We Can’t Go Home
Again (1972/2011)
A Film By Nicholas
Ray
United States
If
you know Nicholas Ray, it’s probably because you’ve viewed his quintessential
teen angst film, Rebel Without a Cause.
Perhaps if you’re a cinephile, you’ve dug into In a Lonely Place or They
Live By Night, noirs that helped define the genre. You might know Mr. Ray
as a director of men that fall against inescapable forces, anguished by their
own destinies that trap them. But what happened to Mr. Ray? Where exactly does
a man with such sound and fury disappear?
The
answer, finally after forty years, is We
Can’t Go Home Again, an experimental feature from 1972 that was Mr. Ray’s
last narrative film. Thanks to his wife Susan Ray, We Can’t Go Home Again has been vividly brought to life in all,
well, its mystique and confusion. Shot with students in Binghamton’s Harper
College in upstate New York, We Can’t Go
Home Again premiered to middling reviews and not much buzz in Cannes in
1973. Mr. Ray kept shooting footage and editing it until his death in 1979, and
thanks to Mrs. Ray, we now can explore a filmmaker who instead of continued the
traditions that defined his career, ended with something quite different.
