Nicholas Ray's Hot Blood 1956

Nicholas Ray always wanted to make musicals and Hot Blood is as close as he ever came, in this wide-screen and colorful (cinematography by Ray June) movie, though stars Jane Russell and Cornel Wilde don't sing or dance much, mostly replaced by stand-ins except for the sado-masochistic "whip dance" after the wedding.  There are also homosexual undertones, with the men in charge of the gypsy subculture depicted here by ethnographer Ray, the depiction of outsiders and their customs a constant feature of Ray's films:   the teenagers in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the Intuit in The Savage Innocents (1960), the rodeo riders in The Lusty Men (1952).  Even the filming of Hot Blood on soundstages representing an unnamed city attests to the outsider nature of the Romani, just as the insistent use of pink, orange and red emphasizes the passions of Russell and Wilde and the blood they use to bind their marriage.