In a Lonely Place
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.78 You Save: $7.21 (48%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of In a Lonely Place
Movie Review: BOGIE AT HIS BEST
Summary: 4 Stars
Humphrey Bogart gives his most daring and emotionally complex performance in Nicholas Ray's IN A LONELY PLACE. Bogie is Dickson Steele (great name, huh?), a Hollywood screenwriter who is prime suspect in a murder after he lures a cute hat check girl to his apartment to read a screenplay and she is found dead a short time later.
Here's a prme example of classic, intelligent, artistic filmmaking by Hollywood's best.
This absolutely gripping film has been restored and looks like new. Highly recommended.
Movie Review: Classic psychological thriller
Summary: 4 Stars
A down-on-his-luck screenwriter's (Humphrey Bogart) violent, antisocial temperament makes him a prime suspect in the murder of a cocktail waitress and ultimately alienates the woman he loves (Gloria Graham). Bogart's performance is sometimes perfunctory and unconvincing in the fight scenes, but he projects a frightening intensity in numerous intimate confrontations with other characters. He creates a character that Graham could believably fall in love with and then just as believably begin to fear later.Movie Review: Quality Bogart flick
Summary: 4 Stars
Bogart plays a mean drunk scriptwriter, and it's one of his best performances. There's a good plot to this and some great scenes, but in places the plot gets a little lost, so it loses a star.
Still well worth seeing, though.
Sherlock Holmes and the Flying Zombie Death Monkeys
Movie Review: In a Lonely Place
Summary: 3 Stars
Any movie with Humphrey Bogart, at least in a starring role, is elevated immediately beyond the normal. The man was a consummate actor who specialized as a tough guy. That element is here in his portrayal of Dixon Steele, a fading screenwriter that has suffered burnout & is his own worst enemy. Director Nicholas Ray takes a stab at the Hollywood industry that was a very daring move for 1950.
In a Lonely Place, on the surface, is done as film-noir but it's not that genre in the classic sense. Steele is definitely a film-noir character: He's flawed, suspected in a murder & a man who's had more than one incident with the law. He's a screenwriter who hasn't done anything significant for years. He's approached to write a screenplay based upon a current trashy, best selling romance novel. Instead of reading the novel for himself he hires the hatcheck girl, Mildred (Martha Stewart), who has just finished reading it to give him an oral synopsis of it. This laziness lands him in trouble. He not only doesn't escort the girl to nearest taxi stand but he compounds the situation by the nature of his character. She is later found murdered, discarded on the side of the road.
Steele, of course, is the leading suspect. He's not very cooperative with the police which leads to even more suspicions. Enter Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahme), who gives him an alibi. She's the next door neighbor who alleges that Steele never left home. None of this is made very clear. Though Dix & Laurel begin a romance, inside, she's afraid of him. She's not even sure he didn't commit the murder. Which begs the question: Is she telling the truth or covering up for him? The film spends a lot of time on the romance; Steele's violent ways & Gray's inspiring him to produce the screenplay. The Steele character fits the film-noir genre but the Gray character isn't a femme-fatale that leads the male on the path of destruction.
It's a curious affair & much of it might have to do with Nicholas Ray's personal life. He was married to Gloria Grhame at the time but their marriage was already heading south. The DVD has bonus features: Sub-titles in 7 different languages; "In a Lonely Place - Revisited", the "Restoration Story" & trailers.
Movie Review: Clumsy. But sincere.
Summary: 3 Stars
There's something darn odd about Nicholas Ray's films. I'm thinking about this one, and Rebel without a Cause. Perhaps it's just that most movies in the 1950s were not much cop. You couldn't really call them good, let alone great. In this one the scaffolding supporting Bogart's performance as Dixon Steele (what a phony name) is quite mediocre, scarcely up to B-movie standard. The script is clunky, the dialogue poor, the second-string acting, especially the completely wooden cops and the ridiculous and permanently drunk thespian, downright ordinary, and the shooting just isn't anything to write home about, in spite of Curtis Hanson's panegyric. However, Bogart's performance is compelling, like Dean's in Rebel. There's something accurate and genuine about his psychology, and the feeling comes across as unusually real. I've known people precisely like this: their own worst enemies; strong tendencies to violence combined with ultra-sensitivity, almost paranoia, whose bizarre behaviour invites suspicion, even though they haven't done anything wrong. Something to do with an extreme egocentricity, and an inability to see things as others see them. This personality dysfunction may also be linked to a certain kind of creativity, but a basically second-rate kind. Bogart carries the story, which is otherwise presented in a very pedestrian and unsubtle manner. In one or two scenes Gloria Grahame just about matches him; although I frankly could never take to her. She always seemed to me highly unattractive-looking, unsexy, and I could never figure out why she got so many high-profile parts. There's no mystery to the plot. In fact, there's no plot at all: the whole thing is a character-study; and there's not one ray of hope for this particular character. Very depressing.