In a Lonely Place
Encyclopedia
In a Lonely Place is a film noir
directed by Nicholas Ray
, and starring Humphrey Bogart
and Gloria Grahame
, produced for Bogart's Santana Productions. The script was adapted by Edmund North from the 1947 novel In a Lonely Place
by Dorothy B. Hughes
.
Bogart stars in the film as Dixon Steele, a cynical screenwriter suspected of murder. Grahame co-stars as Laurel Gray, a neighbor who falls under his spell. Beyond its surface plot of confused identity and tormented lust, the film is a mordant comment on Hollywood mores
and the pitfalls of celebrity and near-celebrity, in much the same vein as two other more widely publicized American films released that same year, Billy Wilder
's Sunset Boulevard and Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve
.
Although not as well known as his other work, Bogart's performance in this film is considered by many critics to be among his finest and the film's reputation itself has grown over time along with Ray's.
The film is now considered a classic film noir, as evidenced by its inclusion on the Time magazine "All-Time 100 List" as well as Slant Magazine's 100 Essential Films. In 2007, In a Lonely Place was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
by the Library of Congress
as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
), is engrossed in reading it and asks if she can finish, since she only has a few pages left. Dix has a second violent outburst when a young director bad-mouths Dix's friend Charlie (Robert Warwick), a washed-up actor.
Dix claims to be too tired to read the novel, so he asks Mildred to go home with him, ostensibly to explain the plot. As they enter the courtyard of his apartment, they pass a new tenant, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame
). As soon as Mildred is convinced that Dix's motives are honorable, she describes the story and confirms what he had suspected—the book is trash. He gives her cab fare to get home.
The next morning, he is awakened by an old army buddy, now a police detective, Brub Nicholai (Frank Lovejoy
), who takes him downtown to be questioned by Captain Lochner (Carl Benton Reid
). Mildred was murdered during the night and Dix is a suspect. Laurel is brought to the police station and confirms seeing the girl leave Dix's apartment alone, but Lochner is still deeply suspicious. Although Dix shows no overt sympathy for the dead victim, he anonymously sends her a dozen white roses.
When he gets home, Dix checks up on Laurel. He finds she is an aspiring actress with only a few low-budget films to her credit. They begin to fall in love; this invigorates Dix into going back to work with a vengeance, much to his agent's delight.
However, Dix behaves strangely. He says things that make his agent and Brub's wife Sylvia (Jeff Donnell
) wonder if he did kill the girl. In addition, Lochner sows seeds of doubt in Laurel's mind, pointing out Dix's lengthy record of violent behavior. Dix becomes furiously irrational when he learns of it. He drives at high speed, with Laurel a terrified passenger, until they sideswipe another car. Nobody is hurt; but, when the other driver accosts him, Dix beats him unconscious and is about to strike him with a large rock when Laurel stops him.
Laurel gets to the point where she cannot sleep without taking pills. Her distrust and fear of Dix are becoming too much for her. When he asks her to marry him, she accepts but only because she is too scared of what he might do if she refused. She makes a plane reservation and tells Mel she is leaving because she cannot take it anymore. Dix finds out and almost strangles her during a violent confrontation before he regains control.
Just then, the phone rings. It is Brub with good news: Mildred's boyfriend (named Henry Kesler, the same as the film's associate producer) has confessed to her murder. Tragically, it is too late to salvage Dix and Laurel's relationship.
wrote in her essay "Humphrey and Bogey" that she felt it was the role of Dixon Steele in this movie that came closest to the real Bogart she knew. "Before inertia set in, he played one fascinatingly complex character, craftily directed by Nicholas Ray
, in a film whose title perfectly defined Humphrey's own isolation among people. In a Lonely Place gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the film character's, the screenwriter's, pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart."
The original ending had Dix strangling Laurel to death in the heat of their argument. Sgt. Nicolai comes to tell Dix that he has been cleared of Mildred's murder but arrests him for Laurel's. Dix tells Brub that he is finally finished with his screenplay, and the final shot was to be of a page in the typewriter which has the significant lines Dix said aloud to Laurel in the car (which he admitted to not knowing where to put) "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me." This scene was filmed halfway through the shooting schedule, but Ray hated the ending he had helped write. Ray later said, "I just couldn't believe the ending that Bundy (screenwriter Andrew Solt) and I had written. I shot it because it was my obligation to do it. Then I kicked everybody off stage except Bogart, Art Smith and Gloria. And we improvised the ending as it is now. In the original ending we had ribbons so it was all tied up into a very neat package, with Frank Lovejoy
coming in and arresting him as he was writing the last lines, having killed Gloria. Huh! And I thought, shit, I can't do it, I just can't do it! Romances don't have to end that way. Marriages don't have to end that way, they don't have to end in violence. Let the audience make up its own mind what's going to happen to Bogie when he goes outside the apartment."
Lauren Bacall
and Ginger Rogers
were considered for the role of Laurel Gray. Bacall was a natural choice given her off-screen marriage to Bogart and their box-office appeal, but Warner Bros. refused to loan her out, which is today thought to be due to their fury that Bogart had set up his own production company (they were afraid that independent companies would jeopardize the future of major studios). Rogers was the producers' first choice but director Nicholas Ray
believed that his wife Gloria Grahame
was right for the part. Even though their marriage was troubled, he insisted that she be cast. Her performance today is unanimously considered to be among her finest.
Grahame and Ray's marriage was starting to come apart during filming. Grahame was forced to sign a contract stipulating that "my husband [Ray] shall be entitled to direct, control, advise, instruct and even command my actions during the hours from 9 AM to 6 PM, every day except Sunday...I acknowledge that in every conceivable situations his will and judgment shall be considered superior to mine and shall prevail." Grahame was also forbidden to "nag, cajole, tease or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him." The two did separate during filming. Afraid that one of them would be replaced, Ray took to sleeping in a dressing room, lying and saying that he needed to work on the script. Grahame played along with the charade and nobody knew that they had separated. Though there was a brief reconciliation, the couple divorced in 1952, when Ray found Grahame in bed with his thirteen year old son.
The film was one of a number of Nicholas Ray films to be scored by avant garde classical composer George Antheil
(1900-1959).
's debut They Live by Night
(1948), it was advertised as a straight thriller while the film is not as simply fit into one genre as the marketing shows. Over the passing years the film gathered a cult following
(Ray's films had a brief revival in the 70s and Bogart's anti-hero stance became re-evaluated in the 1960s, one possible explanation), and the French during the 1950s praised Ray's unique film making. When the film was released on DVD in 2003, it was hailed as a masterpiece of noir. Even Time Magazine, which gave the film a negative review upon its initial release, called it one of the 100 best films of all time in their 2005 list.
Noir expert Eddie Muller
called this title his favorite noir and one which "will stand the test of time."
The staff at Variety
magazine gave the film a good review and wrote, "In a Lonely Place Humphrey Bogart has a sympathetic role though cast as one always ready to mix it with his dukes. He favors the underdog; in one instance he virtually has a veteran, brandy-soaking character actor (out of work) on his very limited payroll...Director Nicholas Ray maintains nice suspense. Bogart is excellent. Gloria Grahame, as his romance, also rates kudos."
Bosley Crowther
lauded the film, especially Bogart's performance and the screenplay, writing, "Everybody should be happy this morning. Humphrey Bogart is in top form in his latest independently made production, In a Lonely Place, and the picture itself is a superior cut of melodrama. Playing a violent, quick-tempered Hollywood movie writer suspected of murder, Mr. Bogart looms large on the screen of the Paramount Theatre and he moves flawlessly through a script which is almost as flinty as the actor himself. Andrew Solt, who fashioned the screen play from a story by Dorothy B. Hughes and an adaptation by Edmund H. North, has had the good sense to resolve the story logically. Thus Dixon Steele remains as much of an enigma, an explosive, contradictory force at loose ends when the film ends as when it starts."
Critic Ed Gonzalez wrote, "Not unlike Albert Camus
' The Stranger
, Nicholas Ray's remarkable In a Lonely Place represents the purest of existentialist
primers...Laurel and Dixon may love each other but it's evident that they're both entirely too victimized by their own selves to sustain this kind of happiness. In the end, their love resembles a rehearsal for the next and hopefully less complicated romance. This is the existential endgame of one of Ray's smartest and most devastating masterpieces."
Curtis Hanson
is featured on the retrospective documentary of the DVD release, and has stated his admiration for the film, notably Ray's direction, the dark depiction of Hollywood and Bogart's performance. This was one of the films which he showed to actors Russell Crowe
and Guy Pearce
in preparation for filming L.A. Confidential
. He said, "I wanted them to see the reality of that period and to see that emotion. This movie, and I'm not saying it's the greatest movie ever made, but it represents many things that I think are worth aspiring to, such as having character and emotion be the driving force, rather than the plot....When I first saw In a Lonely Place as a teenager, it frightened me and yet attracted me with an almost hypnotic power. Later, I came to understand why. Occasionally, very rarely, a movie feels so heartfelt, so emotional, so revealing that it seems as though both the actor and the director are standing naked before the audience. When that kind of marriage happens between actor and director, it's breathtaking."
In 2009, film critic Roger Ebert
added In a Lonely Place to his "great movies" list.
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes
reported that 100% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on twenty-seven reviews.
' 1947 novel of the same title. Some controversy exists between fans of the film and fans of the novel (who view the film as a watered down adaptation), as Edmund H. North's script takes some elements of the novel, but is ultimately an entirely different story.
The strongest difference between the two works lies in the primary character: the film's Dixon Steele is a screenwriter
with an offbeat lifestyle, and a decent person with fatally poor impulse control and prone to wild overreaction when enraged. The novel's Steele is a limited third-person view from Dix's perspective, reminiscent of the first-person in noir, à la The Killer Inside Me
. Steele is a charlatan who pretends to be a novelist while sponging money from his overbearing uncle. When this well dries up, he murders a wealthy young man and assumes his identity, in a manner similar to Patricia Highsmith
's Tom Ripley. (It should be noted that Hughes' novel predates Highsmith's and may have influenced it.) The film follows the question of whether Dix finally went too far in his anger and committed the murder under investigation to a tragic end: even though he's proven innocent, his rage at the cloud of suspicion has driven the woman he loves away for good. No question of Dix's innocence exists in the novel, which follows the investigation of a murder Dix plainly committed and his self-insertion into that investigation for his own ends.
Curtis Hanson
, in the DVD featurette 'In A Lonely Place Revisited', further analyses the parallels and differences between the novel and the film. He notes that there is a parallel in the film between Dix's adaptation of a novel for film with the adaptation of In a Lonely Place for film, he also notes a key difference between Dix in the film and Dix in the novel is their respective treatment of women. In the novel Dix pursues women, the first chapter details his pursuit of a woman. In the film, Dix is pursued by women.
Hughes' novel, out of print for decades, was re-released by The Feminist Press at CUNY in 2003, which edition is still in print as of April 2007. Penguin Books
also published a paperback edition in the UK in 2010 as part of their Modern Classics imprint. The novel has been hailed lately as a stellar example of mid-twentieth hardboiled/noir fiction, both as a rare example of women's writing in that genre and for its quality and contributions to that genre.
Dixon "How can anybody like a face like this, look at it."
[Attempts to kiss Laurel who moves away]
Laurel "I said I liked it, I didn't say I wanted to kiss it."
Dixon "We'll have dinner together tonight."
Laurel "We'll have dinner tonight but not together."
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
directed by Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
, and starring Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was an American actor. He is widely regarded as a cultural icon.The American Film Institute ranked Bogart as the greatest male star in the history of American cinema....
and Gloria Grahame
Gloria Grahame
Gloria Grahame was an American Academy Award–winning actress.Grahame began her acting career in theatre, and in 1944 she made her first film for MGM. Despite a featured role in It's a Wonderful Life , MGM did not believe she had the potential for major success, and sold her contract to RKO Studios...
, produced for Bogart's Santana Productions. The script was adapted by Edmund North from the 1947 novel In a Lonely Place
In a Lonely Place (novel)
In a Lonely Place is a 1947 novel by mystery writer Dorothy B. Hughes. It was made into the classic film noir under the same title starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in 1950.-Synopsis:...
by Dorothy B. Hughes
Dorothy B. Hughes
Dorothy B. Hughes was an American crime writer and literary critic. Hughes wrote fourteen crime and detective novels, primarily in the hardboiled and noir styles, and is best known for the novels In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse .Born Dorothy Belle Flanagan in Kansas City, Missouri, she...
.
Bogart stars in the film as Dixon Steele, a cynical screenwriter suspected of murder. Grahame co-stars as Laurel Gray, a neighbor who falls under his spell. Beyond its surface plot of confused identity and tormented lust, the film is a mordant comment on Hollywood mores
Mores
Mores, in sociology, are any given society's particular norms, virtues, or values. The word mores is a plurale tantum term borrowed from Latin, which has been used in the English language since the 1890s....
and the pitfalls of celebrity and near-celebrity, in much the same vein as two other more widely publicized American films released that same year, Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder was an Austro-Hungarian born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age...
's Sunset Boulevard and Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve
All About Eve
All About Eve is a 1950 American drama film written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on the 1946 short story "The Wisdom of Eve", by Mary Orr.The film stars Bette Davis as Margo Channing, a highly regarded but aging Broadway star...
.
Although not as well known as his other work, Bogart's performance in this film is considered by many critics to be among his finest and the film's reputation itself has grown over time along with Ray's.
The film is now considered a classic film noir, as evidenced by its inclusion on the Time magazine "All-Time 100 List" as well as Slant Magazine's 100 Essential Films. In 2007, In a Lonely Place was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...
by the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Plot
Dixon "Dix" Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who has not had a hit "since before the war." While driving to meet his agent, Mel Lippman (Art Smith), at a nightclub, Dix's explosive temper is revealed at a stop light along the way. At the nightclub, Mel cajoles him to adapt a book for a movie. The hat-check girl, Mildred Atkinson (Martha StewartMartha Stewart (actor)
Martha Stewart is an American actress.-Filmography:-Film:*Surf Party *Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick *Convicted *In a Lonely Place *Are You with It? *Daisy Kenyon...
), is engrossed in reading it and asks if she can finish, since she only has a few pages left. Dix has a second violent outburst when a young director bad-mouths Dix's friend Charlie (Robert Warwick), a washed-up actor.
Dix claims to be too tired to read the novel, so he asks Mildred to go home with him, ostensibly to explain the plot. As they enter the courtyard of his apartment, they pass a new tenant, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame
Gloria Grahame
Gloria Grahame was an American Academy Award–winning actress.Grahame began her acting career in theatre, and in 1944 she made her first film for MGM. Despite a featured role in It's a Wonderful Life , MGM did not believe she had the potential for major success, and sold her contract to RKO Studios...
). As soon as Mildred is convinced that Dix's motives are honorable, she describes the story and confirms what he had suspected—the book is trash. He gives her cab fare to get home.
The next morning, he is awakened by an old army buddy, now a police detective, Brub Nicholai (Frank Lovejoy
Frank Lovejoy
Frank Lovejoy was an American actor in radio, film, and television. He was born Frank Lovejoy Jr. in Bronx, New York, but grew up in New Jersey. His father, Frank Lovejoy Sr., was a furniture salesman from Maine...
), who takes him downtown to be questioned by Captain Lochner (Carl Benton Reid
Carl Benton Reid
Carl Benton Reid was an American actor. He achieved fame on the Broadway stage in 1939 as Oscar Hubbard, one of Regina Giddens's greedy, devious brothers in the play The Little Foxes, and made his film debut reprising his role opposite Bette Davis in the 1941 film version...
). Mildred was murdered during the night and Dix is a suspect. Laurel is brought to the police station and confirms seeing the girl leave Dix's apartment alone, but Lochner is still deeply suspicious. Although Dix shows no overt sympathy for the dead victim, he anonymously sends her a dozen white roses.
However, Dix behaves strangely. He says things that make his agent and Brub's wife Sylvia (Jeff Donnell
Jeff Donnell
Jeff Donnell was an American film and television actress. Born Jean Marie Donnell, she grew up in South Windham, Maine...
) wonder if he did kill the girl. In addition, Lochner sows seeds of doubt in Laurel's mind, pointing out Dix's lengthy record of violent behavior. Dix becomes furiously irrational when he learns of it. He drives at high speed, with Laurel a terrified passenger, until they sideswipe another car. Nobody is hurt; but, when the other driver accosts him, Dix beats him unconscious and is about to strike him with a large rock when Laurel stops him.
Laurel gets to the point where she cannot sleep without taking pills. Her distrust and fear of Dix are becoming too much for her. When he asks her to marry him, she accepts but only because she is too scared of what he might do if she refused. She makes a plane reservation and tells Mel she is leaving because she cannot take it anymore. Dix finds out and almost strangles her during a violent confrontation before he regains control.
Just then, the phone rings. It is Brub with good news: Mildred's boyfriend (named Henry Kesler, the same as the film's associate producer) has confessed to her murder. Tragically, it is too late to salvage Dix and Laurel's relationship.
Cast
- Humphrey BogartHumphrey BogartHumphrey DeForest Bogart was an American actor. He is widely regarded as a cultural icon.The American Film Institute ranked Bogart as the greatest male star in the history of American cinema....
as Dixon Steele - Gloria GrahameGloria GrahameGloria Grahame was an American Academy Award–winning actress.Grahame began her acting career in theatre, and in 1944 she made her first film for MGM. Despite a featured role in It's a Wonderful Life , MGM did not believe she had the potential for major success, and sold her contract to RKO Studios...
as Laurel Gray - Frank LovejoyFrank LovejoyFrank Lovejoy was an American actor in radio, film, and television. He was born Frank Lovejoy Jr. in Bronx, New York, but grew up in New Jersey. His father, Frank Lovejoy Sr., was a furniture salesman from Maine...
as Det. Sgt. Brub Nicolai - Carl Benton ReidCarl Benton ReidCarl Benton Reid was an American actor. He achieved fame on the Broadway stage in 1939 as Oscar Hubbard, one of Regina Giddens's greedy, devious brothers in the play The Little Foxes, and made his film debut reprising his role opposite Bette Davis in the 1941 film version...
as Capt. Lochner - Art Smith as Mel Lippman
- Martha StewartMartha Stewart (actor)Martha Stewart is an American actress.-Filmography:-Film:*Surf Party *Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick *Convicted *In a Lonely Place *Are You with It? *Daisy Kenyon...
as Mildred Atkinson - Jeff DonnellJeff DonnellJeff Donnell was an American film and television actress. Born Jean Marie Donnell, she grew up in South Windham, Maine...
as Sylvia Nicolai - Robert Warwick as Charlie Waterman
- Morris AnkrumMorris AnkrumMorris Ankrum was an American radio, television and film character actor.-Early life:Born Morris Nussbaum in Danville, Illinois, Ankrum originally began a career in academics. After graduating from USC with a law degree, he went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of...
as Lloyd Barnes - William Ching as Ted Barton
- Steven GeraySteven GeraySteven Geray, born Istvan Gyergyay on November 10, 1904 and died aged 69 on December 26, 1973 in Los Angeles, California. He was a film actor who appeared in over 100 films and dozens of television programs...
as Paul, Headwaiter - Hadda BrooksHadda BrooksHadda Brooks , was an American pianist, vocalist and composer. Her first single, "Swingin' the Boogie", which she composed, was issued in 1945...
as Singer
Background
Louise BrooksLouise Brooks
Mary Louise Brooks , generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W...
wrote in her essay "Humphrey and Bogey" that she felt it was the role of Dixon Steele in this movie that came closest to the real Bogart she knew. "Before inertia set in, he played one fascinatingly complex character, craftily directed by Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
, in a film whose title perfectly defined Humphrey's own isolation among people. In a Lonely Place gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the film character's, the screenwriter's, pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart."
The original ending had Dix strangling Laurel to death in the heat of their argument. Sgt. Nicolai comes to tell Dix that he has been cleared of Mildred's murder but arrests him for Laurel's. Dix tells Brub that he is finally finished with his screenplay, and the final shot was to be of a page in the typewriter which has the significant lines Dix said aloud to Laurel in the car (which he admitted to not knowing where to put) "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me." This scene was filmed halfway through the shooting schedule, but Ray hated the ending he had helped write. Ray later said, "I just couldn't believe the ending that Bundy (screenwriter Andrew Solt) and I had written. I shot it because it was my obligation to do it. Then I kicked everybody off stage except Bogart, Art Smith and Gloria. And we improvised the ending as it is now. In the original ending we had ribbons so it was all tied up into a very neat package, with Frank Lovejoy
Frank Lovejoy
Frank Lovejoy was an American actor in radio, film, and television. He was born Frank Lovejoy Jr. in Bronx, New York, but grew up in New Jersey. His father, Frank Lovejoy Sr., was a furniture salesman from Maine...
coming in and arresting him as he was writing the last lines, having killed Gloria. Huh! And I thought, shit, I can't do it, I just can't do it! Romances don't have to end that way. Marriages don't have to end that way, they don't have to end in violence. Let the audience make up its own mind what's going to happen to Bogie when he goes outside the apartment."
Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall is an American film and stage actress and model, known for her distinctive husky voice and sultry looks.She first emerged as leading lady in the Humphrey Bogart film To Have And Have Not and continued on in the film noir genre, with appearances in The Big Sleep and Dark Passage ,...
and Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century....
were considered for the role of Laurel Gray. Bacall was a natural choice given her off-screen marriage to Bogart and their box-office appeal, but Warner Bros. refused to loan her out, which is today thought to be due to their fury that Bogart had set up his own production company (they were afraid that independent companies would jeopardize the future of major studios). Rogers was the producers' first choice but director Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
believed that his wife Gloria Grahame
Gloria Grahame
Gloria Grahame was an American Academy Award–winning actress.Grahame began her acting career in theatre, and in 1944 she made her first film for MGM. Despite a featured role in It's a Wonderful Life , MGM did not believe she had the potential for major success, and sold her contract to RKO Studios...
was right for the part. Even though their marriage was troubled, he insisted that she be cast. Her performance today is unanimously considered to be among her finest.
Grahame and Ray's marriage was starting to come apart during filming. Grahame was forced to sign a contract stipulating that "my husband [Ray] shall be entitled to direct, control, advise, instruct and even command my actions during the hours from 9 AM to 6 PM, every day except Sunday...I acknowledge that in every conceivable situations his will and judgment shall be considered superior to mine and shall prevail." Grahame was also forbidden to "nag, cajole, tease or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him." The two did separate during filming. Afraid that one of them would be replaced, Ray took to sleeping in a dressing room, lying and saying that he needed to work on the script. Grahame played along with the charade and nobody knew that they had separated. Though there was a brief reconciliation, the couple divorced in 1952, when Ray found Grahame in bed with his thirteen year old son.
The film was one of a number of Nicholas Ray films to be scored by avant garde classical composer George Antheil
George Antheil
George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
(1900-1959).
Critical response
At the time of its release in May 1950, the reviews were generally positive (in particular many critics praised Bogart and Grahame's performances), but many questioned the marketability given the bleak ending. The film was considered a box-office disappointment. Some believe that because the film is a unique combination of genuine romance and dark thriller, there was no easy way to advertise it. Not unlike Nicholas RayNicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
's debut They Live by Night
They Live by Night
They Live by Night is a film noir, based on Edward Anderson's Depression era novel Thieves Like Us. The film was directed by Nicholas Ray and starred Farley Granger as "Bowie" Bowers and Cathy O'Donnell as "Keechie" Mobley...
(1948), it was advertised as a straight thriller while the film is not as simply fit into one genre as the marketing shows. Over the passing years the film gathered a cult following
Cult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
(Ray's films had a brief revival in the 70s and Bogart's anti-hero stance became re-evaluated in the 1960s, one possible explanation), and the French during the 1950s praised Ray's unique film making. When the film was released on DVD in 2003, it was hailed as a masterpiece of noir. Even Time Magazine, which gave the film a negative review upon its initial release, called it one of the 100 best films of all time in their 2005 list.
Noir expert Eddie Muller
Eddie Muller
Eddie Muller is a writer based in San Francisco. He is known for writing books about movies, particularly film noir. Founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, he is considered a noir expert and is called on to write and talk about the film genre, notably on wry commentary tracks for Fox's...
called this title his favorite noir and one which "will stand the test of time."
The staff at Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
magazine gave the film a good review and wrote, "In a Lonely Place Humphrey Bogart has a sympathetic role though cast as one always ready to mix it with his dukes. He favors the underdog; in one instance he virtually has a veteran, brandy-soaking character actor (out of work) on his very limited payroll...Director Nicholas Ray maintains nice suspense. Bogart is excellent. Gloria Grahame, as his romance, also rates kudos."
Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...
lauded the film, especially Bogart's performance and the screenplay, writing, "Everybody should be happy this morning. Humphrey Bogart is in top form in his latest independently made production, In a Lonely Place, and the picture itself is a superior cut of melodrama. Playing a violent, quick-tempered Hollywood movie writer suspected of murder, Mr. Bogart looms large on the screen of the Paramount Theatre and he moves flawlessly through a script which is almost as flinty as the actor himself. Andrew Solt, who fashioned the screen play from a story by Dorothy B. Hughes and an adaptation by Edmund H. North, has had the good sense to resolve the story logically. Thus Dixon Steele remains as much of an enigma, an explosive, contradictory force at loose ends when the film ends as when it starts."
Critic Ed Gonzalez wrote, "Not unlike Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
' The Stranger
The Stranger (novel)
The Stranger or The Outsider is a novel by Albert Camus published in 1942. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of existentialism, though Camus did not consider himself an existentialist; in fact, its content explores various philosophical schools of thought, including absurdism, as...
, Nicholas Ray's remarkable In a Lonely Place represents the purest of existentialist
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
primers...Laurel and Dixon may love each other but it's evident that they're both entirely too victimized by their own selves to sustain this kind of happiness. In the end, their love resembles a rehearsal for the next and hopefully less complicated romance. This is the existential endgame of one of Ray's smartest and most devastating masterpieces."
Curtis Hanson
Curtis Hanson
Curtis Lee Hanson is an American film director, film producer and screenwriter. His directing work includes The Hand That Rocks the Cradle , L.A...
is featured on the retrospective documentary of the DVD release, and has stated his admiration for the film, notably Ray's direction, the dark depiction of Hollywood and Bogart's performance. This was one of the films which he showed to actors Russell Crowe
Russell Crowe
Russell Ira Crowe is a New Zealander Australian actor , film producer and musician. He came to international attention for his role as Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius in the 2000 historical epic film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, a...
and Guy Pearce
Guy Pearce
Guy Edward Pearce is an English-born Australian actor and musician, known for his roles as Leonard Shelby in Christopher Nolan's Memento, Lieutenant Ed Exley in L.A...
in preparation for filming L.A. Confidential
L.A. Confidential (film)
L.A. Confidential is a 1997 American film based on James Ellroy's 1990 novel of the same title, the third book in his L.A. Quartet. Both the book and the film tell the story of a group of LAPD officers in the 1950s, and the intersection of police corruption and Hollywood celebrity...
. He said, "I wanted them to see the reality of that period and to see that emotion. This movie, and I'm not saying it's the greatest movie ever made, but it represents many things that I think are worth aspiring to, such as having character and emotion be the driving force, rather than the plot....When I first saw In a Lonely Place as a teenager, it frightened me and yet attracted me with an almost hypnotic power. Later, I came to understand why. Occasionally, very rarely, a movie feels so heartfelt, so emotional, so revealing that it seems as though both the actor and the director are standing naked before the audience. When that kind of marriage happens between actor and director, it's breathtaking."
In 2009, film critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
added In a Lonely Place to his "great movies" list.
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reported that 100% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on twenty-seven reviews.
Comparisons to novel
In a Lonely Place was based on Dorothy B. HughesDorothy B. Hughes
Dorothy B. Hughes was an American crime writer and literary critic. Hughes wrote fourteen crime and detective novels, primarily in the hardboiled and noir styles, and is best known for the novels In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse .Born Dorothy Belle Flanagan in Kansas City, Missouri, she...
' 1947 novel of the same title. Some controversy exists between fans of the film and fans of the novel (who view the film as a watered down adaptation), as Edmund H. North's script takes some elements of the novel, but is ultimately an entirely different story.
The strongest difference between the two works lies in the primary character: the film's Dixon Steele is a screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
with an offbeat lifestyle, and a decent person with fatally poor impulse control and prone to wild overreaction when enraged. The novel's Steele is a limited third-person view from Dix's perspective, reminiscent of the first-person in noir, à la The Killer Inside Me
The Killer Inside Me
The Killer Inside Me is a 1952 novel by American writer Jim Thompson published by Fawcett Publications. In the introduction to the anthology Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, it is described as "one of the most blistering and uncompromising crime novels ever written."- Plot summary :The...
. Steele is a charlatan who pretends to be a novelist while sponging money from his overbearing uncle. When this well dries up, he murders a wealthy young man and assumes his identity, in a manner similar to Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short-story writer most widely known for her psychological thrillers, which led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times, notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951...
's Tom Ripley. (It should be noted that Hughes' novel predates Highsmith's and may have influenced it.) The film follows the question of whether Dix finally went too far in his anger and committed the murder under investigation to a tragic end: even though he's proven innocent, his rage at the cloud of suspicion has driven the woman he loves away for good. No question of Dix's innocence exists in the novel, which follows the investigation of a murder Dix plainly committed and his self-insertion into that investigation for his own ends.
Curtis Hanson
Curtis Hanson
Curtis Lee Hanson is an American film director, film producer and screenwriter. His directing work includes The Hand That Rocks the Cradle , L.A...
, in the DVD featurette 'In A Lonely Place Revisited', further analyses the parallels and differences between the novel and the film. He notes that there is a parallel in the film between Dix's adaptation of a novel for film with the adaptation of In a Lonely Place for film, he also notes a key difference between Dix in the film and Dix in the novel is their respective treatment of women. In the novel Dix pursues women, the first chapter details his pursuit of a woman. In the film, Dix is pursued by women.
Hughes' novel, out of print for decades, was re-released by The Feminist Press at CUNY in 2003, which edition is still in print as of April 2007. Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
also published a paperback edition in the UK in 2010 as part of their Modern Classics imprint. The novel has been hailed lately as a stellar example of mid-twentieth hardboiled/noir fiction, both as a rare example of women's writing in that genre and for its quality and contributions to that genre.
Notable quotes
Dixon [quoting dialog from his new script to Laurel]: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."Dixon "How can anybody like a face like this, look at it."
[Attempts to kiss Laurel who moves away]
Laurel "I said I liked it, I didn't say I wanted to kiss it."
Dixon "We'll have dinner together tonight."
Laurel "We'll have dinner tonight but not together."
External links
- In a Lonely Place at Film Noir of the Week by Barry GiffordBarry GiffordBarry Gifford is an American author, poet, and screenwriter known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and film noir- and Beat Generation-influenced literary madness....
- In a Lonely Place article at TCM by Jeff Stafford
- In a Lonely Place article at Sunset Gun by Kim Morgan
- In a Lonely Place article at Bright Lights Film JournalBright Lights Film JournalBright Lights Film Journal is an online popular-academic film magazine, with a left-leaning critical orientation, based in Portland, Oregon, United States. It is edited and published by Gary Morris....
by Scott Thill - In a Lonely Place article at Senses of Cinema by Fiona A. Villella
- In a Lonely Place film at CrackleCrackleCrackle is a digital network and studio, featuring commercially supported streaming video content in Flash Video format. It is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, and its content consists primarily of Sony's library of films and television shows...
(complete and free) - In a Lonely Place trailer at You Tube