Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Nicholas Ray and the Potential of Cinema Culture -- Note -- 1. Looking for Nicholas Ray -- Note -- 2. Nicholas Ray: The Breadth of Modern Gesture -- 3. Economies of Desire: Reimagining Noir in They Live by Night -- Accidents of Release: They Live by Night's Production History -- Hope and the Economy of Desire in They Live by Night -- Note -- 4. Knock on Any Door: Realist Form and Popularized Social Science -- Notes -- 5. "I've Got the Queerest Feeling" about A Woman's Secret and Born to Be Bad -- Notes -- 6. Something More than Noir -- Showdown at the Fantasy Factory -- Auteur et Noir -- 7. On Dangerous Ground: Of Outsiders -- Rebels without Causes -- A Shallow and Uneven Affair? -- 8. Flying Leathernecks: Color and Characterization -- History, Ideology, and Cultural Contradictions -- Color and Characterization -- Notes -- 9. The Lusty Men and the Post-Western -- Notes -- 10. Citizen Nick: Civic Engagement and Folk Culture in the Life and Work of Nicholas Ray -- Notes -- 11. A Teacup and a Kiss: Staging Action in Johnny Guitar -- A Teacup -- A Kiss -- 12. "You Can't Be a Rebel If You Grin": Masculinity, Performance, and Anxiety in 1950s Rock-and-Roll and the Films of Nicholas Ray -- Specters of Tomorrow along Nicholas Ray's Lost Highway -- Robert Ryan's Cold Night of the Soul and the Rockabilly Roundup -- "I'm Stranger Here Myself": Johnny Guitar and the Delicate Beauty of "Blue Moon" Boys -- 13. Places and Spaces in Rebel Without a Cause -- Positions on Rebel's Spaces -- Note -- 14. Nicholas Ray's Wilderness Films: Word, Law, and Landscape -- "High Green Wall" -- Bitter Victory -- Wind Across the Everglades -- The Savage Innocents -- Notes -- 15. Bigger Than Life: Melodrama, Masculinity, and the American Dream -- Melodramatizing the Male -- The "Social Problem" of Bigger Than Life -- Notes.

16. Ray, Widescreen, and Genre: The True Story of Jesse James -- A Few Words on Widescreen Criticism -- A Few Words about Authorship -- Notes -- 17. Disequilibrium, or: Love Interest (On Party Girl) -- 18. King of Kings and the Politics of Masculinity in the Cold War Biblical Epic -- From Atonement to Incarnation -- From Incarnation to Anxiety -- Circulation and Response -- 19. "As Surely as a Criminal Would Die": Nicholas Ray's The Doctor and the Devils -- Notes -- 20. The Pedagogical Aesthetics of We Can't Go Home Again -- Note -- Postscript: The Class: Interview with Nicholas Ray -- Nick Ray Interview -- Nicholas Ray: Chronological Filmography -- Works Cited -- Contributors -- Index.