In a Lonely Place. 1950. USA. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Screenplay by Andrew Solt, Edmund H. North, based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. With Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid. 94 min.
Nicholas Ray's brooding psychological noir stands as one of the most penetrating examinations of masculine rage and self-destructiveness in American cinema. Humphrey Bogart delivers a performance of devastating self-exposure as Dixon Steele, a screenwriter with a violent temper (who happens to live in a reproduction of Ray's actual Hollywood bungalow) who becomes the prime suspect in a homicide investigation. When his neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) provides him with an alibi, a tentative romance develops between them, shadowed (and perhaps enhanced) by her growing fear that he might indeed be capable of murder.
Ray (then married to Grahame amid their own deteriorating relationship) creates a unique blend of tenderness and fury, drawing on his own life to a degree highly unusual in Hollywood filmmaking—a precedent that would profoundly influence the filmmakers of the French New Wave, who saw in Ray's work a model for their own autobiographical cinema.