In a Lonely Place (1950)

Film: In a Lonely Place (1950)
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Martha Stewart
Director: Nicholas Ray
Oscar History: No nominations, though it's generally considered a classic of the genre and was given a spot in the National Film Registry
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

1950 is perhaps the most famous year for Hollywood giving itself a taste of its own medicine.  The year's Best Picture race pitted All About Eve and Sunset Blvd against each other, two of the finest films ever made and both were about show business.  Eve featured the sniping world of Broadway against Blvd's cruel look at how Hollywood spits out its stars and throws them away once they can't make a profit.  Both are grand pictures, ones you can't really call yourself a film fan without seeing, but apparently there was a third such movie in 1950 that I never knew existed.  In a Lonely Place is a look at a lonely screenwriter who may or may not have murdered a young fan, but it's also a look at how fame, love, and success are tied together, sometimes in heartbreaking ways.  It's also an amazing motion picture that surely should have competed alongside Eve and Blvd that year at the Oscars.

(Spoilers Ahead-And I Mean It If You Haven't Seen This Movie, Rent or Stream, and Then Come Back) The movie is about Dixon Steele (Bogart...I'd say this is his best moniker but no movie star really had a stronger list of character names), a Hollywood screenwriter who has been down-on-his-luck for years.  He used to be quite successful, but fame & ego have gotten in the way of that, and now he's desperately in need of a hit.  We also understand at the beginning of the film that he's a violent man, someone with a short temper when he nearly pitches a fight with a man in a car after the woman in the car starts chatting with him (she's an actress who was in one of his pictures).  Steele gets the chance to adapt a novel that appears to be trash, and rather than reading it he has a hatcheck girl Mildred (Stewart) describe it for him, possibly as a way to seduce her, which she's having none of since she has a boyfriend.  The next day, the girl is found murdered, and Dixon Steele is the prime suspect.  He gets an alibi of sorts from his beautiful new neighbor Laurel Gray (Grahame), who confesses that she finds him attractive while also saying she didn't see Mildred leave with Dixon.  The film follows their romance, with the two falling in love but with Laurel worried that Dixon may have actually murdered Mildred, as he shows frequent violent tendencies and an unusual knowledge for murders, as well as a callousness about Mildred's death.

This focus on violence is what makes In a Lonely Place so riveting, petrifying, and groundbreaking.  We've focused on violence throughout this month of noir, but few films have shown it to the same degree as this picture (there will be an exception in a few days when we get to a different Gloria Grahame picture, but I won't give that away just yet).  Other than Casablanca, I don't think that Bogart has ever given a better performance that I've seen, and that's because he's allowed to really get into the violence of this character.  Dixon Steele may be a theoretical murderer, but he's an affirmed abuser.  He has a violent temper, beating people up at the drop of a hat, and is clearly obsessively controlling Laurel, driven insane by wanting to "make her his."  Whether or not he's the killer, he's still a dangerous man and one that can't possibly be good for his girlfriend, whom he berates into being his fiancé.

This all comes to a head in the movie's famous ending (which, thankfully I didn't have spoiled for me, and hopefully you've quit reading this review if you are ever going to see this movie so you won't have it spoiled for you).  Laurel decides, after Dixon nearly blinds his film agent in rage, that she's going to leave Dixon but is afraid of his reaction so she secretly packs to flee on a flight to New York.  Dixon catches her, though, and violently starts attacking her, with her screaming that she'll do anything he wants.  At this point, it almost seems like both of them aren't sure if he killed Mildred, and then a phone call comes through, stopping Dixon from potentially murdering Laurel.  We find out that Mildred's boyfriend was the killer, and that Dixon is innocent (this is the first time we've gotten proper confirmation of this-the film does nothing to assuage audience members that Dixon isn't the murderer until that point, and certainly Laurel has no way of knowing).  The movie ends on a sour note, as Laurel sees the kind of man that Dixon is, and he walks out of her life forever, his potential guilt and tangible rage already having poisoned the relationship.  It's a mesmerizing, shocking ending to a really brilliant film.  Grahame & Bogart are spectacular-both are two of the greatest actors of this era, but there's a chemistry on display here that's impossible to deny, even as it becomes toxic.  It says something that even in one of the strongest Best Actress fields ever assembled, I'd still have found room for Grahame.  The direction is assured (from Nicholas Ray, who directed They Live By Night which we saw earlier this month, as well as his most known masterpiece Rebel Without a Cause), and frequently quite inventive.  If the movie is known for anything other than the ending, it's known for the crazy fast car chase where Dixon nearly kills Laurel after discovering she spoke with the police (not of her own volition), and it's daringly directed & genuinely scary.  The script is also a stunner, with lines like "there's no sacrifice too great for a chance at immortality" and "I lived a few weeks while you loved me"...I mean, how can you not obsess over such a movie?  In a Lonely Place is a classic that has been lower case for far too long-this movie is too good to be discovered on a late night showing on TCM.


Previous Films in the Series: They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep