Customer Reviews

In a Lonely Place

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

IN A LONELY PLACE is a brilliant film from director Nicholas Ray. Humphrey Bogart with his usual cragged-faced presence dominates the screen once again. This time he is a man totally introverted and obsessed with some hidden lack of ability to express his own compassion and humanity. Bogart plays an elusive Hollywood screenwriter named Dixon Steele that becomes the focus of a police investigation of a murder in this atmospheric and unsettling film. What makes the film so unsettling is Bogart's performance. He is a very enigmatic, private and tired man who at times seems so detached from reality that it is frightening. Yet Bogart in this role still posses a virile and cynical coolness of style that is so appealing and it is one that only he can pull off with his screen charisma bringing this character to reality and believability.

In the film Bogart lives in a complex of courtyard apartments. The police investigation interferes with a relationship that Bogart has with Gloria Grahame who lives in the same complex. Bogart comes to be intrigued (and visa versa) by her and truly falls in love with her. Yet it is the police investigation that continues to intensify Bogart's inner struggle as a human being with his need to love and be loved and escalates his volatile and violent outbursts which confuse and distance Grahame from him.

IN A LONELY PLACE examines such human qualities and frailties of love, trust and loyalty. It explores and exposes the effects of our interpretations, perceptions and misconceptions and ultimately demonstrates that our own human flaws can lead to perpetual loneliness of the heart if left unchecked. IN A LONELY PLACE is an outstanding and important film.

This is one of those 50+ year old classics. The acting is superb and the story is typical 'film noir' of that era. It even has bluesy song performance in the middle of the movie to add to the mood. The dvd transfer is just amazing .A sharp clear picture throughout......there's also a very nice selection of bonus features........5 stars !

Columbia Pictures presents "IN A LONELY PLACE" (1950) (94 min/B&W) -- Starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid & Art Smith

Directed by Nicholas Ray

Screenwriter Dixon Steele, faced with the odious task of scripting a trashy bestseller, has hat-check girl Mildred Atkinson tell him the story in her own words. Later that night, Mildred is murdered and Steele is a prime suspect; his record of belligerence when angry and his macabre sense of humor tell against him. Fortunately, lovely neighbor Laurel Gray gives him an alibi. Laurel proves to be just what Steele needed, and their friendship ripens into love. Will suspicion, doubt, and Steele's inner demons come between them?

Despite the fact that the plot is ostensibly a 'did he do it?' crime story, this is largely inconsequential to the psychological character and relationship study that is the central concern of the film. The script is smart, witty and cynical, just like a typical Bogart character. But in this film Bogart plays probably his darkest character. The cynical, darker aspects of this film just go to highlight how few contemporary films are prepared to be so bleak.

In some of the scenes with Gloria Grahame he's at his smooth, wisecracking, slightly irritable best, but in the moments where the anger and the fog of despair descends he is a more threatening character than in any of his other leading man roles.

If you like a cracking script with sharp performances, with all kinds of deep psychological observations on love and loneliness to be read into it, in the best noir tradition, this is the film for you.

"In A Lonely Place" could be director Nicholas Ray's best. It's a fascinating movie that mixes drama, suspense and romance in a very interesting way. You could call it Noir I suppose, but it's a very difficult movie to tie down.

Powerful Bogie noir - often described as one of his best (now that's saying something!)

BIOS:
1. Nicholas Ray [aka: Raymond Nicholas Kienzle] [Director]
Date of Birth: 7 August 1911 - Galesville, Wisconsin
Date of Death: 16 June 1979 - New York City, New York

2. Humphrey Bogart [aka: Humphrey DeForest Bogart]
Date of Birth: 25 December 1899 - New York City, New York
Date of Death: 14 January 1957 - Los Angeles, California

3. Gloria Grahame [aka: Gloria Hallward]
Date of Birth: 28 November 1923 - Los Angeles, California
Date of Death: 5 October 1981 - New York City, New York

4. Frank Lovejoy
Date of Birth: 28 March 1912 - The Bronx, New York
Date of Death: 2 October 1962 - New York City, New York

Mr. Jim's Ratings:
Quality of Picture & Sound: 4 Stars
Performance: 5 Stars
Story & Screenplay: 4 Stars
Overall: 4 Stars [Original Music, Cinematography & Film Editing]

Total Time: 94 min on DVD ~ Columbia Pictures ~ (03/18/2003)

Here's late 1940's early 1950's Film Noir, a love gone wrong drama. Bogart's ugliness, the angles of his forehead, the lines about his mouth are fascinating. Bogart is both violent and tender by body language. A truly remarkable and revealing performance. Not that the dialogue doesn't matter. It's brilliant give and take, literary musings with tough guy and gal repertoire. Gloria Graham is no piker either. She is the beautiful actress, but there is no doubt she loves Dixon Steele the screenwriter and comes to fear him too. I can't imagine another actress of this period pulling off this love story. And we get Bogart in love, a tough, and maybe psychotic guy in love. His manliness is counterpoint to his unprotected psyche. Also homage should be paid to Nicholas Ray's direction. There is a dark LA at night, eyes in the headlights of a post-war Buick feel in his direction. The story is adapted from a potboiler novel, but the adaptation takes it to another level.

"In a Lonely Place" is usually considered a classic example of film noir, although-as other reviewers have pointed out-- it doesn't completely fit the mold. It has much of the darkness and violence typical of the genre, but the main female character(Laurel Gray) is less a classic femme fatale than an ordinary woman who has fallen in love with the wrong man (Dixon Steele, a screen writer whose career is on the skids). Although the background plot of the movie is about a murder investigation with the Steele as the prime suspect (he's innocent), its major focus is really on the man's psychology and the negative impact of his violent streak on those around him.

Bogart is perfect as Dixon Steele, the screen writer with what would now be called "anger management problems." His screen presence oozes with the dangerousness that lies under his character's surface. Gloria Grahame plays Laurel as a basically sweet women who finds herself increasingly uneasy and eventually terrified of her lover's potential for violence. The issue of domestic abuse is never explicitly raised, but it's implicit in Laurel's fear of Steele's dangerous side. The tension builds, the relationship collapses, and in the bittersweet end, both lovers are left in a "lonely place" without each other.

This film was based on a 1947 novel of the same name written by Dorothy Hughes. The novel is a classic example of hard-boiled pulp fiction. Dark as the movie is, the original novel is much darker. In the film version, Steele is a deeply flawed man, but one capable of love as well. In the novel, he's a twisted serial killer with no redeeming features. It's interesting to compare the book and the movie. Even given Bogart's penchant for tough guy roles, it's easy to understand why so many changes were made. Both versions are good, and both are concerned with the violent nature of the main character, but they're really two different works. Watch one, read the other--and enjoy both.

Nicholas Ray's film noir is a departure for Humphrey Bogart and for the film noir genre itself.

Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), a washed-up screenwriter with a flashpoint temper and a violent streak, is equal parts Rick Blaine and Fred C. Dobbs. Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) is the antithesis of the dumb blonde.

The script by Andrew Solt from Dorothy B. Hughes's novel has all the crisp, Chandleresque dialogue of the best film noir but with an emotional intensity not usually associated with the genre. The film works better as a romance between two damaged people than as a crime drama. George Antheil's score works wonders at underscoring their anguish.

Dix's agent Mel Lippmann (Art Smith) asks the old hack to dinner to consider adapting a Harlequinesque romance novel that hack director Lloyd Barnes (Morris Ankrum) is eager to shoot. On the way to the restaurant Dix nearly gets into a fight with a passing motorist and upon arrival at the bar DOES mix it up with some sonofaproducer who calls Dix's old buddy Charlie (Robert Warwick) the washed-up drunkard actor that he is.

The semiliterate coat check girl Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart) gushes about the novel that Dix is up for adapting, so rather than read it, Dix invites her to his apartment to tell him the story. She has to break a date with her boyfriend to do so but as Dix says, "There's no sacrifice too great for a chance at immortality."

When one of Dix's old war-buddies-turned-police-detective Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) pays Dix a visit at 5 a.m., he thinks it's because the producer's son filed a complaint. He's wrong. The coat check girl has been murdered and thrown in a ditch.

Dix's best defence is new neighbor Laurel Gray who saw the girl leave Dix's apartment alone. Dix falls for Laurel because she has a nice face. But she's a little more cautious.

DIXON STEELE: Go ahead and get some sleep and we'll have dinner together tonight.

LAUREL GRAY: We'll have dinner tonight. But not together.

There are plenty of laughs supplied by Art Smith, Robert Warwick, and Ruth Warren as the cleaning lady who can never get either Dix's or Laurel's apartment clean.

At its core, though, IN A LONELY PLACE is about two lonely people who clearly need but will not allow themselves to have each other.

I checked this out of my local library because I am a big fan of Frank Lovejoy's 1950's radio drama "Nightbeat." This film comepletely took me by surprise. Anyone that is a fan of Gloria Grahame (The Greatest Show On Earth) and Humphrey Bogart has just got to see this. Very suspenseful and thought provoking character study of two hollywood lovers dealing with murder suspicions and Bogie's bad temper. So well directed and written I can't even tell you. They sure don't make'em like they used to.

"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-

In the seventies Ray couldn't get work, so film buffs began to think that he was a rebel (unwarranted assumption number one; he could have just been a soak) and that his movies must therefore be too cool for the studio brass (unwarranted assumption number two; they may have just stunk) and if they were too cool for the studio brass they must therefore be great (unwarranted assumption number three; they're not). He also wore an eyepatch, and eyepatch directors are always cool, aren't they? Lang, Ford, Walsh, de Toth. This Ray guy? Nah. Make that unwarranted assumption number four.

This one mainly offends by its dullness. Slow, mushy, unstructured, cursed by a pillowy and nonstop score by George Antheil, free of any menace or suspense or villainy.

Bogart is accused of some crime or other and spends the rest of the movie futzing around his apartment. The neighbor girl, Gloria Grahame, falls for him but begins to question if he's really as innocent as he seems. That's all she does is question; she doesn't do much of anything about it.

This is one heck of a talky film.

As the cops - none of whom can boast even one personality trait among them - lackadaisically pursue their meandering investigation, Bogart and Grahame sit around and talk about not much of anything. The seconds tick by. The viewer listens to the tuneless score. The cleaning lady comes in and asks to vacuum. A washed up silent film star makes several unsuccessful bids for audience sympathy. (I wish he'd been the one who was murdered.) Bogart makes the dull cop act out the murder and Ray shines a little light into his face, I guess because he'd been impressed by Detour five years earlier. Time passes... The viewer realizes that since Bogart produced the thing himself he's not likely to be a bad guy anyway so what are we waiting around for? More time passes... "It's as much a part of him as the color of his eyes, or the shape of his head." That one jolts you awake: the shape of his head?!?! What's that supposed to mean? We go droningly onwards... The cop mentions the investigation has been going on for three weeks, and the snarky viewer says "So, it's filmed in real time then?" More of the lush score; sounds like the Jackie Gleason Orchestra. More dullness. Silent-film-actor-dude recites Shakespeare, though there's not much call for a silent film actor to have memorized Shakespeare, now is there. Drip... Drip... Drip... Like sands through an hourglass... The viewer reaches for the gin bottle with trembling hand.

I dunno if this is the worst film in Ray's unimpressive oeuvre - after all he made a lot of bad films - but I do know that except for Sirocco it's the worst film in Bogart's. Actually, Sirocco got itself quoted in a Dylan song one time, so Lonely Place wins the Razzie by a nose.

If you want to see the cast in movies that don't stink so bad you have to open all your windows to air out the place, then see Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat, Art Smith in Brute Force, Robert Warwick in Silver Lode. If you want a truly great and underrated example of late Bogart, check out his final picture The Harder They Fall.

The starbright status of Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, and Frank Lovejoy fails to carry this crater-filled tale of a woman's worries about the propensity to violence of her beloved. The narrative rises to a promising start with a mysterious murder to which Bogart seems marginally linked, but then the story wanes straightaway into a muddled exploration of his erratic behavior. And given the shaky, shifty ground on which psychology now rests, this study looks like primeval ooze! Is Bogie mentally deranged, artistically tempermental, viciously manipulative, or what? There's never a clear answer, and, given forties/fifties chauvinism, Grahame apparently assumes it's okay if her man roughs up women or bops proteges-- just as long as he's not capable of murder! And there's nothing in the plotline to elucidate her motivations or calculations. There are so many sinkholes in the story that the film seems clumsily overedited. When Bogart and Grahame first meet, they almost immediately make moon-eyes. Next, they're viewed in a writer/secretary relationship that appears almost chaste. He's not paying her, so how is she supporting herself? And what's this about a former lover? Or is that superfluous masseuse her lover? The one merit this movie might have is the challenge to figure it all out!