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Film Noir: In a Lonely Place (1950)Bogart Shatters Heroic Movie Image in Backstage Hollywood DramaMovie star Humphrey Bogart was a serious actor - and set out to prove just that in 1950's excellent film noir In a Lonely Place. To do so, he cast himself against type.
Bogart’s years on Broadway were forgotten by the mid-30s, when the movies brought him the kind of attention that had eluded him onstage. After playing mostly movie gangsters for five years, Humphrey Bogart morphed into “Bogie,” the canny, world-weary cynic hiding his altruism in picture after picture, most notably in Casablanca. True, he played a villain in 1947’s The Two Mrs. Carrolls, which three years later pushed him to an even lonelier place. Bogart as Psychotic ScreenwriterBy 1950 Humphrey really wanted to show he was more than Bogie. So he hired director Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt, and made the movie under the banner of his own Santana Productions. In In a Lonely Place, Bogart is Dixon “Dix” Steele, an angry, hard-drinking, sometimes violent screenwriter. Humphrey Bogart has rarely played a darker character. Steele has many admirable qualities – he’s unyieldingly loyal to friends, he chafes at Hollywood “phonies” and he stands up for what he believes in. The dichotomy in Steele’s personality probably was very appealing to a movie star eager for more complex roles. When Steele is too lazy to read a trashy novel he’s been hired to adapt, he invites a hat-check girl home to explain the story (she loves the book). When the girl is murdered after leaving his apartment, the cloud of suspicion hangs over Steele. Gloria Graham as Girlfriend FridayWe know he’s innocent, and so does his sexy neighbor, Laurel Gray, played with her patented kittenish aplomb by Gloria Grahame. At the Beverly Hills police station, Laurel vouches for Steele, with whom she’s flirted in the courtyard of their apartment complex. The film’s second act is fairly conventional. Dix and Laurel’s relationship heats up, as she commits to drying him out and getting him started on writing again. She’s the good woman behind the man and he loves her for it. But Dix and Laurel inadvertently inspire an upward spiral of fear and paranoia in each other. Is he a murderer? Is she unfaithful? Will he ever tame his outrageous temper? Doesn’t she really believe in him? Viewers know Dix isn’t a killer – but it’s easy to see why Laurel would begin to have doubts. Especially when Steele nearly kills a motorist who’d hurled a benign insult. All this plays out against the backdrop of a Hollywood in which there’s a distinct caste system and plenty of “phonies” for Steele to bemoan. Special Film for DirectorThis was a very personal film for hard-drinking director Nicholas Ray, right down to the fictional apartment complex: it’s an exact duplicate of the property where Ray once lived. Nick Ray was married to Gloria Grahame when the movie was shot. But the marriage was nearly over and the film’s troubled love affair seems to mirror that. In a supporting role, Frank Lovejoy is his usual stolid self as a police detective trapped between his admiration for Steele – he’d served under him during the war – and his duty to investigate Steele for murder. Dixon Steele bears little resemblance to the Bogie persona so assiduously crafted by Warner Bros. in the 1940s. But Steele remains a fascinating psychological study and an attempt by one of the cinema’s preeminent stars to break his own mold – or at least, put it aside for a moment – to explore darker hues of the human personality.
The copyright of the article Film Noir: In a Lonely Place (1950) in Film Dramas Based on Books is owned by Barry M. Grey. Permission to republish Film Noir: In a Lonely Place (1950) in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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