by John Grant
US / 93 minutes / bw / Santana, Columbia Dir: Nicholas Ray Pr: Robert Lord Scr: Edmund H. North, Andrew Solt Story: In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes Cine: Burnett Guffey Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Art Smith, Jeff Donnell, Martha Stewart, Robert Warwick, Morris Ankrum, William Ching, Steven Geray, Hadda Brooks, Jack Reynolds, Ruth Gillette, Alix Talton, Lewis Howard, Don Hamin.
Dorothy B. Hughes’s psychological thriller In a Lonely Place (1947) is one of those marvelous novels that make the hardboiled pulp literature of the 1940s and 1950s such a rich trove for lovers of what one might call vernacular literature. Its central character is a serial strangler called Dixon “Dix” Steele. He has murdered the tenant of the apartment in which he now dwells—and he’s living off the dead man’s allowance—but most of his murders are sex killings. To the world, and to his old army buddy Brub Nicolai, now a cop, he pretends he’s a wildly talented upcoming writer; like so many such, he never in fact writes anything. Against all the odds, he strikes up a passionate relationship with the redhead who lives in a neighboring apartment, Laurel Gray. What he doesn’t know is that she has recognized the cigarette lighter she gave to the man he killed; with Brub, Brub’s wife Sylvia and Brub’s boss, Captain Lochner, she works to bring the serial killer to justice . . .
To aficionados of the 1950 Nick Ray movie, the names will seem familiar and likewise some of the circumstances, but the whole basis of the plot disturbingly different, as if Hughes had capriciously thrown together the elements of the movie and made something willfully other out of them. Of course, the reality is the other way round; but the movie has become so very much more a part of the popular consciousness than the half-forgotten novel that it has come to dominate our perceptions of what’s the “right” version.
In the movie Dix (Bogart) isn’t a serial rapist/strangler; there was no way anyone in Hollywood would tolerate their star Bogart playing a character so vile. And Dix is no longer an author who relishes the status but never does any actual writing; instead he’s a well regarded Hollywood screenwriter, the slump in whose recent career is directly attributable to his anger-management problems; he has a string of rage crimes behind him, including crimes against girlfriends like Frances Randolph (Talton), but people tend to forgive him this behavior—or at least to be more tolerant of it than otherwise they might be—because of his obvious talent.
One night, carousing with friends at the restaurant Paul’s, Dix is persuaded by his agent, Mel Lippman (Smith, in very good form), to consider the assignment of bringing the latest bestselling paint-by-numbers bodice-buster doorstop novel to the screen. Dix can’t face the thought of reading the thing. Discovering that the hat-check girl, Mildred Atkinson (Stewart), is reading the copy that was brought to the restaurant for him and is just a few pages from the end, he allows her to keep on reading on condition that, after she finishes her shift, she comes with him to his apartment to recount the plot to him so that he can construct his screenplay from her retelling rather than directly from the book.
Already we’ve seen an example of Dix’s fearsome temper. As he waited at a light, the passenger in the next car proved to be an actress who was once in a movie he scripted. They exchange pleasantries, her obnoxious boyfriend weighs in insultingly, and it’s only because the light changes that Dix doesn’t climb out of the car and whale the guy. And now, at Paul’s, there’s another example. A whizzkid director, Junior (Howard), treats Dix’s alcoholic old friend Charlie Waterman (Warwick) with derogatory contempt. Next Junior knows he’s in the middle of a heap of splintered furniture and shattered crockery. As the long-suffering Paul himself (Geray) explains with strained patience, he’d really rather Dix did this sort of thing in the parking lot. The two episodes of course convey to us that Dix is a man on a hair-trigger, ready for a fight at any moment and under any provocation. There’s a slight air of contrivance to them, but Ray gets the point across; and at least in the second case Dix’s wrath has been aroused in a noble cause.
Mildred breaks her date with boyfriend Henry Kesler (Reynolds), drives home with Dix and, after some moments of uncertainty as to his intentions, gushingly narrates the book’s plot.
It’s one of the movie’s most comedic sequences. Dix was right: the book is sentimental sewage about an heiress and a studly lifeguard, yet clearly it has meant a lot to the naive Mildred, whose enthusiasm for it knows no bounds; she regards it as a beautiful, poignant and very genuine tale. Once he’s heard more than enough of the book’s story, Dix gives the girl a twenty-dollar bill and tells her where the nearest cab rank is.
Earlier, on the way into his apartment, Dix and Mildred encountered the new tenant on the block, Laurel Gray (Grahame), and there was immediate mutual interest between the two neighbors. That night Dix catches sight of her on her balcony, apparently looking down through his apartment window.
Early next morning Dix is woken by a cop, Detective Sergeant Brub Nicolai (Lovejoy), whom he knew back during his miliary service. Brub has been sent by his boss, Captain Lochner (Reid), to bring Dix in for questioning. Mildred’s body has been found in a lonely canyon, strangled and hurled from a moving car. Lochner makes it plain to Dix that he’s Suspect #1—that his whole tale of inviting a pretty girl back to his place late at night merely so she could tell him a story is risible—but when Laurel is brought in she tells Lochner that she saw Mildred leave Dix’s apartment at the time he said she left. Lochner’s not entirely convinced but has little choice other than to let Dix go.
Very soon, Dix and Laurel are in love, and as a consequence he’s working harder on the new screenplay than he’s worked on anything in years. Laurel is typing up the pages for him, and she reports glowingly to Mel that the script’s a masterpiece. Yet Lochner is still fixated on Dix as Mildred’s killer, and Brub is playing something of a double game with his old friend. One night, after dinner with Brub and Sylvia (Donnell), Dix persuades the pair of them to demonstrate how he thinks the murder was done. The re-enactment, and the savage fascination Dix displays toward the act of murder, leave Sylvia visibly shaken. She begins to wonder if perhaps Dix did kill the girl—as do we, because really, now we think on it, the sequence of events on the fateful night hasn’t been made entirely clear to us.
And even Laurel starts to have doubts. In part these are stirred by her masseuse, Martha (Gillette), who knows Frances Randolph and through her about the violence Dix meted out. More important, though, is Dix’s own behavior. The two friendly couples are picnicking on the beach one evening when Sylvia accidentally lets slip that Brub has told Lochner about that amateur re-enactment the other night. Dix immediately flies into a rage. Pursued by Laurel, he leaps into his car and, with her terrified by his side, drives home through the darkness at breakneck speed. When, finally, he forces the sportster driven by John Mason (Hamin) off the road and Mason starts yelling, Dix attacks him, beats him unconscious, and is ready to crush his skull with a rock when at last Laurel’s cries get through to him.
Laurel is having to take pills to sleep nights. She’s still in love with Dix, yet she’s terrified of him. When he insists they get married, she’s too scared to refuse, yet admits to Mel that she’s secretly planning to escape, to catch a flight to New York that night and lose herself there. Dix’s paranoia kicks into top gear, and for once it’s justified. All day she’s forced to shop with him for clothes and a ring and to look at houses, then attend a select little soirée at Paul’s preparatory to flying off to Vegas.
The soirée’s a disaster, because Dix’s temper bubbles over and he strikes Mel. Laurel flees home to grab her stuff and go, but is caught there by Dix. He’s halfway through violently strangling her when Brub phones to tell them that Dix is, after all, in the clear for the killing of Mildred. Says Laurel in a broken voice to him, “Yesterday this would have meant so much to us. Now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.” Moments later, as she watches Dix head back to his lonely place while she must soon leave for hers, she tearfully quotes a line from Dix’s screenplay: “I lived a few weeks while you loved me,” then adds, “Goodbye, Dix.”
It’s this final sequence that makes In a Lonely Place such a wrenchingly romantic piece. But this ending was apparently a late afterthought. In the first version of it that Ray filmed, Dix completed the strangulation of Laurel; Brub arrived to give Dix the good news that he was no longer a suspect in the Mildred Atkinson killing, caught him red-handed, and arrested him instead for killing Laurel. Ray—fortunately for us—decided he didn’t like this and filmed the alternative that we now know. What he did was transform the movie from what might have been a rather trite, too tidily resolved film noir, however true to its nihilistic roots, into something that, while it’s still indubitably noirish, transcends genre boundaries.
The movie’s often today regarded as one of Bogart’s finest hours, giving him the chance to portray a truly three-dimensional character, a man whose struggle with his inner demons causes him to act unpredictably and often violently. Personally I find this to be so only in parts. His confrontation with the snarky driver John Mason after their minor traffic collision is an example of where the portrayal lives up to its reputation: it’s hard to forget the image of Dix with the rock raised high in his hand, his face rendering first confusion and then realization as he slowly lowers the weapon. Yet in other instances the sudden shifts of temper seem artificial, as if Bogart—and his director—were merely going through the motions. Again, the look of avid intensity on his face as he watches Brub and Sylvia perform their little re-enactment is not so much high art as Hammer horror.
For me, then, the movie is Grahame’s; she’s the reason to watch it again and again. For this movie she was lent out by RKO to Santana, Bogart’s production company; she responded by delivering arguably her greatest performance. She was not in fact the first choice—Ginger Rogers and Lauren Bacall were approached before her—but, watching the movie today, it seems inconceivable that anyone else could have played the part so effectively. Of course, she was still married to Nick Ray at the time, and there are definite parallels between the movie, whose script Ray largely rewrote during the shooting, and the collapse of the marriage between director and actress; like Dix, Ray was a man with considerable anger-management issues, a hard drinker, and so on. Because of the fragmenting relationship, producer Robert Lord felt impelled to put clauses into Grahame’s contract that read bizarrely today, specifying that, during working hours, she had to be subservient in every way to her director. (In fact, the two behaved professionally and the matter never became a problem.)
Her performance is one of considerable emotional depth. Especially after she realizes the violence of which Dix is capable, and is torn apart by her—eventually failed—attempt to accommodate this into her undoubted love for him, it’s hard not to feel her anguish. The final seconds—as, tears washing down her cheeks, she watches with such expressive, hopelessly yearning eyes as Dix walks away across the courtyard between their two apartments—offer the most obvious instance of this extraordinary emotional power, but for me her most moving moment comes when she’s having a heart-to-heart with Sylvia and we suddenly see in Laurel’s eyes her first recognition of the futility of it all.
Many years later Grahame had a small yet central role in The Girl on the Late, Late Show (1974 TVM). The movie’s a love letter to film noir, complete with deadpan voiceover narration and a cast packed with icons of that era in a succession of cameos. (It’s very loosely based on the 1922 Hollywood murder of philandering director William Desmond Taylor and the scandalous aftermath.) Grahame played the fictitious actress Carolyn Parker, whom an executive for an NYC-based network decides he needs to interview; she seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and he uncovers shenanigans as he hunts for her. We see clips from some of “Carolyn’s” old movies—in fact, they’re three of Grahame’s old movies, and taking pride of place among them is In a Lonely Place.
Despite its stellar reputation today—for all its occasional creakiness, it must rank high on anyone’s list of films noirs—In a Lonely Place was relatively unsuccessful on release. How times change.
