Time for a depressing one, but it’s a good one.
First off, who likes film noir? I do! I do! And who like Humphrey Bogart? Psh. Who doesn’t like Bogey!
In a Lonely Place features Bogart as a Hollywood screenwriter named Dixon Steele struggling to create a big hit as he did in his heyday. Dix is presented as the typical academic artist of the 50s, rather broody and hot tempered balanced with a sarcastic humor and a sickness of the Tinsel Town B.S. Despite being presented as having a certain moral code, Dixon is also revealed to be violent both to men and women. He’s under orders to adapt a popular novel, but the idea of having to read something he considers trash depresses him. He invites a young hatcheck girl who has already read the book to his place simply so she can summarize the novel for him and save him some trouble. And the night is revealed to be exactly that. The young Mildred gives him a dramatic retelling, drinks a ginger ale, then leaves to catch a cab which Dix pays for. Before she goes, they have a talk about her love life, as Mildred broke a date to be at that innocent storytelling event. Dix points out that she’s not in love with her would-be beau.
“Are you a mind reader?”
“Most writers like to think they are.”
Then, poor Mildred ends up murdered and Steele, under suspicion, asks his neighbor to confirm that he never left his apartment after the girl left. Gloria Grahame plays the pretty blonde neighbor Laurel Gray. This is the start of a tense, but passionate relationship between the pair. Between her and the murder, Dix delves into his work for the first time in a decade. Laurel acts as his typist and secretary, making sure he eats and sleeps between hours of writing. I wish I could do that, sit for twelve hours straight, but just sitting for that long messes with my brain. I don’t know how Bogey’s character could do it and write something decent. Maybe that’s why he’s a genius?
Now for some gross trivia. Grahame was married to the film’s director Nicholas Ray. She would eventually leave Ray for . . . his son! There was a marriage between her leaving Ray and marrying junior, but . . . She met this guy when he was a teenage boy. Just creepy.
Okay, I guess I should get back to the film and writer/suspect played by Bogart.
Dix has a friend who is policeman named Nicolai (played by Frank Lovejoy who usually played some kind lawman including in one of my favorite films - House of Wax 1953). Dix explains to Nicolai and his wife how he imagines the killer may have strangled Mildred, a scene which sparks the writer’s imagination and creates a sinister grin on his face. Still, he stands by his innocence stating, “I assure you I could never throw a lovely body from a moving car. My artistic temperament wouldn’t permit it . . . You see, we so-called creative artists have a great respect for cadavers. We treat them with the utmost reverence. Put them in soft beds, lay the out on fur rugs, leave them lying at the foot of a long staircase, but we definitely could never throw them from a moving car as though they were cigarette butts.”
This movie speaks to the idea of the secretive and anti-social personalities that writers can cling to. Dix is viewed as a genius, but a rather sick genius and the question of his role in Mildred’s death becomes the primary theme of the story. Any writer can tell you to steer clear of their browser history, but before the internet, writers got their sources from the horse’s mouth, experience, and observation.
Therefore, when Dix obsessive writing and the realization that he’s being tailed by police begins to effect his mental health, Laurel loses confidence in her resolve that he’s innocent. Violence, anger, and the lack of another suspect let the audience also wonder about Dix. The relationships also bring up interesting points about artistic temperament and how it can effect people surround said artist. There are those who seems to know the best, healthiest boundaries like the cop, those who throw themselves into the artist’s life with little thought to their own mental well being like Laurel, and those who simply don’t get it like some of the actors and other Hollywood big shots portrayed. I’m not going to give away whether he did it or not, but I will say this is a good lesson to all writers. Sometimes anti-social behavior can be . . . complicated.
