Back to the Feature: In a Lonely Place (1950)

At the height of the studio system, it was hard for stars to break out of the character types assigned to them by their studios and the media. Janet Gaynor was always the wide-eyed ingenue, Clark Gable the rugged leading man, Cary Grant the stylish, charismatic leading man, Greta Garbo the tormented leading woman. Big enough actresses could diversify from time to time, such Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Crawford, but it took some work. It wasn’t until The Thin Man that Myrna Loy could finally unshackle herself from the femme fatale and evil oriental parts she’d been playing since the late 1920s, and of course the recently deceased Olivia de Havilland actually fought the studios for the opportunity to play a wider range of characters. However into the 1950s, male stars remained relatively stuck in the same kinds of roles, as much as some like Grant, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda managed to find new avenues within those constraints. But one big male star of that era seemed to be able to move freely between types of roles without sacrificing his career, and it’s one of the reasons Humphrey Bogart is so well-regarded as a screen legend.

To say Bogart didn’t have a type is not entirely true of course, his characters were often brooding melancholy individuals in noirish settings -but they managed to also be vastly different people. Perhaps because he was handsome but not “Gary Cooper handsome”, Hollywood felt more comfortable putting him in less conventional parts. The cynic with the heart of gold he immortalized in Casablanca may be one of them, but he was also entrusted to play more dubious characters: the ethically questionable Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon, the unconscionable Fred C. Dobbs of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the gruff, slovenly Charlie Allnut of The African Queen; in addition to the romantic figures of To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. Nobody else could have played the terrifying lead of Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film noir In a Lonely Place -Bogart was simply too perfect for it.

In a Lonely Place is one of those films that didn’t take off terribly well on initial release, predictably so given its’ subject matter, only to later be regarded as a classic. It’s part of an unofficial trilogy of films from 1950 that dared to posit “maybe show business isn’t so great, actually”, alongside the far better known Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve. In a Lonely Place is more intimate than either of those films, honing in on a single person within the system, and not a star but a screenwriter behind the scenes. Often the fact that he is a screenwriter and that he is connected to the world of Hollywood is incidental -incidental, but not insignificant. Because unlike those other two films which largely revolve around matters of ego and recognition, In a Lonely Place deals with the phantom of celebrity scandal, as Bogarts’ Dixon Steele is suspected of the murder of a young woman he took home after a night of drinking.

He didn’t do it and we know he didn’t. Ray makes sure we’re aware of that by showing us their entire interaction. Rather than seduce the young Martha Stewart (not the cook), he just has her reiterate the plot of the book he’s been assigned to adapt, so that he knows whether or not it’s good enough to attempt a loyal translation -it’s not. Then he sends her home, and she is subsequently murdered. The movie is not so much about the question of whether he did, but whether he could have. Because Dix Steele is a very sketchy dude.

We see this long before any signs of the murder right as the movie opens, with him about to get into a violent altercation with another man while in their cars at a stoplight. From there, his toxic behaviour and proclivity towards violence only escalates. Quite often he seems to provoke fights and react with extreme impulsiveness. But more than a mere temper, he appears to be genuinely disturbed. In the best scene of the movie, he discusses the murder in detail (how he would have done it, if you will) with his police friend Brub (Frank Lovejoy) and his wife Sylvia (Jeff Donnell), having them act out the scenario in an unsettling fashion, concluding by responding to Sylvia’s observation that he seems to know a lot about this subject with the chilling remark, “I’ve killed dozens of people… in pictures.” This line sticks out in my memory more than the one often quoted from this film (“I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me” -an aside deliberately without context). It speaks more truly to Dix’s character I feel than that vaguely romantic bit of manufactured melodrama. Dix is enthusiastic in his grisly talk of violence and murder, he’s excited by the choke-hold he’s having Brub put Sylvia in. It’s one of the most frightening scenes Bogart has ever performed and confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt his capacity for murder, if not his guilt of the one at hand.

A small degree of sympathy is afforded Dix, and he was and continues to be read with consideration by a number of critics. He’s a profoundly unhappy man, stuck in a career that yields little creative satisfaction, dictated by the constraints of studios and producers. You get the sense he is tortured by some internal conflicts too -this he has in common with every other Bogart character (it’s in those perennially sad eyes), and may be behind his violent personality as well. He’s far too aware of the monotony and the patterns of his industry, and is clearly seeking some form of solace. But as captivating as he is to watch and as empathetic as he is, he is not by any means a good person, and this should be evident to anyone who understands what he’s putting poor Gloria Grahame through.

As Dix’s ostensible love interest Laurel, Grahame illustrates exactly the feelings and fears of what it’s like to be in an abusive relationship. Though the romance starts out well enough, Laurel’s suspicions are soon raised and after a couple instances of him lashing out and one indisputable episode of attempted murder after a car crash, she begins to fear for her life. It reminds me a lot of another movie I’ve covered here, Hitchcock’s Suspicion -however Dix is much more openly toxic and outwardly threatening than the cool and sophisticated Cary Grant of that film. Laurel is constantly terrified that she’ll do something that might provoke Dix to hurt her, she develops an addiction to sleeping pills, accepts a marriage proposal out of fear, and plots a secret escape out of town. We see too that he is prone to irrational anger over inconveniences, that he acts out in recklessness when he learns she met with an inspector without telling him. It’s a harrowing depiction of domestic abuse, one made permissible perhaps out of the films’ desire to draw Laurel as paranoid. After all, Dix didn’t kill anyone, and the tragedy of the film is intended to be in the dissolution of their relationship. It’s not quite another New York New York situation, where the filmmakers are ignorant to how abusive the relationship here is -Ray, the screenwriters, and actors know it is toxic, just not to what extent. However time has been extremely kind to Laurel and not at all to Dix. With each of her responses somewhat common in stories of domestic violence, we now cannot view the film through that old lens of two broken people unable to make their relationship work. In a Lonely Place is not at all a romance, the downer ending becomes a relief that Laurel can now escape, and the only tragedy is that Dix isn’t going to jail for two attempted murders (ironically he would have in the original script, where he does indeed strangle Laurel to death).

Grahame is marvellous here. Perhaps her own (though non-abusive) marital strife with Ray during the filming played into her performance somewhat. She wasn’t able to find many lead roles after In a Lonely Place though, which is a shame, because she holds her own against Bogart so well. And though he is her antagonizer, the pair work together terrifically to wring the most tension out of every scene. Bogart, if its not entirely clear, is magnificent in one of his most complex and darkest characters he ever got to play, and it can only be the bleak subject matter that didn’t land him the Oscar that year.

But that might also be because of the films’ treatment of Hollywood, and the people behind the scenes of Hollywood, far less excusable than the ego battles of divas that fueled its’ two counterparts. This was a film that undermined the conventions of Hollywood pictures in both its commentary and form; and presented the people behind them as psychologically tormented individuals capable of violence and chaos -even towards those they implicitly love. Though this was before his biggest films like Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar, and King of Kings, Ray distinguishes himself as a particularly unique and subversive voice on the Hollywood scene, critiquing the glamour of that system as wholeheartedly as Sunset Boulevard, the cult of celebrity as potently as All About Eve, and reveling in the darkness just beneath the surface more than both.

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