Nicholas Ray and the Nifty Fifties

by Richard Brody

I was talking yesterday about the glories that emerged, almost daily, from Hollywood in the nineteen-fifties (which made that decade, for that matter, a richer source of cinematic treasure than the vaunted post-“Bonnie and Clyde” “New Hollywood” of the late sixties and seventies). Well, let’s not bury the lede: tonight, our friends at AltScreen remind us, at 7 and 9:30, Clearview Chelsea will show one of that era’s masterworks, Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar,” from 1954—a Western that’s pulled to the breaking point on vectors of love, sex, power, and violence, and is one of the most grievous of DVD absences...

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