In a Lonely Place (1950) - film review

Dixon Steele is a jaded Hollywood screenwriter who hasn’t had a success for years.  At a nightclub, his agent Mel Lippman tries to persuade him to adapt a popular romantic novel for a film.  Steele is non-committal but he accepts the offer of the club’s hatcheck girl, Mildred Atkinson, to outline the plot of the novel at his apartment.  Shortly after leaving Steele’s home, Mildred is found dead, having been thrown out of a speeding motorcar.   Steele is the obvious suspect but his neighbour, Laurel Gray, testifies in his favour.   Laurel and Steele fall in love and the screenwriter’s creativity has a sudden new lease of life.  But while Steele toils on his screenplay, Laurel becomes anxious over his frequent violent outbursts and begins to suspect that he may indeed be a killer...

With its slick production values, beguiling performances and ingenious multi-layered screenplay, In a Lonely Place is surely one of the smoothest and most compelling examples of classic film noir – and also one of the most disturbing.  Adapted from a well-known thriller novel by Dorothy B. Hughes (but with some significant changes), the film employs the familiar film noir motifs to create an atmospheric portrayal of nihilistic despair and paranoia from which there is no escape.

The film offers what many consider to be Humphrey Bogart’s finest screen performance, and possibly his most revealing.  It is certainly one of Bogart’s bleakest and most vivid roles, with the actor ruthlessly undercutting his familiar sympathetic underdog persona with something much, much darker.  This was Bogart’s second of several successful collaborations with director Nicholas Ray – they had previously worked together on Knock on Any Door (1949).

Nicholas Ray was one of the few true great auteur filmmakers working in Hollywood in the 1940s and he uses this film to vent his frustration with the standardised moviemaking process at the time.  The conflict between creativity and artistic integrity on the one hand, and the desire to make big bucks on the other, is something that has always preoccupied many directors and screenwriters working in Hollywood, and this film still strikes a chord – perhaps it is even more relevant today, as moviemaking is increasingly driven by the shallow cult of celebrity and get-rich-quick executives.

Ths film’s female lead was played by Gloria Grahame, Nicholas Ray’s then wife.  At the time he made this film, Ray was undergoing a painful separation with Grahame.  It has been suggested that the crumbling on-screen love affair between Bogart and Grahame mirrored Ray’s own experiences – it would certainly explain the searing emotional impact of the film’s devastating last few scenes.  After divorcing Ray, Grahame went on to marry his son by an earlier marriage, provoking one of Hollywood’s biggest scandals.

In a Lonely Place is a classic film noir portrayal of a man driven to despair and destruction by a tragic combination of circumstances.   In contrast to many film noirs, the enemy driving this tragic decline is not some flesh and blood villain but something far deadlier – the victims’ own psychological flaws.  Steele’s fear of rejection and Laurel’s fear of another disapppointment in love are the seeds from which a maelstrom of paranoia and fury grow.  The tragedy lies in the fact that there is no substance to their anxieties.  Fear is enough to destroy them both.  There is no greater enemy than fear, that ill-defined shadow of something half-glimpsed in the dark corners of the mind, with an unmistakable odour of death about it.

This is also a film that has a haunting existential dimension, a keenly felt portrait of the frustrated artist who, through his craving for truth and originality, becomes an outsider and a therefore threat to those who stick with the system he despises.  Steele’s antagonistic behaviour and cynicism is fuelled by the environment in which he works, which favours money-making mediocrity over creativity and originality.  The lonely place is where all true artists end up sooner or later.

© James Travers 2008

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?