In a Lonely Place (1950)
This was written for MovieZeal’s noir month - which you should most certainly be checking out.
Humphrey Bogart was an ideal movie star, one of the movie stars, and that partially sprung from his ability to marry (and sentimentalize) what most men hope to be with what most men fear themselves to be; seemingly without effort. Bogart is one of American cinema’s lasting ideas of masculinity, but he also had a sharp, wounded verbal quality, and vulnerability, that could appeal to the sort of outsiders that noirs probably spoke (and continue to speak) most clearly to. Noir is the opposite of romantic comedy, we go to those to be comforted, to have our giddiest, silliest dreams confirmed; noirs play to our suspicions that life is rigged, and that the sexes are driven by irreconcilable desires (that men are obsessed with money as route to sex, and women are obsessed with sex as route to money). Noirs provide comfort too, it’s just of a different sort; they’re that friend with whom you can share your self-indulgent feelings of loneliness and alienation. Many actors, including the continually underrated Robert Ryan, embodied the noir in ways that few future actors will most likely ever match, but Bogart is our spokesman, a deserved legend. In some films he’s reveling in the highs of quick-witted self-absorption (The Maltese Falcon), and in others he explores what that mercenary shell might mask, such as In a Lonely Place.
Bogart toyed with his image more than is usually acknowledged (The Caine Mutiny, The Treasure of Sierre Madre) but In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray, captures Bogie at his squishiest – we see an ache behind the barbed, contemptuous quips. Bogart worked with Nicholas Ray two years prior in Knock on Any Door (unseen by me) and he produced In a Lonely Place through his Santana Productions. The picture is based on a novel by Dorothy Hughes, but the script by Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt reportedly deviated from it, and Ray strayed even further while filming – this picture is undeniably Ray and Bogart’s, reflecting their specific sense of romantic defeat. (Ray’s marriage to lead actress Gloria Grahame was also dissolving at the time, and that, rather icky, situation is also thought to have informed the picture. How could it not?)
Ray ostensibly worked in the noir several times, including They Live by Night, the overlooked On Dangerous Ground, and In a Lonely Place, and all of these pictures have a surprising fragility – it’s little wonder that Ray would go on to make one of the most iconic of all misunderstood youth pictures. Ray grasped the helplessness that drives these pictures on a chemical level - of things being hopelessly beyond our control. Ray doesn’t take the noir picture as a chic fashion statement; the plots are beside the point, and the “cool” has been discarded. Ray dwells on the outlook of the characters, who find it impossible to fathom why people respond to them so; and acknowledges the prevailing doom of the noir to stem from self-fulfilling prophecy (this isn’t new, but few manage it so convincingly and internally). There’s an authentic throwing-your-hands-in-the-air quality to Ray’s work. Many, more predictable, filmmakers would play the hero against society and watch one score points off the other, but Ray has a greater, more pained, empathy.
In a Lonely Place disappoints and soars at once. Bogart is Dixon Steele, an off-again, possibly on-again, screenwriter who falls for his neighbor, Laurel (Grahame) after she initially frees him from charges of murdering a young woman, who was last seen leaving his house the night before. Eyeing Steele – cold, calm, contemptuous - his name perfect movie short-hand - as she answers the policemen’s questions, Laurel tells the policeman she likes Dixon’s face. Dixon shrugs it off as he would anything else, but, underneath that pained, lined visage, he’s a goner.
The first act is just as you hope. Bogart’s performance sparks with the aloof, electric sexuality of Grahame; and the opening half-hour primes us for a classic obsessive-romantic-thriller, perhaps a Laura or a Vertigo of the Humphrey Bogart canon. But In a Lonely Place, ultimately, goes too far into Steele’s outlook, and embraces his fantasy of the perfect woman at the expense of dramatic perspective. Bogart and Grahame are initially terse and wonderful together, but Ray, in a misguided ellipsis, cuts directly to Dixon and Laurel in domestic reverie only a few moments after their meeting, with her typing Dixon’s adaptation and making his breakfast, while he works furiously on the next pages, inspired by the love of a woman who embodies everything he’s longed for. Grahame, who suggests Lana Turner with an extra bit of kink, if perhaps David Lynch had gotten hold of her, (her heat nearly stopped Crossfire) is an ideal actress to explore the Madonna-whore fantasy, but Ray flips her from potential whore to Madonna in the instant of a dissolve; dissolving much of the tension with it.
We understand what Ray is doing, theoretically, but we don’t feel it; imagine if Hitchcock cut from James Stewart encountering the reincarnated Kim Novak to them cuddling (with Novak now blonde, the transformation omitted) on the couch. In a Lonely Place is that jarring, and we want more fireworks; it’s perverse in an unintentional, counter-intuitive way to present Bogart and Grahame so earnestly. This trade-off is a constant in Nicholas Ray’s pictures – his put upon filter opens the thriller to new potential, but it also mucks up the primal gears of the thriller – Ray’s self-pity trumps his instincts as a dramatic movie-maker. Ray allows the subtext traditional to film noir pictures to swallow the text (Tim Burton did the same thing to the monster movie in Edward Scissorhands). In a Lonely Place, to really drive its effect home, should have emphasized the pull between Dixon’s fantasy and Laurel’s reality, and should have hinted somewhat as to how these miscommunications and tugs and conflicts inform their bedroom politics. There’s a moment in La Bête Humaine that underlines what In a Lonely Place desperately needs: Simone Simon, before kissing Jean Gabin, bites briefly at his face. I wanted Grahame to bite Bogart, or to grab him, or to otherwise hint at the wannabe bad girl that’s drawn to this mixed-up boy who dresses and acts as a tough guy. In a Lonely Place is too self-consciously interested in moving you, and it doesn’t understand that the thriller mechanics, which are shallow in most pictures, would be enriched by Ray and Bogart’s obsessions; and that Ray and Bogart’s obsessions would inherit, in the thriller mechanics, a needed slight of hand - giving the picture subtlety. In a Lonely Place is too often only about one thing, “I’m sad”. That would be enough if it worked on a thriller level too, but it pointedly doesn’t.
There are moments where Ray achieves an ideal balance – a personal thriller. Early on, Dixon drinks and listens to Meredith’s (Martha Stewart) touchingly awed summary of the book he is to adapt next. Meredith is the girl who is to die the next morning, and Ray instills the scene with a slow-dawning dread. When Meredith, impersonating a character from the book, screams within earshot of Laurel next door, we know it’s being inserted for some reason, a trap being set. But the moment is also revealing of Steele, the bitter, broken softie; and of the sort of wide-eyed, poignant naiveté that Hollywood routinely crushes. Meredith is guileless, and that temporarily warms Steele, and steers him away from his original, more manipulative intentions. Steele’s home is also telling: a small, L.A. bachelor pad with an atmospheric courtyard that evokes clichéd notions of the struggling writer; as well as of someone walled off, away from everyone else. (The title is meant to be taken, as director Curtis Hanson notes on the DVD, to mean several things.)
There are two other moments, both images, in which the dialogue is thankfully barred from intruding. The first is understandably the most famous image from the film, the most truthful, and one of the most succinct and effective images in all of noir: of Dixon and Laurel, their irritation at Dixon’s continued interrogation reaching a quiet fever, sitting next to one another in a club watching a singer (Hadda Brooks) perform. Bogart’s eyes have never looked fuller, more haunted, or more unavoidably, purely alone; and Grahame embodies that woman sitting next to you, who has, whether she knows it yet or not, moved on. This is an intimate portrait of a couple as two single people. The second image is the final one, where Steele, having finally understood that he’s lost Laurel, walks out of that now-barren courtyard, his next step in the air. Dixon will probably pick up another drink, another assignment, another woman, another fight, all to go round and round again, with no relief until the final relief. That prospect shakes you – it earns the picture’s title.
