In a Lonely Place

Plot

Dixon "Dix" Steele is a down-on-his-luck Hollywood screenwriter who has not had a successful movie since before World War II. While driving to meet his agent, Mel Lippman, Dix's explosive temper is revealed when, at a stoplight, he engages with another motorist in a confrontation that almost becomes violent. Meeting with Mel at a nightclub, Dix is cajoled into adapting a book for a movie. The hat-check girl, Mildred Atkinson, is engrossed in reading the copy meant for Dix; since she only has a few pages left to go, she asks to be allowed to finish it. Dix claims to be too tired to read the novel, so he asks Mildred to go home with him to explain the plot. As they enter the courtyard of his apartment, they pass a new tenant, Laurel Gray. Mildred describes the story, confirming what Dix had suspected—the book is no good. Rather than drive her home as promised, he gives her cab fare instead.

The next morning, Dix is awakened by his friend, police detective Brub Nicolai, who served under Dix during the war. Nicolai takes him downtown to be questioned by his superior, Captain Lochner, who reveals that Mildred was murdered and informs Dix that he is a suspect. Dix remembers that Laurel saw him letting Mildred out of his apartment, which Laurel confirms when brought in for questioning. Afterwards Dix strikes up conversation with Laurel and their mutual attraction is evident. When he gets home, Dix checks up on Laurel. He finds she is an aspiring actress with only a few low-budget films to her credit. They begin to fall in love and, with Laurel assisting him, Dix enthusiastically goes back to work, much to Mel's delight.

At a dinner with Nicolai and his wife, Sylvia, Dix has them re-enact the murder as he imagines it; his odd behavior leads Sylvia to doubt his innocence. Captain Lochner meets with Laurel again and sows seeds of doubt in her mind, as he has fixated on Dix's record of violent behavior. Laurel confides to Sylvia her growing doubts about Dix.

At a nightclub with Laurel, Dix spots Ted Barton, another detective, arriving with a female companion. Dix angrily leaves, believing that Barton is tailing him. Later, Laurel's masseuse Martha warns her about Dix's chequered romantic past, and Laurel grows irritated, kicking her out of the apartment. At a beach party with the Nicolais, Sylvia inadvertently reveals Laurel's follow-up meeting with Lochner; Dix furiously storms off. Laurel follows and gets into Dix's car; he drives erratically and at speed until they sideswipe another car. Nobody is hurt, but when the other driver accosts him, Dix beats him unconscious and is about to strike him with a large rock when Laurel stops him.

Background

When Edmund H. North adapted the story, he stuck close to the original source and John Derek was considered for the role of Steele because in the novel the character was much younger. North's treatment was not used.

Andrew Solt developed the screenplay with regular input from producer Robert Lord and director Nicholas Ray, and the result is far different from the source novel. Solt claimed that Bogart loved the script so much that he wanted to make it without revisions – Solt maintains that the final cut is very close to his script – but further research shows that Ray made regular rewrites, some added on the day of shooting. In fact, only four pages of the 140-page script had no revisions. The film was produced by Bogart's Santana Productions company. The firm's first movie was Knock on Any Door (1949), which was also directed by Ray and starred Bogart and Derek in the leading roles.

Louise Brooks wrote in her essay "Humphrey and Bogey" that she felt it was the role of Dixon Steele in this movie that came closest to the real Bogart she knew.

Before inertia set in, he played one fascinatingly complex character, craftily directed by Nicholas Ray, in a film whose title perfectly defined Humphrey's own isolation among people. In a Lonely Place gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the character's pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart.

The original ending had Steele strangling Gray to death in the heat of their argument. Sgt. Nicolai comes to tell Steele that he has been cleared of Mildred's murder but arrests him for killing Gray. Steele tells Brub that he is finally finished with his screenplay; the final shot was to be of a page in the typewriter which has the significant lines Steele said to Gray in the car (which he admitted to not knowing where to put) "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me". This scene was filmed halfway through the shooting schedule, but Ray hated the ending he had helped write. Ray later said, "I just couldn't believe the ending that Bundy (screenwriter Andrew Solt) and I had written. I shot it because it was my obligation to do it. Then I kicked everybody off stage except Bogart, Art Smith and Gloria. And we improvised the ending as it is now. In the original ending we had ribbons so it was all tied up into a very neat package, with Lovejoy coming in and arresting him as he was writing the last lines, having killed Gloria. Huh! And I thought, shit, I can't do it, I just can't do it! Romances don't have to end that way. Marriages don't have to end that way, they don't have to end in violence. Let the audience make up its own mind what's going to happen to Bogie when he goes outside the apartment."

Reception

Critical response

At the time of its original release, the reviews were generally positive (in particular many critics praised Bogart and Grahame's performances), but many questioned the marketability given the bleak ending. The staff at Variety magazine in May 1950 gave the film a good review and wrote,

In In a Lonely Place Humphrey Bogart has a sympathetic role though cast as one always ready to mix it with his dukes. He favors the underdog; in one instance he virtually has a veteran, brandy-soaking character actor (out of work) on his very limited payroll ... Director Nicholas Ray maintains nice suspense. Bogart is excellent. Gloria Grahame, as his romance, also rates kudos.

Bosley Crowther lauded the film, especially Bogart's performance and the screenplay, writing,

Everybody should be happy this morning. Humphrey Bogart is in top form in his latest independently made production, In a Lonely Place, and the picture itself is a superior cut of melodrama. Playing a violent, quick-tempered Hollywood movie writer suspected of murder, Mr. Bogart looms large on the screen of the Paramount Theatre and he moves flawlessly through a script which is almost as flinty as the actor himself. Andrew Solt, who fashioned the screenplay from a story by Dorothy B. Hughes and an adaptation by Edmund H. North, has had the good sense to resolve the story logically. Thus Dixon Steele remains as much of an enigma, an explosive, contradictory force at loose ends when the film ends as when it starts.

Not unlike Ray's debut They Live by Night (1948), it was advertised as a straight thriller although the film does not fit easily into one genre, as the marketing shows. Ray's films had a brief revival in the 1970s and Bogart's anti-hero stance gained a following in the 1960s, and the French Cahiers du cinéma critics during the 1950s praised Ray's unique film making. Time magazine, which gave the film a negative review upon its initial release, called it one of the 100 best films of all time in their 2005 list.

Critic Ed Gonzalez wrote in 2001, "Not unlike Albert Camus' The Stranger, Nicholas Ray's remarkable In a Lonely Place represents the purest of existentialist primers ... Gray and Dixon may love each other but it's evident that they're both entirely too victimized by their own selves to sustain this kind of happiness. In the end, their love resembles a rehearsal for the next and hopefully less complicated romance. This is the existential endgame of one of Ray's smartest and most devastating masterpieces."

In popular culture

The 1986 song "In a Lonely Place" by the Smithereens, from the album Especially For You, was inspired by the film. Its chorus, "I was born the day I met you, lived a while when you loved me, died a little when we broke apart," is taken directly from the movie's dialogue.

In Season 2, Episode 1 of the TV show Frasier (1994), an author reads from his book lines echoing the film's: "I budded when you kissed me. I withered when you left me. I bloomed a few months while you loved me."

Comparisons to novel

In a Lonely Place was based on the 1947 novel of the same name by Dorothy B. Hughes. Some controversy exists between admirers of the film and admirers of the novel (who view the film as a watered down adaptation), as Edmund H. North's script takes some elements of the novel but is ultimately a different story. Hughes was not bothered by the changes made by North and praised Grahame's performance as Gray.

The strongest difference between the two works lies in the protagonist; the film's Dixon Steele is a screenwriter with an unconventional life and a decent person with fatally poor impulse control, prone to wild overreaction when enraged. The novel's Steele is a limited third-person view from Steele's perspective, reminiscent of the first-person in noir, à la The Killer Inside Me. Steele is a charlatan who pretends to be a novelist while sponging money from his overbearing uncle. While still receiving what he perceives as a small monthly allowance from his uncle, Steele murders a wealthy young man and assumes his identity, in a manner similar to Patricia Highsmith's later Tom Ripley. The film follows the question of whether Steele finally went too far in his anger and committed the murder to a tragic end. Even though he is proved innocent, his rage at the cloud of suspicion has driven the woman he loves away for good. No question of Steele's innocence exists in the novel, which follows the investigation of a murder Steele plainly committed and his interference in the investigation for his own ends.

Curtis Hanson, in the DVD featurette 'In A Lonely Place Revisited', further analyses the similarities and differences between the novel and the film. He notes that there is a parallel in the film between Steele's adaptation of a novel for film and the adaptation of In a Lonely Place for film. He also notes that a difference between Steele in the film and Steele in the novel is found in the way he treats women. In the novel Steele pursues women and the first chapter details his pursuit of a woman. In the film, Steele is pursued by women.

Hughes' novel was out of print for decades, until re-released by The Feminist Press at CUNY in 2003, which edition was still in print in 2010. Penguin Books published a paperback edition in the UK in 2010 as part of their Modern Classics imprint, and the Library of America included it in the first volume of their "Women Crime Writers" collection. The novel has been available from New York Review of Books Classics since 2017.