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    Contest: Win Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again On DVD & Blu-ray

    Ryan Gallagher
    November 13, 2012

    To help celebrate the release of Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again on DVD and Blu-ray, we’re partnering with the wonderful folks over at Oscilloscope Laboratories to give away two copies of the DVD and two of the Blu-ray.

    All you have to do to get your name in the running is leave a comment below, describing why you love Nicholas Ray. I’ll pick the four random winners on Friday, November 16th at 4pm (Pacific time).

    The release is fantastic, and includes a number of great supplements:

    Disc One

    • WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN (1973) ‘“ newly restored from original elements
    • DON’T EXPECT TOO MUCH (2011) ‘“ Feature-length documentary by Susan Ray

    Disc Two

    • Extended interviews with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Ray Biographer Bernard Eisenschitz.
    • Camera Three – Profile of Nicholas Ray  (CBS) (1977)
    • Rushes from Ray’s MARCO (1977)
    • About Marco  ‘“ Interviews with Claudio Mazzatenta and Gerry Bamman
    • The Janitor  ‘“ Nicholas Ray’s Segment from the feature WET DREAMS (1974)
    • With a twenty-four page booklet featuring photos, original material by Nicholas Ray, and Essays by Susan Ray, Serge Daney, and film scholar Bill Krohn.

    You can order the DVD and the Blu-ray from Amazon, but if you really want to support Oscilloscope, you’ll get yourself a membership to their Circle Of Trust program. It’s a great deal and goes to a company that we all love supporting.

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    Ryan Gallagher

    Ryan is the Editor-In-Chief / Founder of CriterionCast.com, and the host / co-founder / producer of the various podcasts here on the site. You can find his website at RyanGallagher.org, follow him on Twitter (@RyanGallagher), or send him an email: [email protected].

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    38 comments

    • Nicholas Ray – the under-appreciated studio auteur. He virtually created the New Hollywood, but has never received the credit he deserves.

    • I love Nicholas Ray because he indelibly changed the face of cinema upon releasing Rebel Without A Cause…also making drinking whole jugs of milk oddly cool in the process.

    • I remember walking into Cinema 21 when I was living in Portland with the intention of watching a double feature. ‘Hausu’ was the main attraction for me, but the following up a new restored 35mm print of Nicolas Ray’s ‘In a Lonely Place.’

      Now at that point I had seen ‘Rebel without a Cause’ on TCM but my brain didn’t connect two and two together. Little did I know after watching Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham avert murder and Hollywood in gorgeous Black & White that I would become one with the CULT OF RAY. It propelled my search for any and all restored films playing in theater houses. It lead me to Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, Bigger Than Life! It almost ruined my Hausu experience because I was reeling from that damn film (Hausu won over the IALP fumes ultimately).

      So do I want this Bluray?

      You decide, Ryan…

      You decide.

    • Who BUT Nicholas Ray can lay claim to bedding basically the whole cast of Rebel Without a Cause? Many have dreamed it, he lived it :p BONUS POINTS: making James Mason bigger than God + making the perfect role for Farley Granger to raccoon-eye himself into — love this legend

    • I love Nicholas Ray films because he was one of a few directors (Fuller, Lang, Wise) of that time period who brought their own sensibilities and style to any film. I don’t want to watch just any film from the golden age of Hollywood. I want to watch films that stand out from the rest and that you can tell their is someone with a clear vision behind the camera.

      He was able to put his personal stamp on films ranging from westerns to film noir, biblical epics to social dramas. What’s even more amazing is that he was able to do all of this while under the studio system, resulting in some of the best films of the era (In a Lonely Place, Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger than Life).

    • I love Nicholas Ray because he never stayed put. WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN is proof that he kept pushing himself further and further, experimenting, breaking boundaries, pushing the limits of filmmaking. This movie is relentless, still full of power, emotion, and groundbreaking ideas decades after it was made.

    • Lets see… reasons I love Nicholas Ray… oh yeah, how about; “Johnny Guitar,” “Bigger Than Life,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” and “In a Lonely Place” to name a few! And yeah, his eyepatch is pretty cool too!

    • His use of CinemaScope as well as his sensitivity towards troubled and conflicted characters.

    • I love Nicholas Ray because he made nightmares out of the ordinary without framing them as horror films. Whether it was the fear of drug interference (Bigger Than Life), the fear of being an outcast (Rebel Without a Cause) or the simple fear of being alone (Johnny Guitar, In a Lonely Place), Ray had that one-of-a-kind ability to paint some of the most tangible and relevant American bad dreams imaginable on screen, and they still work as both entertainment and enlightenment today.

    • In my opinion, Ray, along with Fassbender and Douglas Sirk, made the melodrama a legitimate art form. Without his commitment to taking the human psyche to the extreme and relishing in the Id we wouldn’t have talents like Lars Von Trier and Andrea Arnold today. An invaluable director that doesn’t even get half of the recognition he deserves.

    • The title of this film sums up Ray better than I could. His characters are always looking for a home that suits them and most never find it. Sometimes they have a home but screw it up. James Dean has a home but it doesn’t work so he moves to an abandoned mansion. Mitchum in The Lusty Men crawls under his boyhood house to find what he left there as a kid but he can’t get Hayward to be his wife. James Mason has a wife and kid but thinks he deserves better. Most of the lovers in Ray films aren’t together (or even alive) at the end. Ray probably did the Jesse James movie just for the bit where Jeffrey Hunter gets shot hanging curtains. Ray, himself, mainly lived in apartments, and had strained relations with his wives and children. In 1971 when he needed a gig, a home, he makes this film at a college in NY and gets himself kicked off the faculty. My guess is he’s not even at home in his coffin but became a ghost and is out haunting some place even as we speak.

    • Ray is cold, hard uncut stuff, teeming with frenzy and confused masculinity. Even his most baffling choices (Anthony Quinn as an eskimo, anyone?) run circles around the tepid practices of modern Hollywood productions.

    • Nick was/is the reason I ended up chasing the dream in Hollyweird. During the filming of “You Can’t Go Home Again/The Gun Under My Pillow” he told us amazing stories about working with great actors and sleeping with starlets. One of the starlets may have been a little underage but that hardly mattered to me in 1971. What I did get from him was the best film education I could ask for and even more about human nature. He demonstrated how to get people to do what you wanted by making it seem like it is was their idea.

    • Nicholas Ray is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time, and I tend to love his lesser known films throughout his career. Films like Bigger Than Life (Mason is a powerhouse and one of the scariest fathers I’ve seen on screen in a non-horror film, scarier still because it reminds me of my father way too much), worked with an icon who died too soon in James Dean with Rebel Without a Cause, and used technicolor better than most others. When I would check out a Ray film, I knew I was in hog heaven, so recently I believe Olive Films put out a lesser known Ray film called Run For Cover which blew me away because somehow I had missed it throughout my film loving years. He somehow gives us an older James Cagney performance and shows why he was more than a tough guy gangster in film (even though films like Yankee Doodle Dandy did that just fine), but I liken it to Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, being a western that starred someone we had come to know and love in other films entirely. Considering he came from a small town in Wisconsin, he gave his films a reality that most couldn’t match. He made films his way (even when he didn’t have control over them) and if one move changed, we’d probably have Nicholas Ray as a famous architect instead of an outstanding filmmaker.

    • I love Nicholas Ray because of Bigger Than Life, and his incisiveness in depicting the 50’s as the complex and repressed society that it was rather than as a Cleaver-esque idealistic veneer. What’s even more impressive, is that he did it while the 50’s were still happening.

    • I love maverick directors and really enjoyed the performance he got from James Mason in “Bigger Than Life. It’s a shame more of his films aren’t in The Criterion Collection. One film title: “Rebel Without A Cause”. Finally, a great quote from Mr. Ray: “If it were all in the script, why make the film?”

    • I first learned about Nicholas Ray on three separate occasions — The first was by way of the omnipresent Americana cultural icon James Dean classic, Rebel Without a Cause. The second was from a quote by Francois Truffaut referencing how Ray’s film Bigger Than Life was a particular influence on him and his New Wave buddies. The third was this weird, experimental film made with some film students with the help of a dying auteur. That film is We Can’t Go Home Again. — I have “Discovered” Nicholas Ray three times in three completely different ways; yet he was one man, one filmmaker. That is why I love him.

    • Johnny Guitar was my first introduction to Mr. Ray, followed by Bigger than life. This powerful force behind the camera challenged me to see these films as something as a bigger stroke to a detailed picture. His choice of colors and casting continue to impress.

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