In a Lonely Place
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Movie Reviews of In a Lonely Place
Movie Review: I Lived the Few Weeks You Loved Me ... Bogie's Lonely Place!
Summary: 4 Stars
Soft-spoken actress Gloria Grahame's sultry voice with Bogie's no-nonsense violent rendition of Dix Steele make for a movie that surprisingly has little to do with the crime drama it proports to portray.
Dix Steele, a hit & miss screenwriter, has a gal come to his place to read a book he was ordered to write a screenplay. He has her over, she has a ginger ale (she's a swell kid, ya know) and he gives her some money for cab fare. The next morning she's dead, killed by an unknown assassin.
His only alibi, neighbor Laurel, gets him off, but police suspicions run high. Soon, she begins do doubt that her lover hasn't actually done it to a point of fear and depression!
Several points to this film: Bogie hates the screenwriter hacks who pump out film after film successfully, bowing to the demands of Hollywood (those damn popcorn factories!). I can relate. How many times have we seen plays based on books that were a mere shadow of the author's intentions?
Women in this film notice Dix a lot more than the other way around and often comment on his honest face. Unfortunately with the face comes a fiery temper that makes people wonder. Did he do it or didn't he?
Nicholas Ray's use of lighting in this Black & White flick is masterful. The lights shine on Dix's eyes as someone points him out in the street. Again, the same intense, crazy light shines as if from his eyes as he dramatizes to his cop friend how the murder may have occurred: "use your imagination"...and "take your arm around her neck and squeeze, squeeze the life out of her!"
Cool extras by a film historian and the usual subtitles and scene selections. Not Bogie's most well-known but definitely well-acted. Much different than his usual tough-guy approach!
Others to see:
Gloria Grahame:
Sudden Fear
Oklahoma! (50th Anniversary Edition)
Humphrey Bogart:
Bogie: A Celebration of the Life and Films of Humphrey Bogart
The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart: The Early Years (1899-1931)
Movie Review: A strange but rewarding film.
Summary: 4 Stars
Nicholas Ray's "In a Lonely Place" is one of the strangest films ever released by a major Hollywood studio. It asks us to invest our sympathy in Dixon Steele, a gifted but violent-tempered screenwriter whose salient trait is his total inability to tolerate any sort of insult or contradiction, no matter how minor. Columbia Pictures advertised this as a mystery, but it's a mystery of a very special sort: We know from the beginning--as does his neighbor and soon-to-be lover Laurel Grey--that Steele gave Mildred Atkinson $20 for a taxi and sent her home, so he couldn't have been responsible when she turned up dead a few hours later. Yet Steele's subsequent behavior is so weird and brutal--and his past history of violence so damning--that we start having the same doubts as Laurel. Could Steele have changed his mind and followed Mildred? Could Mildred have forgotten something, come back, and said or done something to set off Steele's notorious temper? Ricocheting off this main story are all sorts of unspoken questions: Even if Steele is innocent, is he a perp-in-waiting, a psychopath who simply hasn't gotten around to committing a murder just yet? And how much leeway should we give to geniuses who consistently exhibit anti-social behavior? In any case, it took a great deal of courage for Ray to ask us to spend time with Steele, and even more for Humphrey Bogart to play him. There were parallels (unfortunately) between Steele and Bogart's own volatile personality; indeed, Bogart's own company, Santana Productions, produced this film. Whether Bogart intended this film as apology or apologia, he gives one of his most subtle and heartfelt performances here, deftly mingling his trademark charm and charisma with terrifying eruptions of anger. Gloria Grahame, exhibiting the bruised, hard-bitten innocence that made her such a compelling actress, is the perfect match for Bogart. There are similarities between "In a Lonely Place" and Hitchcock's "Suspicion," but "In a Lonely Place" is the movie that got the story right: Ray and Bogart both understood that no happy endings could ensue from such a story. Above all, they understood that, if you're very unlucky, you end up being your own destiny.Movie Review: An Unpredictable Pseudo-Noir
Summary: 4 Stars
"In a Lonely Place" is widely considered to be one of the best of the film noir genre, but I can't quite bring myself to give it noir status. It certainly has the ambiguity, sense of paranoia and seedy underworld setting of the standard noir, but it's also lacking in a few crucial elements that in my opinion give a film noir its noir: the femme fatale, the sense of underlying corruption. When Gloria Grahame first slinks her away across the screen, you think "Ah ha! Here's our femme fatale." But she's not, and this is only one instance of the way this film unpredictably turns the audience's expectations upside down.The film is very unusual in the way it tells its story. Bogart plays a struggling screen writer suspected of murdering a young, star-struck girl. We know he hasn't done it, and we expect the film to be about the unraveling of the mystery surrounding her death in Bogie's attempts to prove his innocence. But that's not at all what we get. The murder is forgotten, never very important to begin with, and the film settles into a character study of Bogie, not concerned so much with whether or not he committed a murder but rather with whether or not he has the CAPACITY to commit murder. The cool, unflappable persona that greets us at the beginning of the movie (the Bogie we're used to), deteriorates into a paranoid, jealous, nearly psychotic loner by the film's end, and Gloria Grahame (who we early on suspected of having some devious aims) becomes our chief object of concern. The movie is all over the place in a good way, truly surprising and fresh.
The title of course refers to the lonely place of the interior psyche, and the demons that can haunt a man who has too much time with himself. Bogie spends so much time in the imaginary worlds he creates for his screenplays, that he can't seem to deal any longer with the reality of the material world around him, or maintain relationships that don't rely on his bullying his way into getting what he wants. And the saddest thing is that he knows this about himself. It's a great display of acting on Bogie's part and a neat deconstruction of the Bogie screen persona.
Enjoy.
Grade: A-
Movie Review: Dark, angry Bogart in a noir classic
Summary: 4 Stars
"In a Lonely Place" is usually considered a classic example of film noir, although-as other reviewers have pointed out-- it doesn't completely fit the mold. It has much of the darkness and violence typical of the genre, but the main female character(Laurel Gray) is less a classic femme fatale than an ordinary woman who has fallen in love with the wrong man (Dixon Steele, a screen writer whose career is on the skids). Although the background plot of the movie is about a murder investigation with the Steele as the prime suspect (he's innocent), its major focus is really on the man's psychology and the negative impact of his violent streak on those around him. Bogart is perfect as Dixon Steele, the screen writer with what would now be called "anger management problems." His screen presence oozes with the dangerousness that lies under his character's surface. Gloria Grahame plays Laurel as a basically sweet women who finds herself increasingly uneasy and eventually terrified of her lover's potential for violence. The issue of domestic abuse is never explicitly raised, but it's implicit in Laurel's fear of Steele's dangerous side. The tension builds, the relationship collapses, and in the bittersweet end, both lovers are left in a "lonely place" without each other.
This film was based on a 1947 novel of the same name written by Dorothy Hughes. The novel is a classic example of hard-boiled pulp fiction. Dark as the movie is, the original novel is much darker. In the film version, Steele is a deeply flawed man, but one capable of love as well. In the novel, he's a twisted serial killer with no redeeming features. It's interesting to compare the book and the movie. Even given Bogart's penchant for tough guy roles, it's easy to understand why so many changes were made. Both versions are good, and both are concerned with the violent nature of the main character, but they're really two different works. Watch one, read the other--and enjoy both.
Movie Review: A diamond in the rough--the very rough
Summary: 4 Stars
This unusual noir film has acquired an impressive reputation, mostly because of its distinctiveness and its blending of one of the most iconic of Hollywood actors (Humphrey Bogart) with one of the most intensely personal of Hollywood directors (Nicholas Ray). Adapted from a pulp novel about a serial killer, the film veers widely from its original source: the murder mystery that sets it off fades very quickly to the background, as the film becomes much more about the volatile relationship between the abusive but romantic screenwriter played by Bogart and the woman he loves (Gloria Grahame, in a very fine performance that makes much of her odd combination of flowerlike beauty and tough will). The film's searching exploration of raw emotions combined with its complex use of mise-en-scene only partially obscures the fact that Bogart's performance is quite erratic. Although believably incensed in the final scene, he seems too bored and tired to be credible driving his car at high speed in a fury or beating up a star football player. Moreover, the initial scenes with Bogart and the murder victim seem from another movie altogether, and you feel cheated when the likeable murder victim turns out to be so irrelevant to the story. This DVD version has a sometimes illuminating, sometimes fatuous short starring Curtis Hanson providing commentary on the film.