Doctor Ray and the Devils (2012) on Netflix
NR20121h 36mBiographyComedyDrama
In 1964, American director Nicholas Ray arrives in Yugoslavia to restart a stalled career. His host, Ratko Dražević, runs a state film company and dreams of a Hollywood behind the Iron Curtain.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.9/10162 votes
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Plot summary
Nicholas Ray, the American director of Rebel Without a Cause, comes to Yugoslavia in 1964 after two flops have stalled his career. His name still carries weight, and he is offered Yugoslav state funds for a costumed horror drama drawn from Dylan Thomas's screenplay The Doctor and the Devils. His host is Ratko Dražević, who runs the state film company and once worked for Yugoslav state security. Dražević wants to build a Hollywood behind the Iron Curtain and believes Ray fits that plan. Ray settles in Belgrade and moves among the city's cultural elite, while his family and an American producer chase him, even hiring a private detective.
Cast
- Pavle Pekicas Zlatan
- Gordon Murrayas Orson Welles
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Doctor Ray and the Devils (2012)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Yugoslavia's state studio Avala Film, run by former UDBA operative Ratko Dražević, gave American director Nicholas Ray a US$1.7 million budget to adapt Dylan Thomas's The Doctor and the Devils, for which Maximilian Schell, Susannah York and Geraldine Chaplin had been cast.
- The project collapsed when Avala Film's co-production La Fabuleuse aventure de Marco Polo ran severely over budget; Avala then failed to find a foreign partner for The Doctor and the Devils, scrapped it, and Ray left Yugoslavia.
- Willem Dafoe was originally cast to play Nicholas Ray, but dropped out because financing problems repeatedly pushed back the start date and he had other movies lined up.
- The part of Ray's wife Betty Utey passed through three actresses: Anica Dobra dropped out after taking other roles while waiting, Nataša Janjić's theater commitments forced another change, and Ana Sofrenović finally played her.
- Because the filmmakers could not get permission from their families, some real figures were hidden behind aliases: the character Aleksa is Serbian director Saša Petrović, Zlatan is Serbian writer Slobodan Selenić, and Ivica is Croatian producer Branko Lustig.
- The film-within-the-film footage of the movie Ray is working on was taken from Tucaković's own 1990 horror short, Bernisa, jača od smrti.
- An early plan to cast Rade Šerbedžija as the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, whom Šerbedžija knew well, had to be scrapped.
