, BIGGER THAN LIFE had a disastrous run in theaters and was critically panned. But like so many films that are highly regarded today, BIGGER THAN LIFE has been reevaluated, and is considered by many to be Ray’s masterpiece.

On the Lolita set, Stanley Kubrick cranes his neck behind Sue Lyon’s back to watch James Mason’s performance from the same angle as the camera (1961, via)

“The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book’s psychological content, will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.

…People have asked me how it is possible to make a film out of Lolita when so much of the quality of the book depends on Nabokov’s prose style. But to take the prose style as any more than just a part of a great book is simply misunderstanding just what a great book is. Of course, the quality of the writing is one of the elements that make a novel great. But this quality is a result of the quality of the writer’s obsession with his subject, with a theme and a concept and a view of life and an understanding of character.

Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the beholder in order to convey to him his feelings and emotions and thoughts. These are what have to be dramatised, not the style. The dramatising has to find a style of its own, as it will do if it really grasps the content.”

-excerpted from Kubrick’s essay “Words and Movies” (Sight & Sound, 1960-61)