Cheap In a Lonely Place (DVD) (Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame) (Nicholas Ray) Price

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Customer Reviews of In a Lonely Place

Disturbing, Important Film
For all the praise film-noir is lavished with (quite a lot of it valid), the majority of it relies on convention as much as the standard white-picket-fence, happy-ending 'family' film does: just invert the cliches and bathe them in deep-focus shadows. While this movie, on its surface, resembles the classic-style film noir of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, beneath the surface it's a whole different animal. No calculating evil females or tough guys masking hearts of gold populate IN A LONELY PLACE. It's a much more wrenching and powerfully disturbing film because the murder that draws the protagonists together turns out to be of peripheral importance, while the love story between Humphrey Bogart's troubled screenwriter and Gloria Grahame's B-actress spins inexorably towards damnation completely on its own power. The basic story has him a suspect in a killing, and her in love with him yet unsure of his innocence, but director Nicholas Ray stages the proceedings so that WE see it's not the murder that disturbs her but her own conviction that his self-destructive and volatile nature will destroy them both. To his credit, Ray never takes the easy way out of having Bogart turn monster on her. You care inordinately about the characters, hoping hard (as Bogart's agent does in the film) that some transforming moment will come that will spare these people and allow their deeply felt love to flourish and heal them both - even as the evidence before your own eyes tells you there ain't no way. For 1950 -hell, for any year- such an unsentimental and uncompromising treatment of a tragic adult relationship is a rarity. The shadows suffusing this excellent film come not from UFA-influenced lighting but from the Black Dahlia murder, the HUAC hearings, the death throes of old Hollywood & the moral and spiritual detachment of postwar American life. But most of all, they're projected from within the characters themselves. Grahame and Ray's own real-life deteriorating relationship formed the template for the doomed lovers, and for them, this film is an act of great courage. For his part, Bogart (the star and executive producer) takes elements of all his previous romantic loners and blends them with the harsh, sour pigments of Fred C Dobbs, running the risk of audience rejection. His performance is unflinchingly honest, among his best work ever. See this movie.

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An Unpredictable Pseudo-Noir
"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-

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"He isn't quite normal."
When he meets his agent in a club to discuss a new project, screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) hasn't had a hit in years. While there, Steele picks up a chatty hatcheck girl who agrees to go home with him, but the next day she's found murdered. Steele's anti-social violent history makes him the prime suspect, but then a neighbour, Laurel Grey (Gloria Grahame) provides Steele with an airtight alibi. Laurel and Dixon Steele are attracted to one another, and the murder investigation throws them together. Inevitably, they fall in love. Their new relationship is tested to the limits as the investigation continues.

This is a great role for Humphrey Bogart. We all have our favourite Bogart film (mine is "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"), but the role of Dixon Steele allows Bogart to play with the elements of anti-social behaviour--he often plays a loner, but as Dixon Steele, he's more than that. His reaction to the murder of the hatcheck girl is rather peculiar, and this, naturally, makes him the perfect suspect. There's a side of Steele that dwells on evil possibilities--perhaps it's just the writer in him. However, as Steele--the prime suspect, Bogart carries emotional apathy to new depths. Laurel Gray is not Gloria Grahame's best role (see "The Big Heat") --in fact, she's underused here, and the focus is squarely on Bogart. Gloria Grahame was married to director Nicholas Ray during the filming, and this is her first starring role. They were divorced amidst scandal shortly after the film. Bogart and Grahame fans (and I'm a fan of both) will enjoy this film very much. It's not one of Bogart's better-known roles, and that's a shame. The film is based on the book "In a Lonely Place" by Dorothy B. Hughes--displacedhuman