NFR Project: “In a Lonely Place”
Dir: Nicholas Ray
Scr: Andrew P. Solt, Edmund H. North
Pho: Burnett Guffey
Ed: Viola Lawrence
Premiere: August 1950
94 min.
“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived for a few weeks while she loved me.”
The French have a phrase for it: amour fou, crazy love, love that makes no sense and leads nowhere. Ostensibly a film noir, this movie is a treatise on dysfunction and obsession, the portrait of a potential murderer, an epic emotional tale for an unlikely heroine.
The protagonist is nominally screenwriter Dixon Steele, played by Humphrey Bogart near the end of his era of plausibility as a romantic lead. Dix is a down and out storyteller who hasn’t written a successful movie since before the war. He is caustic, cynical, temperamental, morbid. We are told he broke a woman’s nose. In short, he is a jerk.
He’s supposed to read a book for adaptation as a screenplay. He gives it to the hat-check girl to read. She reads it, and purports to tell him the story. He suggests they go to his place. They do, she does. Nothing unseemly occurs. The girl leaves, headed around the corner to a cab stand.
The next morning, it is revealed that the girl was murdered. Dix is a suspect until a neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), testifies to the cops that she saw her leave his place alive, and that Dix was in after that. Dix thanks her, and the two fall madly and immediately in love. Suddenly, they are blissfully together, and Dix is writing better than he has in years.
But Dix feels he is being watched. He lashes out as random people, to the degree of nearly smashing a man’s head in with a rock. His erratic behavior begins to disturb Lauren. She is terrified, and reluctantly accepts his proposal to marry her – right away. She plans on leaving him, but he catches her on her way out and strangles her. “I can’t live with a maniac!” she screetches.
Suddenly, the phone rings. It is the police; the real murderer has confessed. Dix is off the hook. But as Laurel says, “It doesn’t matter now.” It’s over. Dix slinks away, down her stairs, out through the entrance of their apartment building. Laurel has narrowly avoided death at the hands of her lover.
Bogart plays a true villain. Supposedly this kind of behavior was acceptable when you were a hard-drinking cynical screenwriter after the war. Dix has a friendly relationship with the policeman in charge of the case, Sgt. Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), who refers to him as “major.” Obviously, Dix was in the fighting. Still, his nasty temper and suspicious mind poison the miraculous-seeming romance that ignites him and Lauren.
It’s only Ray’s fourth film, but he already infuses the story with a weary fatalism that would pervade his later On Dangerous Ground¸Johnny Guitar, and Rebel Without a Cause. Ray gives his actors room to breathe here. We develop our understanding of them just as they do of each other.
Ray takes the full measure of Bogart’s character, and gently moves him from hero to heel as the picture progresses. Gloria Grahame is at her most beautiful and empathetic here (Ray obviously loved her, though their marriage was dissolving at the time), and she gets to play at three-dimensional character -- a thoughtful young aspiring actress who falls for the good she sees in a needy and dangerous man. Dix smothers Laurel with attention while he displays his distrust of her. It’s a no-win situation.
The original script called for Laurel to be killed. Ray changed it, not wanting to go for the obvious ending. In this way, In a Lonely Place persevered as a story of two people fated to find each other for only a short time. In an instant, loves shatters in front of our eyes.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Sunset Boulevard.
