In a Lonely Place [1950]

 Nicholas Ray’s brooding and viscerally arresting film In A Lonely Place eschewed classic noir conventions by subsuming crime under existential inquiries, but definitively remained one for its moody atmosphere and fatalism. While adapting Dorothy B. Hughes’ dark and terrific novel, Ray retained just the core framework and characters, and drastically diverged from there. A direct adaptation of the book’s chilling POV of a misogynistic sociopath wouldn’t anyway have survived the Hays Code; he, instead, delved into the self-destructive and emotionally alienated world of its protagonist – changed from a terrifying and unemployed drifter to a cynical, formerly successful Hollywood screenwriter in an extended creative slump – and his brief, passionate and ultimately doomed affair with a woman who’s torn between love, doubts and fear. Humphry Bogart gave one of his fieriest turns as the tormented and lonely Dix Steele, who’s suspected by the police of murdering a hatcheck girl – primarily on account of his violent temper, and also as an accusation by the moralistic social order for refusing to display sorrow upon the girl’s death and then doing an unsettling reimagining of that with a cop buddy and his wife – while Gloria Grahame, in a crumbling marriage with the director at that time, was commendable as the luscious, seemingly hardboiled but inwardly vulnerable Laural, an aspiring actress, who gives Dix his alibi, falls for him, and eventually becomes intensely conflicted, thus leading the film to its crushing finale that was altered by Ray (vis-à-vis the script). The movie was considerably metatextual – be in its jaundiced portrayal of tinsel-town, or Dix’s free adaptation of a book within the film, despite being asked to remain faithful, thus ironically mirroring what Ray himself did.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Nicholas Ray

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Film Noir/Romantic Noir

Language: English

Country: US