By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Ralph Nelson, who helmed Lillies Of The Field, Soldier Blue, Requiem For A Heavyweight and Charly.
The late Ralph Nelson is tarred with that brush applied to so many directors featured in the Unsung Auteurs column, namely that of the “journeyman”. It’s a title dismissively, pejoratively, snobbishly and irritatingly applied to directors who choose to work across a wide variety of styles and genres while seemingly offering no “authorial voice” of their own. Just a little digging, however, can often elucidate common themes, casting choices and stylistic flourishes in amongst “journeyman” films that have been largely forgotten or deemed inferior. Many directors labelled “journeymen”, however, have helmed strong, individualistic, important work, but have remained steadfastly and inexplicably under-celebrated, with obvious cases like Unsung Auteurs such as Stuart Rosenberg, John Flynn, John Mackenzie and many more. Ralph Nelson is another such case, even though he directed Sidney Poitier to a Best Actor Oscar for 1963’s groundbreaking classic Lillies Of The Field, the first African-American man to ever be awarded the honour.
Ralph Nelson was born in Long Island City, New York in 1916, and began working on the stage in his teens as an errand boy and actor. He served in the US Army Air Corps as a fighter pilot and flight instructor during World War II. Always harbouring ambitions to direct, Nelson staged The Wind Is Ninety on Broadway before the war had ended, and when it did, he moved quickly into the burgeoning world of live television. As a director and producer, Nelson was involved in 1,000 TV presentations in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He directed the first broadcast of Playhouse 90 and was a regular director on anthology series like The General Electric Theater, The Lux Theater, and The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse in what is now commonly referred to as TV’s Golden Age. Nelson also directed the episode “A World Of His Own” for Rod Serling’s classic omnibus series The Twilight Zone.
This would prove a major turning point for Nelson, who was offered the reins on the feature version of Rod Serling’s Requiem For A Heavyweight, which he’d also directed as a television play. Released in 1962, this downbeat drama features Anthony Quinn in one of his best performances as a washed-up boxer at a crossroads in his life, and showcased Nelson’s skill for working with actors and taking on difficult, complex material. The following year, Nelson joined with pioneering African-American actor Sidney Poitier in helping to change the face of American cinema. By dint of his own charm, talent, style and screen presence, Poitier had become the first major African-American leading man, and he gave a delightful performance in Nelson’s 1963 drama Lillies Of The Field. Though seemingly just the simple, sweet, heartwarming tale of an African-American handyman who helps a group of nuns build a chapel, Lillies Of The Field is much more than that. It won Poitier a Best Actor Oscar and helped lay the foundation for future essential Poitier works like A Patch Of Blue, In The Heat Of The Night and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.
Ralph Nelson has never received his due credit for directing this important film, and afterward, he moved through a variety of genres. He brought a stylish effervescence to 1963’s Soldier In The Rain, adapted from a William Goldman novel by Blake Edwards, and starring the brilliant Jackie Gleason as a military man hero worshipped by a young Steve McQueen as a truly radiant Tuesday Weld looks on. From there, Nelson directed rock-solid comedies (Cary Grant and Leslie Caron in 1964’s Father Goose), thrillers (1964’s Fate Is The Hunter with Glenn Ford; 1965’s Once A Thief with Alain Delon; 1975’s The Wilby Conspiracy with Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine), war films (1967’s Counterpoint with Charlton Heston), westerns (1966’s Duel At Diablo with James Garner and Poitier; 1972’s The Wrath Of God with Robert Mitchum); family films (1971’s Flight Of The Doves, which reunited Jack Wild and Ron Moody from Oliver!); and even a horror flick (1976’s creepy Embryo with Rock Hudson). Though some of these films are a little pedestrian, all are skilfully crafted and boast top casts in good form, and many of them feature quirky elements, along with interesting and daring detours into pointed social commentary.
In amongst this strong and under-recognised body of work, however, there are a few standout titles, particularly with regards to the bold manner in which Nelson dealt with the issue of race in America. 1970’s ominously titled Tick, Tick, Tick is toplined by African-American superstar Jim Brown, who delivers a characteristically powerful and charismatic performance as a deeply conflicted man riding nothing less than a powder keg when he’s elected sheriff of a small town in America’s racially explosive Deep South. In 1977’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich, Nelson boldly tackled the issue of urban decay and racial oppression with this tough story about a young African-American boy who becomes addicted to heroin. Films such as these would very appropriately never be directed by a white filmmaker today, but their importance in American cinema history is unquestionable.
Nelson approached the issue of race with even more ferocity in his 1970 western Soldier Blue, which rates as one of the most revisionist examples of the genre in a decade literally filled with them. Harrowing, ugly and truly devastating (the film has lost none of its power), Soldier Blue stars the perennially underrated Peter Strauss and an excellent Candice Bergen, who play witness to the apocalyptic horrors of The Sand Creek Massacre, in which Native-Americans (most of them women and children) were brutally killed by soldiers of The US Cavalry. Nelson’s depiction of these horrors is utterly unflinching; the film’s poster blared with the line “The Most Savage Film In History”, and it’s not exactly an overstatement. The film is also filled with bitter, lively debate about America’s treatment of its native peoples, and also serves as an obvious allegory to US involvement in Vietnam. Though only infrequently discussed today, Soldier Blue is an extraordinarily provocative film, and a key work for Ralph Nelson.
Outside of Lillies Of The Field, however, Nelson’s most beloved and well recognised film is inarguably 1968’s deeply humanist and utterly heartbreaking Charly. Adapted by the revered Stirling Silliphant from Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers For Algernon, the film stars a never-better Cliff Robertson (the second actor Nelson would direct to a Best Actor Oscar, no less) as the title character, namely a man with an intellectual disability who undergoes experimental surgery which gives him the intelligence of a genius. This somewhat fanciful plot leads into all manner of philosophical and ethical territory, and Nelson handles it with extraordinary sensitivity. The director shies away from nothing here, and the film’s ending is truly rending. It’s a fine and truly impressive film, but with changed attitudes towards the presentation of characters with disabilities in film, Charly certainly belongs to a bygone era.
A maker of finely crafted, beautifully performed, imaginative, daring and occasionally deeply provocative films, Ralph Nelson passed away in 1987 from cancer after ending his career with a collection of superior telemovies (including the 1978 Aussie-shot-and-set Because He’s My Friend starring Karen Black and Keir Dullea), the last of which was Christmas Lillies Of The Field, a belated 1979 sequel to Lillies Of The Field, with Billy Dee Williams filling in for Sidney Poitier. A fiery but deeply sensitive and humanist talent, Ralph Nelson should be discussed with far greater reverence than he is today.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
