In a Lonely Place: Bogart's Most Frightening Role

Humphrey Bogart plays a Hollywood screenwriter named Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place, and for the first twenty minutes you think you know the film. Washed-up talent, wisecracks sharper than the room deserves, a cynicism worn like a good coat. Then a young woman is murdered after leaving his apartment, Dix becomes the prime suspect, and the film begins to do something almost no noir of 1950 dared. It stops asking whether he did it and starts asking whether you would want to be in a room with him regardless. By the end, that second question is the only one that matters, and it is far more disturbing than any answer to the first.

Nicholas Ray directed it, one film before Rebel Without a Cause made him a name attached to youth and alienation. It is the best film he made, and it contains the performance that should have retired the idea of Bogart as merely cool.

A murder mystery that loses interest in the murder

The set-up is pure noir plumbing. Dix, a screenwriter who has not had a hit in years, is asked to adapt a trashy bestseller he cannot be bothered to read. He brings the hat-check girl who has read it back to his flat so she can tell him the story, sends her home in a cab, and by morning she is dead. Detective Brub Nicolai, an old army friend, is on the case, and his boss is certain Dix is the killer. Into this walks Laurel Gray, a neighbour who gives Dix an alibi and then falls in love with him.

A conventional thriller would spend its running time gathering evidence toward a verdict. Andrew Solt’s screenplay, adapting Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel, does something stranger. The police investigation recedes into the background and the romance moves to the front, and then the romance itself becomes the investigation. Laurel, watching Dix up close, starts to see the thing the audience has been half-seeing all along: a violence in him that has no off switch, a temper that arrives too fast and enjoys itself too much. The question migrates from the courthouse to the kitchen. She is no longer wondering whether he killed a stranger. She is wondering whether he could kill her, and she is right to wonder.

Why Bogart is so frightening here

Bogart built his stardom on men who were dangerous but ultimately decent — the private eye you could trust, the cynic with the buried code. His Marlowe in The Big Sleep is the template: needling, watchful, always one move ahead, and finally on the side of the angels. Dixon Steele is that same man with the decency scooped out and replaced with something that frightens even the people who love him.

What makes the performance great is that Bogart does not play a monster. He plays a charming, talented, wounded man who is capable of sudden brutality and then genuinely bewildered by the fear it produces in others. There is a scene where Dix, describing how the murder might have happened, becomes so absorbed in the choreography of the killing that his friends go quiet with alarm — and Bogart lets you see that Dix is having a wonderful time, lost in craft, oblivious to what he has just revealed. The horror is not that he is faking normality. The horror is that this is him, the temper and the tenderness the same instrument, and he cannot tell which one is playing.

It helps that the role rhymed uncomfortably with Bogart’s own reputation for a short fuse, and that Ray was directing his own wife, Gloria Grahame, through the disintegration of their marriage while filming her character’s disintegrating trust. The set was reportedly miserable. It shows on screen as truth.

Nicholas Ray and the geometry of a room

Ray was a director who thought spatially, and In a Lonely Place is built around a courtyard apartment complex where Dix and Laurel can see into each other’s windows across a small central space. That architecture does quiet, constant work. Intimacy and surveillance run on the same sightline; the woman who loves Dix is also the woman positioned to watch him, and her window is both an invitation and a lookout. Ray stages the couple’s happiest scenes and their most frightening ones in the same few rooms, so the geography of love and the geography of dread become identical. You stop being able to tell a domestic evening from a stalking.

The craft peak is a scene in a car. Dix, enraged by another driver after a minor collision, beats the man half-senseless and has to be pulled off, and Ray shoots Laurel’s face watching it — the exact moment her feeling for Dix acquires a permanent shadow. Grahame, one of noir’s great faces, plays the whole arc of a relationship curdling in a single reaction shot. She would win an Oscar two years later for a lesser part; this is the performance that should have done it.

Why it works: the film withholds the thing it’s about

The masterstroke is structural. By refusing to resolve the murder cleanly for most of its length, the film forces the audience into Laurel’s exact position — living with a man who might be a killer, unable to be sure, watching for the tell. The uncertainty is not sloppy plotting. It is the entire experience. We are made to love Dix and fear him at the same time, on the same evidence, and the film never lets us set the fear down.

This is the deep ancestor of a whole strain of crime cinema that turns the genre’s machinery on its central character rather than on a mystery. When a modern film wants you to be seduced and repelled by the same man in the same frame — think of the ambitious sociopath at the centre of Nightcrawler, whose charm is the most alarming thing about him — the technique traces back here, to Ray’s willingness to make the protagonist the thing you are afraid of. It is a first cousin to the poison that runs through Sweet Smell of Success a few years later, another film about a man whose talent and cruelty are the same faculty.

Set beside the other titans of its moment, In a Lonely Place is the one that goes furthest inward. The doom in Out of the Past is a matter of fate closing on a man from outside. The doom here comes entirely from within Dix’s own nervous system, which is a far more modern and far more frightening idea of what ruins a life.

There is also a deceptively small formal choice worth flagging for anyone who studies how these films are built. Ray and his cinematographer Burnett Guffey keep the lighting warm and even in the early scenes, closer to a romantic comedy than a thriller, and let the shadows creep in only as Laurel’s fear grows, so the visual style tracks her dawning knowledge rather than the plot’s timeline. The film gets darker as she understands more, which means the images are keeping her emotional score rather than the detectives’. By the final act the same apartment that once looked like a haven is cut into hard diagonals of black. Almost nobody notices the shift while watching, which is the point: the craft works on you below the level you can name it.

Where to watch

In a Lonely Place has a fine restoration on Blu-ray through the Criterion Collection, and it is the noir to press on anyone who thinks they have Bogart figured out. Watch it after The Big Sleep for the full range of what he could do inside eighteen months.

Spoilers below

The film’s greatest decision is to change Hughes’s novel completely, and it is the change that makes it a masterpiece. In the book, Dix Steele is a serial killer, and the reader eventually knows it; the suspense is procedural, a matter of when he will be caught. Ray and Solt threw that away. In the film, Dix is innocent of the murder — the real killer, the dead girl’s jealous boyfriend, confesses near the end and clears him. On paper that should be a relief. It is a catastrophe.

Because by the time the phone rings with the exoneration, it is too late for anything the news could fix. Laurel, terrified by Dix’s escalating rages, has already secretly arranged to leave him, and Dix, discovering the deception, has flown into exactly the kind of violence that proves her fear was sound — his hands are around her throat when the call comes. He is not the man who killed the hat-check girl. He is unmistakably a man who could kill the woman he loves, and both of them now know it. The legal innocence changes nothing about the human verdict. The relationship is already dead in the room, strangled by the very temper the police were investigating for the wrong crime.

Ray reportedly shot a more conventional ending in which Dix actually murders Laurel, then discarded it for the version we have, which is far crueller. A clean tragic murder would let the audience off with catharsis. The finished ending denies catharsis entirely: the couple survives, the love does not, and they part knowing precisely what he is. Bogart’s last look — hollowed out, understanding at last what others have always seen in him — is the most naked thing he ever put on film.

If this leaves a mark, the natural next step is Sweet Smell of Success, for another portrait of a charming man whose gift and his cruelty cannot be separated, or Out of the Past for the outward-facing version of the same fatalism.