In a Lonely Place

1950 was a banner year for withering self-examinations in Hollywood. In addition to Sunset Boulevard (which I'll discuss in this space next month) was In a Lonely Place, released in May sixty years ago. It's a bilious tale, directed by Nicholas Ray, that turns a gimlet eye on the edges of the Hollywood dream factory.

Humphrey Bogart stars as Dixon Steele, a washed up screenwriter who "hasn't had a hit since before the war." His patient agent, Art Smith, arranges for him to get a chance at adapting a best-selling novel, and gives it to him at a local watering hole. Steele gets in an argument with the film's director, accusing him of being "a popcorn salesman," and then gets in a fistfight with another man, who insults Bogart's friend, a drunken thespian.

Not wanting to have to read the book, he invites the restaurant's hat-check girl (Martha Stewart) to come home with him and tell him the story, as she's read the book. Finally convinced he's on the up and up, she agrees, and accompanies him to his apartment, which is in a Spanish-style complex (Ray lived in just such a place in West Hollywood, which still exists). Across the courtyard lives a cool beauty, Gloria Grahame, who sees that Stewart leaves Bogart's apartment. This is important, as the young hat-check girl ends up murdered, dumped from a moving car, strangled.

Bogart becomes a suspect, and the investigating detective wonders at his lack of emotional response. But Grahame supplies him with an alibi, and the two begin a relationship. She's drawn to him, but he also frightens her, as he has anger management issues (he pummels a youth after a traffic accident and his ready to stave in his skull with a rock when Grahame stops him). He wants to marry Grahame, but she's leery of his mood swings, and plans to flee.

I'll leave the plot discussion there, for as the film goes along we can never be sure that Bogart didn't kill Stewart. During a scene in which he has dinner with one of the detectives (who was an old army buddy) Bogart takes delicious delight in imagining how it happened, instructing his friend to act it out by wrapping his arm around his wife's neck. A key light highlights Bogart's mug, his eyes dancing with murderous glee. He explains that he's killed off many people in his scripts, but the seed of doubt is planted in the viewer's mind.

During this scene Bogart speaks the title of the film, talking about the place where the girl was killed as being "in a lonely place," but of course the title has many more meanings, such as Bogart's condition during the film, and overall as a description of a world without love. A line that is repeated throughout the film is when Bogart, who works on the adaptation of the book after all, writes "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me." This applies as well to his relationship with Grahame, as he takes a good thing and strangles the life out of it with his paranoia and anti-social behavior.

Bogart gave many great performances throughout his career, but this one is especially great, given it's complete lack of ego. His character is very unsavory, and the lighting of the film does his homely visage no favors. In those scenes when his anger erupts there is a certain lightning in his eyes that really is frightening. From the late forties on, especially from Treasure of the Sierra Madre through The Caine Mutiny, Bogart was not afraid to play the unhinged.

There have been many films about Hollywood, and most are not flattering. This one seems to regard the whole process cynically. In addition to the line about "popcorn salesman," Bogart is asked to simply follow the plot of the book as he writes his script, ignoring any originality. When he turns a script that changes the book, his agent reveals that he didn't like it, but then he says, "I advised Selznick not to do Gone With the Wind." Bogart, who though not awash in offers, says that he doesn't want to work on anything he doesn't like, which here is shown as the principle of a crazy man.