In a Lonely Place

This was a very interesting role for Humphrey Bogart, and was a bit of a production code buster on several levels. Bogart plays Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele, who is in somewhat of a writing rut. He also has a quick temper and a paranoia complex. He picks fights with people over the most routine matters and these fights commonly come to blows. He is indeed "in a lonely place" of his own making. Steele has a chance to write a screenplay based on a book, but the author wants him to read the book and give him his opinion in just a matter of a few days. At the restaurant where Steele has talked with the author, the hat check girl says she has just read the book and loves it. Steele invites her to come over to his apartment and tell him about the book to save him the trouble of reading it. This is all very innocent in what Steele intends and in what actually happens. In fact, Steele's reaction, unseen and unheard by the hat check girl, to her semi-literate oral book report is wickedly funny. This shows us Steele's charming and funny side. After the girl tells her story, she leaves. Neighbor Laurel Grey (Gloria Grahame) sees her leave. However, the next day, the girl's strangled body is found next to a road. The police quickly find their way back to Steele's place where, due to his violent past and nonchalant reaction to the murder, he is under immediate suspicion. He finds an alibi in his neighbor Laurel, and this is how they formally meet. Almost immediately the two begin a relationship that gets serious fast. Laurel finds Steele attentive and interesting. Thus at first Laurel thinks Steele is innocent of the murder, but one by one her doubts grow. Steele explodes over little things, even eventually punching out his own agent over nothing. In fact, Steele's agent is his only real friend and actually is a bit of an enabler for his bad behavior. You always see Steele show his idea of remorse for his actions, even anonymously sending money to a guy he has beaten up over a traffic accident. However, the question that is left to be answered is - exactly what is going on with this guy? Could he have stalked and killed the girl over his anger at something else or someone else entirely? And if he didn't kill the hat check girl, will he eventually kill someone else? Laurel is asking these same questions as she begins to wonder - is it more dangerous to try and run away from Steele, or is it more dangerous to stay? One should never consider saying "yes" to a marriage proposal if it comes down to what is less dangerous. Laurel is not exactly a finished book herself. Apparently she had a serious relationship with a well-off man just prior to this, and ended it for really no tangible reason. Then there is a kind of gay subtext going on between herself and her masseuse, Martha. They only have one scene together but it certainly throws out more questions than answers, just like the rest of this film. If you like noir, if you like Bogart, if you like being challenged, watch this film.

Another reviewer asks why don't people like this film. Very simply the character Humphrey Bogart plays is such a jerk no one can have any sympathy for him. In a Lonely Place finds Humphrey Bogart casts as a brilliant, but egotistical writer, who has a hair trigger temper and beats up on people when things don't go his way. Norman Mailer who as I remember back in the day was always involved in all kinds of scrapes must have been the model used for Bogey's character of Dixon Steele. Anyway a script girl played by Martha Stewart comes over one night and gives him the synopsis of a trashy novel that the movie studio which employs Bogart wants him to adapt. Later that night Stewart is murdered and Bogart is a natural suspect given his violent proclivities and the fact he was the last person to see her alive. A neighbor, Gloria Grahame, gives Bogart an alibi by stating to the police that she saw Stewart leave Bogart's apartment alive and healthy. The police aren't satisfied, but they cut Bogart loose. And Bogey and Gloria get to kanoodling. The rest of the film is their rough and rocky courtship punctuated by displays of a violent temper on Bogart's part. So bad that I lost interest in the character. I couldn't work up any sympathy or rooting interest in Bogart. Especially when he uses agent Art Smith as a punching bag and shows Grahame what he has in store for her. The only thing good out of this film depending on your point of view was that Gloria Grahame met and married director Nicholas Ray on the set. In a Lonely Place was a dreadful mistake all around. Bogart's character was impossible and Gloria Grahame wasn't as slinky and seductive as she normally is. Just a disappointment in general.

I like Bogart . . . I'm a fan . . . however, (SPOILER ALERT!!! from here on out) the character he plays in this movie has got to be one of the biggest assholes ever! It isn't really explained WHY he is a supreme asshole -- he just is. And, if you "love" him, you are just supposed to tolerate it. An ex-Army buddy says, "He's dynamite and bound to explode once in a while -- ya gotta take the good with the bad." Maybe it wasn't the army buddy -- it may have been his "agent" (whom he socks around). Dix (Bogart) gets accused of murdering a young woman he'd been seen leaving a club with. He is a primary suspect for pretty much the entire movie. I (personally) never believed he killed her. I think the audience is "clued in" early on that he did not. So, there's no suspense there. It may have been a better film if the audience wasn't informed of this and we were all wondering, "Did he do it?" An attractive woman who lives in the same building complex eyes him and lets him know that she "Likes what she sees". So, pretty soon they are a "couple." But, as much as she likes/loves this guy, she also realizes he is not quite "normal". At one point she sees him lose control and almost beat a guy to death with his fists (and about to bash his head in with a rock) over a traffic incident! I did enjoy the locale, sets, and some of the scenery. The acting is pretty good. But I'm not sure anyone under 60 would enjoy this B&W film, which is quite dated compared to the tastes and standards of 2015. The movie is mostly much ado about nothing. What is the point? The point is (I hope), if you EVER encounter a guy like Bogie, RUN (don't walk) the other way! There IS "something wrong with him" lady. You are right! This movie came out in 1950 and I hope that Bogie wasn't any kind of 'role model' for anyone with *this* film. He is the kind of guy that gives "guys" (in general) a bad name.

There was a brave and smart twist to the 'man alone' theme in an unusually literate thriller which isolated its ambivalent hero having conflicting feelings inside his own negative personality... This man was not physically isolated as Robert Ryan ('Inferno') had been: he was an embittered Hollywood screenwriter who needed self-discipline and trust… The lonely place in which he was trapped was his own mind... Perhaps some people thought Bogart over-acted, played the writer like a criminal aggressively apt to be easily offended... but he played his role well. No gangster this time, or cop, or private eye... He was a Hollywood screenwriter—strong, easily annoyed, depressed; his nerve-ends constantly steaming; living alone with his talent, his reputation and his typewriter; impulsive rather than strengthened by a diet of alcohol and nicotine… His savage temper was uncontrollable: anything, it seemed, could explode it; and his violence was more than merely verbal Bogart found himself capable of murder... He might have been anti-social... But the stress within him, reacting to the pressures without, built up so strongly that his rages, always near boiling point, became explosive... He hit people without good reason... One watched the reactions of his dream girl, the beautiful blonde Gloria Grahame, and his two close friends... With them, one came to wonder if he was not really a murderer after all...

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, 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. Yet, Ray never takes the easy way out of having Bogart turn monster on her. You care deeply about these people, hoping desperately (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 terrible wonder to behold. The shadows suffusing this excellent film come not from UFA-influenced lighting but from moral and spiritual desolation, the death throes of old Hollywood, the coming of McCarthyism and the Black Dahlia murder of 1947. But most of all, they're projected from within the characters themselves. The finest work of Bogart, Grahame and Ray. Special note should be taken of Ray and Grahame, whose own deteriorating relationship formed the template for the doomed lovers; for them, this film is an act of great courage. Bogart himself has taken elements of all his previous romantic loners and blended them with the sour pigments of Fred C Dobbs; as the star and executive producer, his performance is unflinching in its honesty, and as fearless as Grahame and Ray. See this movie.

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." Powerful, emotionally real and devastating, with one of Bogart's most complex roles he ever played and maybe his Greatest Performance. One of the best Noirs i've seen 'til Date, i Highly Recommend it.

Bogart stretches his acting muscles and allows his vulnerability to be on display in this realistic gut-wrenching love story. Gloria Grahame, one of the underrated great US actresses of the 40's and 50's, has an electrifying chemistry with Bogie, touching a side that we'd never seen -- not even with Lauren Bacall, laced with an odd kind of violent tenderness. Frank Lovejoy heads a fantastic supporting cast, heavy on three-dimensional characterisations. This unknown classic is Bogie's most complete performance ever. I give it 10 out of 10.