IN A LONELY PLACE: Blu-ray (Columbia 1950) Criterion Collection
Humphrey
Bogart officially entered the emeritus phase of his career with Nicholas Ray’s
blistering pseudo-noir pressure cooker, In
a Lonely Place (1950); a gritty, often sadistic exposé, superficially
speaking, about fickle Hollywood’s callous treatment and disposable nature of
fame and its stars. Ah me, ‘show
business…like no business I know.’ And Bogart, who with this movie, perhaps
more than any other, disavowed his hard won status as a romantic leading man
(typified by his iconic world-weary Richard Blaine in Casablanca, 1942 and superbly fermented thereafter in his frequent
teaming with wife, Lauren Bacall – To
Have and Have Not, Key Largo, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage), delivers a calculating and vicious performance as
Dixon Steele; a hot-headed Hollywood has been – a writer, the lowest form of
celebrity, already circling the bowl of his own oblivion; high-handedly
mistreating the women who come and go from his life, and, giving virtually
every indication he is capable of practically anything – even the murder of
bubble-headed hatcheck girl, Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart).
In A Lonely Place is perhaps the most disturbing ‘love story’ ever put on the screen;
Bogie’s belligerence turning on a dime with Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), the
platinum fantasy plaything; glacially cool on the outside/a red-hot pistol
whipper lurking just beneath the surface. But Laurel has a heart – a commodity
Dix neither possesses nor harbors a yen to foster in any of his relationships.
Dix is a loner. Arguably, he prefers this God-spot, smug superiority frowning
down on everybody else. His ego is titanic even as his soul is bankrupted.
Whether or not he is willing to acknowledge as much, Dix desperately needs a
woman like Laurel to provide a solid center to his amoral compass. But can she
steer him through every labyrinth his crude tetchiness invites? Arguably, no.
And why should she? Dix has a brilliant mind - alright. But it is preceded by a
champion pair of hard-clenched fists, far too eager to blacken the eye. Anger
management issues do not begin to describe this ‘loose cannon’.
Set against a
jaded post-war America movie-land, paralyzed into submission by cracks in its
seemingly indestructible – if superficially glamorous façade, director,
Nicholas Ray’s carefully triangulated crossfire of repeatedly missed romantic
opportunities builds into an almost Shakespearean-like tragedy of
self-destruction. There is a thread of moral ambiguity that hacks like a
cleaver into virtually every moment Laurel tries to reach her lover; perhaps,
even more indicative of Bogart’s own soured good nature; by 1950, in the
producer’s chair with Santana Productions after having challenged the House
Un-American Activities Committee in Washington; a humiliating experience. As
with Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (release the same year), In A Lonely Place exploits Hollywood’s imploding
den of iniquity as mere springboard for another hellacious crime – murder. Both
movies begin in mysteriously shrouded death, though only Wilder’s finishes with
an extended confessional flashback. Ray’s sad-eyed summation never quite gets
around to this. Neither does it matter because somewhere along the way the
Black Dahlia-esque killing of Mildred Atkinson bleeds a more telling trail back
to Laurel’s grave concerns for Dix; his sinister zeal to keep ole pal, Det.
Sgt. Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) dangling on a string with speculations, just
a game Dix plays as he skirts the particulars of his own innocence…or guilt.
At least in
the movie, Dixon Steele is innocent. Not so in Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 novel
where he does in fact kill Mildred Atkinson and several others who cross his
path in varying fitful psychotic episodes. Interesting, Andrew Solt’s revision
turns Dix’s unbridled rage inward; the anger seeping through as manic,
angst-driven depression; the more explosive episodes written off as part in
parcel of Dix’s volcanic temperament. And Bogart is absolutely brilliant in
managing his own star persona with this counterintuitively repugnant man of
privilege. Bogart can inflict more devastation and transmit more kilowatts of
menace with a single penetrating stare than any amount of gratuitous violence
could spell out. Consider the moment when Dix first begins to suggest to Brub
how Mildred’s murder might have been committed; Dix getting Brub to test his
theory on his own wife, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell) and Brub, so enraptured by Dix’s
hypnotic piecing together of the clues he damn near garrotes Sylvia during the
investigative process.
In a Lonely Place is, as its title unabashedly
implies, an intriguingly bleak affair; arguably, the darkest exorcism of human
foibles yet achieved on the screen. That it manages to narrowly avoid virtually
every pitfall that otherwise could have brought down the heavy sledgehammer of
screen censorship, while remaining vague about Dix’s ethics (he likely has none
or very few scruples to draw upon), creates a tantalizing tightrope, offset by
Burnett Guffey’s noir-ish cinematography. Even the early dawn looks oppressive
in this movie. Setting the plot against the patina of a Hollywood suffering the
slings and arrows of its own disquieting collapse adds yet another subtext of
perversion to this already desperate tale. Exactly who killed Mildred Atkinson?
It probably wasn’t Dix. But even the audience is never entirely certain. The
Edmund H. North/Andrew Solt screenplay takes appalling pleasure and great pains
to reveal nothing except how brutal and nasty Dix can be in a pinch, given only
an ounce of provocation. After all, if a kid on a joyride can provoke such a
confrontation (in an ensuing roadside fistfight, Dix nearly pummels a teen to
death with his bare fists; Bogart, caught with a sadist’s wild-eyed glint of
pure evil; a middle-age madman unexpectedly exposed from under an otherwise
very transparent veneer of rank, cynical respectability) might a naïve girl
like Mildred Atkinson, rejecting his advances, create an even more volatile
mixture of self-loathing and castrating rage; the perfect Molotov cocktail for
murder?
Dix takes
Mildred home on a whim to reprise him of a synopsis to a soapy novel – what
Mildred calls ‘an epic’, after his agent, Mel Lippman (Art Smith) suggests this
could be the winner they have both been waiting for to put Dix’s career back on
top. Alas, after enjoying a ginger ale and some lightly sarcastic badinage,
somewhere between Dix’s gated bungalow and the cabstand, dear ole Millie is
whacked by an unknown assailant. The discovery of her strangulated remains in
the wee hours of the next morning raise more than a few eyebrows and questions,
placing the last 24 hours of Dix’s whereabouts under a microscope as the
police’s number one suspect, despite his utter lack of motivation. In Dix’s
corner are old wartime buddy, Brub Nicolai, presently a detective sergeant on
the L.A. police force, and, Laurel Gray; a scissor-legged, silken smooth cross
between his gal Friday and the traditional sultry femme fatale. In time, Laurel
is revealed as the true innocent of this piece – figuratively bloodied, but
unbound; Dix’s credibility – both public and private – left in tattered ruin as
he laments, “I was born when she kissed
me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”
In A Lonely Place teeters on the verge of becoming
just another psychologically dense puff piece a la the likes of a Spellbound (1945) or Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) in which
all of the woes plaguing our protagonist can be – and generally are – resolved,
simply by connecting the psycho-babble dots in a past regression. Instead,
Nicholas Ray eschews any sort of concrete deconstruction to get to the truth,
neither analyzing nor probing Dixon Steele’s thought processes; ditching the
elegant psychoanalysis in the former example, but never veering quite so
completely into the grotesqueness of Grand Guignol that is truly horrifying in
the latter. The parallels between Dixon Steele and Bogart cannot be dismissed –
Bogart, scarred by the lacerating critical backlash incurred from his defense
of the ‘Hollywood 10’; forced to publish an ‘admission’ he being ‘duped’ by their Communist influences.
Bogart – the man – if not his career, was wounded by this enforced compliance,
causing him to temporarily recoil in shame. The episode would continue to haunt
Bogart privately for the rest of his life. The irony was perhaps not lost on
Nicholas Ray; a one-time card-carrying member of the Communist Party, never
investigated, much less indicted by HUAC for his former alliances; quietly left
to observe the malaise swirling around Bogart’s naïve altruism. “He was more than an actor,” Ray would
later concur, “…the very image of our
condition whose face was a living reproach.”
In A Lonely Place owes a lot to Bogart’s
remorseless portrait of Dixon Steele. But the ballast of its success goes to
Nicholas Ray’s casting his soon to be ex-wife, Gloria Grahame as Laurel Gray, a
part originally intended for Lauren Bacall. Bacall had made a start of her
career rivaling her husband’s on-screen insolence, barb for barb. But from the
moment, Grahame’s ladylike, if diffident, tart sashays into the police precinct
to confirm Dix’s alibi on the night of the murder, she emanates an aloof
sensitivity that is in complete symbiosis with Dix’s isolation from the rest of
the world; her cocoon, the glacial façade of a blonde bombshell, dipped like a
soft-centered candy bonbon with an uncharacteristically hard-covered shell.
What is Laurel’s story? Hmmm. We get flashes of a more sordid past in Laurel’s
infrequent, though tempestuous exchanges with her masseuse, Martha (Ruth
Gillette); a beefy pseudo-lesbian type who may know enough to blackmail Gray
out of any lasting happiness. For certain, Laurel has been ravaged in ways Dix
cannot even begin to fathom. Not that he would care to try. But like the
Ado-Annie-ish floozy she would later play in The Big Heat (1953); Grahame herein offers up a weirdly empathetic
intelligence, exposing this sadder but wiser girl; imperiously composed at a
glance, but far more fragile and careworn on the inside.
After a brief
main title sequence, set to the world-weary strains of George Antheil’s score, In A Lonely Place opens with a prelude
to the opera that is to follow; Dix, in his convertible, recognized by a
starlet (June Vincent) for whom he wrote the screenplay to her feature debut.
The gal’s husband (Charles Cane) is unimpressed and provokes a confrontation
Dix is only too eager to partake in; the car pulling away and Dix, already
perturbed, now proceeding to his favorite haunt – Paul’s; a carbon copy of the
famed Hollywood hotspot, Romanoffs.
Almost immediately, he is assailed by his agent, Mel Lippman and director,
Lloyd Barnes (Morris Ankrum); fair-weathers, eager to bleed the last drops of
his creative genius onto a project as unworthy, but otherwise possibly
salvageable with his talents. In short order, Nicholas Ray introduces us to the
green hatcheck girl Mildred Atkinson who has been reading the novel Mel hopes
to entice Dix to turn into a movie. She refers to the book as ‘an epic’. Dix is
mildly amused by how little Mildred knows about great literature or even good
writing. In these early moments, we also get a sense of Dix’s compassion for lost
causes, perhaps recognizing how easily today’s much-in-demand commodity can
become yesterday’s ostracized outcast overnight. Case in point: Charlie
Waterman (Robert Warwick), a one-time leading man reduced to bleary-eyed
alcoholic reminiscences at the bar. Barnes and Lippman would prefer a booth,
but Dix sits next to this fallen idol adding, “What’s wrong with right here? He’s not contagious.”
It does not
take long for Dix’s temper to get the better of him; Barnes’ mild condemnation
of Dix’s refusal to work on anything he doesn’t like met with some violent
finger pointing. “You know what you are?” Dix suggests, “A popcorn salesman. You haven’t had a flop because you’ve made the
same picture over and over again for the last twenty years.” In short order, an unnamed executive, Junior
(Lewis Howard) turns up, gregarious and raving about the prevue he has just
attended, in tandem criticizing Charlie as a drunkard that his father once had
the misfortune to turn into a star. His comments incur Dix’s wrath. He flies
off the handle and gives ‘Junior’ a good sock in the jaw. A full-out brawl is
narrowly averted, leaving Dix to illustrate that his disgust for humanity at
large is not exclusively focused on the chest-thumping male of the species,
cruelly dashing aside the flirtatious invites of a former flame, Fran Randolph
(Alix Talton). Not long thereafter, Mildred returns with the book. Dix finds
her eagerness amusedly infectious and suggests she accompany him back to his
bungalow. Getting the wrong impression, Dix informs Mildred his interests in
her are purely professional. Now
relieved, she willingly cancels a previous date to go home with him instead. In
the forecourt of Dix’s gated bungalow at the Beverly Patio Apartments we meet
Laurel Gray – a neighbor, slinking past them with watchful eyes.
While Dix
retires to his bedroom to change into more comfortable clothes, Mildred begins
to relay the novel’s plot to him from the next room. It becomes painfully clear
to Dix that what Mildred calls ‘an epic’ is actually second-rate romantic pulp
of the worst vintage; real trash and B-grade filler that in no way motivates
him to write the screenplay. He thanks Mildred for her time, pays her off and
sends her on her way. Disgusted by the prospect of committing himself to another
flop, Dix retires for the night instead. Too bad for Dix, that in the wee hours
of the morning he is awakened by Brub Nicholai. It is not a social call. Since
leaving the army, Brub has become a detective sergeant on the Beverly Hills
police force. It seems the body of Mildred Atkinson was discovered in Benedict
Canyon, dumped from a moving car; the trail leading back to Dix’s bungalow. At
the police station, Capt. Lochner (Carl Benton Reid) rides Dix hard, suggesting
twenty dollars paid for more than Mildred’s cab fare and that any gentleman
would have called for a cab, rather than leave a young girl to go in search of
one on her own. “Oh, I didn’t say I was a
gentleman,” Dix glibly replies, “I
said that I was tired.”
Lochner is
unimpressed. Believing he has already found his man, he orders Brub to stick
like glue to Dix; certain, Dix will eventually provide the slip-up to
effectively announce his guilt. Lochner also calls Laurel Gray in for
questioning. Alas, she confirms Dix’s story instead. While Mildred was at Dix’s
earlier in the evening, it is also true she left his bungalow alone, exactly as
he stated. Mel is horrified to learn his client is under investigation for
murder. But Dix delights in tormenting his agent with his noncommittal
explanation of his whereabouts. A short while later, Brub invites Dix to dinner
at his home; Brub’s wife, Sylvia, unconvinced of Dix’s innocence, particularly
after Dix’s reenactment of the crime causes Brub to narrowly avoid strangling
his own wife. Sylvia prefers her men conventionally handsome and average. Brub,
however, admits he has gleaned more pertinent knowledge of how the crime might
have been committed in five minutes from listening to Dix than from all his
many hours of investigative legwork thus far. Meanwhile, Dix makes a play for
Laurel. She is willing and receptive and soon becomes the muse to inspire Dix
to write his best screenplay to date. Laurel could not be happier. But her
masseuse, Martha, keeps needling her to pursue a more profitable relationship
with a former flame, Mr. Baker.
Dix and Laurel
join Brub and Sylvia for a moonlit bonfire on the beach. But the mood turns
from palpably romantic to contemptuous when Sylvia inadvertently reveals Laurel
has been in Lochner’s office more recently to answer another round of
questions. Suspecting Laurel has been getting closer simply to help Brub and
Lochner pin Mildred’s murder on him, Dix flies off the handle. He drives like a
madman with Laurel in tow, racing down the narrowly winding coastal highway; confronted
by a teenage driver, John Mason (Don Hamin) whom he almost sideswipes. Dix and
John get into it, Dix pummeling the college football star to the ground until
he is unconscious. Laurel can plainly see Dix is out of control. Possibly, she
fears for her own safety too. Without a doubt, it is a turning point in their
relationship. Laurel confides her fears to Sylvia who suggests she should go
away to clear her head and decide either to continue or break off her
relationship with Dix. Meanwhile, Dix attempts to make a mends by wiring John
money to repair his car. For the next little while, Laurel tries to reach Dix.
However, increasingly she begins to fall out of love with him. Thus, by the
time Mel arrives to check up on Dix’s progress with the script, Laurel has
already made up her mind not to marry him. She offers Mel the screenplay and
prepares to pack up and leave. But Dix returns home early, as yet unaware of
her intentions, and invited by Mel and Fran to dinner at Paul’s. Regrettably,
once again, Dix’s ire is raised when Fran confides she cannot wait to begin
work on the new film Dix has written; Mel endeavoring to cover up the fact
Laurel gave him the screenplay.
Having once
been dishonest and nearly ruined her own chances for happiness, Laurel comes
clean and reveals to Dix she gave the script to Mel. When a private call comes
in for Laurel, Dix intervenes, suspecting it to be her former lover/sugar
daddy, Mr. Baker. Mel tries to reason with Dix but it’s no use. Dix slugs Mel
in the face; a humiliating moment, capped off by Dix’s realization Mel was
right about his screenplay. It is a hit with the producers and with Barnes, who
cannot wait to begin shooting. By all accounts, Dix is back on top; except, the
phone call he intercepted is actually Martha - not Baker. Mel is willing to let
bygones be bygones. Though demoralized, he will remain Dix’s agent. However,
Laurel has suddenly realized Dix will never change. He may not be a murderer,
but he is decidedly a loose cannon and a bully. It is time to cut her losses,
move out and move on. Meanwhile, Capt. Lochner is chagrined when an unknown
man, Tesla, confesses to Mildred’s murder. So, Dix really is ‘clean’ after all.
Brub tries to telephone the good news. But Dix is not home, having stormed
Laurel’s bungalow under the misguided notion she is cheating on him. Despite
her protestations, Dix remains suspicious; unaware she has plans to escape his
tyranny with an impromptu trip to New York. When Dix repeatedly badgers Laurel,
then threatens her with the possibility of physical harm, she pleads for his
understanding. Thwarted in the nick of time by Brub’s phone call; Lochner’s
apology comes much too late to make any difference in their future as a couple.
The affair that burned searing white hot is at an end. As Dix leaves Laurel’s
apartment for the last time, utterly defeated and for parts unknown – certain
to come to no good, a tearful Laurel murmurs the memorable line from Dix’s
movie script, “I was born when she kissed
me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me”,
adding, “Goodbye, Dix.”
In A Lonely Place is the purgatory of all truly
heartbreaking love stories; the antithesis of romance, for sure. Director,
Nicholas Ray builds on an intensity of misdirection; that Dixon Steele has somehow
murdered Mildred Atkinson in a fit of rage. Initially, it all plays out as a
hunch, blossoming into more than a distinct likelihood until the very end. Even
if Dix has not killed Mildred, he certainly possesses both the temperament and
predilection towards uncontrollable violence that, left unchallenged, almost
resulted in at least one murder – the aforementioned bludgeoning to the brink
of death of U.C.L.A. athlete, John Mason. And in these penultimate moments of
farewell, Ray does more than hint that without Laurel as his buffer Dixon
Steele will come to no good, despite having dodged Lochner’s impassioned police
frame-up for this crime. In hindsight, the Red Scare’ is written all over this
movie; the tabloid-esque quality of its police procedural and nightmarish
fantasy element of its flagrante delicto – I hesitate referring to Laurel and
Dix’s brief relationship as either a ‘whirlwind romance’ or ‘love affair’ (more
like the Texas-sized tornado of torrid liaisons) – is permeated by political
subtext. Without a doubt, Bogart was feeling the sting of HUAC’s heedless
spank, in hindsight, most fortunate McCarthy’s slap down did not escalate to
career-derailing proportions that had befallen a great many iconoclastic
talents along the way. Co-star, Art Smith’s career would not survive this
deluge; Smith utterly ruined a few short years after the release of In A Lonely Place when he was fingered
as a Communist by his erstwhile ‘friend’, director, Elia Kazan.
Having
narrowly dodged his own run in with McCarthyism, Nicholas Ray would prove an
influential figure to the burgeoning French New Wave; his reputation in
Hollywood dogged by speculations of rumored – though never proven –
bisexualism. By 1960, Ray’s liberal usage of various drugs and alcohol had overrun
his clear-eyed professionalism. While shooting 55 Days at Peking (1963) he suffered a complete physical collapse,
withdrawing from film-making for almost a decade, by which time it had become
rather obvious to his closest friends he was suffering from more than his
addictions, his health in very steep decline. Becoming a professor of film
studies during these emeritus years, Ray continued to produce and direct modest
movies in conjunction with his students. He died of lung cancer on June 16,
1979; ironically the same week as John Wayne, whom he had directed in Flying Leathernecks in 1951; today,
regarded as Ray’s least distinguished movie. Ironically, In A Lonely Place was the antithesis of Ray’s own prospects in
Hollywood circa 1950, the pendulum of his career decidedly on the upswing. For
the briefest of wrinkles in time, Nicholas Ray occupied an enviable position as
an irrefutable trendsetter/trailblazer with such daring classics as Johnny Guitar (1953), Rebel Without A Cause (1954), Bigger Than Life (1956) and Party Girl (1958) pushing the envelope
on every hell-raising/hair-raising wickedness, from teen delinquency/gang
violence, to drug abuse and prostitution, rocking the Eisenhower era’s insular
view of America; the beautiful. In A
Lonely Place is distinctly a prologue piece to this memorable period in
Ray’s career and something of an epilogue to the Hollywood that was – or rather,
never was, but affectingly pretended to be during the golden thirties and well on into the
1940’s. It survives today as a blistering piece of post-war American cinema
with a shockingly bleak performance from Humphrey Bogart.
I will simply
go on record and state that it would have been prudent of Sony to remaster In A
Lonely Place in 4K, considering this is fast becoming the technical standard
bearer in an industry insidiously pushing for the upgrade, but without actually
possessing any truly inspired content to view in this ultra-hi-def format. But
no, Criterion's ‘new’ Blu-ray is sourced from a 2K digital restoration done a
few years back, overseen and curated in their vaults until now by Grover
Crisp’s exceptional team of archivists and restoration experts. I really cannot
fault the results. In A Lonely Place
in 1080p easily bests the tired old DVD transfer from 2002, offering superior
resolution, exceptional tonality and film grain that, at long last, appears
naturally thick instead of rather hazily soft and artificially clumpy. Fine details
are brought to the forefront while age-related artifacts have been diminished
and/or eradicated for a very impressive and consistent rendering. Honestly,
there is virtually nothing to complain about here; the limitations of
Columbia’s source materials resulting in some less than perfect, though
forgivable moments scattered throughout. The scene taking place in the dewy wee
hours after Dix’s initial police interrogation, as he offers a young man
cleaning the sidewalks a few bucks to send flowers to Mildred Atkinson’s
funeral, still looks rough and underexposed, as example. We won’t poo-poo the
results, however, because the effort put forth is satisfying on the whole.
Criterion’s PCM mono is more than adequate; George Antheil’s score sounding
marvelous and dialogue front and center, with a very crisp resonance.
Criterion pads
out the extras. We have perhaps come to expect such plush accoutrements from
Criterion when in reality we really ought to give sincere thanks to Jon
Mulvaney and his team at Criterion, as they remain the only company to
consistently apply such a mantra and dedication to virtually every home video
release long before the birth of hi-def. Herein, we get a thorough audio
commentary from NYU prof, Dana Polan. Aside: I really wish Polan would
contribute more tracks like this one to Criterion’s upcoming slate of releases.
Honestly, I cannot find enough plaudits to recommend his work both elsewhere
and herein. We also get a newly produced 16 minute reflection on Gloria Grahame
by biographer, Vincent Curcio; too brief, but nevertheless fascinating in the
tidbits of information he provides. Ported over from the DVD is director,
Curtis Hanson’s 20 min. ‘In A Lonely Place Revisited’; Hanson
returning to the famed apartments where Nicholas Ray shot the bulk of his
movie, to retrace the director’s steps and reminisce about the movie and its
legacy.
Criterion has
also unearthed I’m a Stranger Here Myself; a 1975 documentary on Nicholas Ray
curiously condensed from its original runtime of an hour to 40 min. Given
allowances for excised TV commercial breaks, I am uncertain exactly what else
in the way of actual content was omitted to account for this 20 min. gap. As
with a lot of vintage ‘bio’ puff pieces made in the 70s, this one stacks the
deck with noteworthy names apart from Ray to provide context and snippets of
commentary; Francois Truffaut, John Houseman and Natalie Wood among its
cavalcade. Finally, there is the
hour-long radio adaptation from 1948; arguably, more faithful to Dorothy B.
Hughes’ novel, with Robert Montgomery and Laurene Tuttle as its stars. As
expected, we also get liner notes, these featuring a critical essay by Imogen
Sara Smith. Bottom line: very highly recommended!
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
4.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
4
EXTRAS
4
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