In 1950, Humphrey Bogart was one of the top-grossing film stars in
the country and had just established his own Santana Productions film company
to create interesting work outside the rigid Hollywood studio system (though
still relying on studios for distribution) after being known the industry as a
somewhat willful star to work with. At the same time, director Nicholas Ray had
made three moderately successful films (one of them via Santana Productions)
and his star was rising; his biggest success, Rebel Without A Cause,
still lay years ahead of him. Ray was in a tempestuous marriage with actress
Gloria Grahame, also an up-and-comer with several supporting roles to her
credit, but her only starring role to date had come a couple years earlier in
the film noir Crossfire. These three strong artistic personalities found
themselves together to create the best film Santana Productions made - and also
one of the best works any of the three produced in their careers - the noir-ish
drama In A Lonely Place, adapted from the Dorothy B. Hughes novel of the
same name.
Bogart stars in one of his all-time
best performances as Dixon Steele, a screenwriter who hasn’t had a hit since
“before the War,” whose violent temper we see erupt three separate times in
only the first six minutes of the film, and whose penchant for drinking doesn’t
help matters. Gloria Grahame plays Laurel Gray, a neighbor in the same
apartment complex who’s seen Steele (usually called “Dix” in the film) around
and when he’s accused of murdering a young woman who left his apartment after
going there to help him work on a script - a story the police hardly believe -
she provides his alibi, though official suspicion is still aimed squarely at
him. As Laurel and Dix get to know each other, romance blossoms and his
writer’s block begins to lift, but as Laurel learns more about his explosive
temperament, she (and the audience) begins to wonder if she did the right thing
in helping him - and if perhaps her own life might be in danger. Nicholas Ray,
who advocated for his wife to play the role after both Lauren Bacall and Ginger
Rogers proved unavailable, has an unerring eye and ear for the tone of the
film, which starts out like a whodunit and then quickly loses interest in the
murder mystery as the principles fall for each other and the film instead
drifts into the turbulent waters of their relationship (though the murder
always lurks in the background). There’s never been a more threatening ‘love
scene’ than when Dix is making breakfast for the increasingly suspicious
Laurel, with the dialogue standard romantic fare but the body language and the
absolutely perfect tone of Grahame’s delivery reading as pure terror.
In fact, it’s hardly a noir at all, even though it’s tagged as
such on most film sites, and even though a murder sets things in motion.
Nowhere are the shadowy, high-contrast cityscapes of noir, the standard femme
fatale (instead we may have noir’s first homme fatale), the greed and cynicism
driving most of the great noirs - instead we have an examination of a delicate,
fragile relationship, one that’s constantly under threat of being blown apart
by Dix’s behavior. This examination of the relationship of outsiders, and
especially of masculine stereotypes, is common to Ray’s films - think of James
Dean in Rebel, fighting against the school gang leader for honor and
disappointed in his father’s inability to stand up to his mother, think of
James Mason in Bigger Than Life, undermining the role of paternal
protector to his family as his addiction spirals out of control, think of Johnny
Guitar and its inversion of gender roles wherein women play the respective
heads of a town in roles usually doled out to male actors and Sterling Hayden’s
titular character is just an ex-flame and hired gun to Joan Crawford. And right
in this line we have In A Lonely Place and Dix Steele, supposedly a
successful artist in Hollywood, but also a heavy drinker, and a brawler when
provoked - and he gets provoked at the drop of a hat. His masculine ego simply
can’t take it when he feels attacked, rightly or wrongly, and as the film
progresses and he gets closer to Laurel Gray, he gets more paranoid and
jealous, rather than more intimate and trusting. It’s an unsettling examination
of toxic masculinity decades before that phrase was even coined.
As it was in the script, so it was in life. Actress and writer
Louise Brooks wrote in Sight & Sound magazine about Bogart’s
performance that “In a Lonely Place gave him a role that he could play
with complexity because the character's pride in his art, his selfishness, his
drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence,
were shared equally by the real Bogart.” And the relationship of Dix and Laurel
gets closer and closer in the first half of the film, then slowly falls apart
for the second half, mirroring that of Ray (who was also a heavy drinker) and
Grahame, who separated during the filming and who divorced two years later.
Ray, after filming the original script’s ending, decided it didn’t ring true
and created an improvised new ending with Grahame, Bogart, and co-star Art
Smith. The ending, which I won’t spoil for you, replaced the noir-styled downer
finale of the novel with a more devastating and unexpected one that gives the film
its lasting sting and resonance.
Time hasn’t been as kind to Ray’s
work as when he was revered by French critics of the 50s and 60s, but In A
Lonely Place has endured, his only film to place on the most recent once-a-decade
international critics’ poll in Sight and Sound magazine. He’s got a lot
of great work but this film, with its personal resonance for the three key
artists involved in its making, cuts the deepest of any of his films.
-
Patrick Brown
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