Nicholas Ray's 1950 Film Noir Masterpiece In a Lonely Place Is a Trenchant Exploration of Toxic Masculinity

Nicolas Ray was one of American film’s premiere poets of Eisenhower-era existential angst. The iconoclastic auteur made his name with 1950s-era movies about protagonists whose sometimes violent alienation from the people and institutions around them spoke to the inherent weaknesses of the worlds they inhabit. 

Rebel Without A Cause and Bigger Than Life each explored the dark, seedy underbelly of the white picket fence American dream while 1950’s In a Lonely Place explores, with Ray’s trademark combination of steely toughness and sensitivity, a man of dark impulses and explosive violence fighting a war on two fronts against a heartless Hollywood system that chews up and spits out original talents like himself and his own bottomless capacity for violence. 

He’s a man at war with the world and at war with himself, a man of integrity in a business full of whores. His name is Dix Steele, which has the unfortunate quality of sounding simultaneously like a gay porn star and a bootleg erectile dysfunction drug, and because he is played by Humphrey Bogart at his brooding, hard-drinking, bleakly charismatic best, he is impossible to laugh at despite the amusingly over-the-top homoeroticism of his name. 

Dix Steele is a show-business anomaly, a celebrity screenwriter, a famous name in a field that treats screenwriters as disposable and irrelevant. He’s a veteran of World War II, but that doesn’t seem to have scarred him half as much as his battles with studio executives and collaborators and the world at large. His past is filled with dust-ups and skirmishes and fisticuffs, only some of which happened on a field of battle. 

He is extraordinarily successful at what he does, but not in a way that gives him any real power. By the time the film opens, Dix Steele is as infamous for his explosive temper and propensity for violence as he is for writing hit movies, and he hasn’t had a hit in quite some time. Dix's problem drinking only adds to the sense of desperation that follows him, that gnawing fear that he has seen his best days and is locked in a permanent personal and professional downward spiral. 

So when a hatcheck girl Dix Steele took home one night under the dubious logic that he needed her to tell him the story of a novel he was supposed to adapt for film turns up dead, Steele is the primary suspect, in part because he doesn’t do much to dissuade the police, or anyone else, for that matter, from thinking he did it. Dix views the whole matter with the icy, jaded cynicism of a professional storyteller for whom contemplating the complexities and intricacies of murder is just another part of the job. 

Besides, Steele has an alibi in actress Laurel Gay (Gloria Grahame), a neighbor in his complex but more importantly a fellow show-business survivor, a woman who, like Steele, has been kicked around a lot by the industry but is still standing. Actually, that describes everyone in In a Lonely Place. Show-business has enacted a terrible toll on just about everyone it touches, including an old actor friend of Dix for whom acting jobs are few and far between but inebriation is constant. 

With Laurel’s love and support, Dix is more productive and happy than he has been in ages. He stops being a man of constant sorrow and opens himself up to the possibility of love with a woman who has clearly lived, and who bears the psychological scars of a tough life full of disappointments. And the possibility of hope, that vague, fuzzy promise that despite everything, things might just turn out alright, makes the inevitable erasure of that hope all the more shattering. 

In In a Lonely Place, Steele uses words like weapons. They are his trade, after all, and though he also uses language to keep a sometimes scary outside world at bay, underneath all the hardboiled patter and tough-guy talk lies a very real sense of pain and emotional exhaustion. One of In a Lonely Place’s great strengths lies in its lived-in quality, in the sense that the characters onscreen lived full, fascinating lives before we were ever introduced to them, and will continue to live interesting lives after the movie ends. It depicts the motion picture business as a harrowing gauntlet where people survive rather than thrive, where compromises are essential but also scarring to the human soul. 

In a Lonely Place boasts one of Bogart’s deepest and most fascinating performances. He and the filmmakers really play up the notion that Bogart’s character might be guilty of murder. It’s not a question of whether or not Steele is a man of violence. It is established indelibly that Steele is definitely capable of the crime he is suspected of committing. The real question is not whether or not he did it. The film is less interested in violence as an act of aggression than in violence as something endemic to its protagonist’s soul. When violence is a fundamental part of who you are, can it ever be truly conquered? 

The filmmakers even suggest that Steele himself might not entirely know whether he committed murder or not. His brain is a foggy, malfunctioning machine, a liquor-addled mess so full of holes that it’s entirely possible that he might have committed the murder, then forgotten all about it in a blackout haze. 

In a Lonely Place is a mystery that doesn’t seem particularly interested in the murder at its core, except for what it says about its protagonist’s mind and his terrifying capacity for violence. It’s a character study in the shadowy guise of a film noir about two profoundly damaged people trying to find a way beyond their mutual damage to a fresh start, one where they can escape the messes of the past and start anew.  

In the film’s most haunting passage, Dix writes of a love affair, “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” It’s something Dix wants to put into the screenplay he’s working on, but it ends up doubling as an elegy for Dix and Laurel’s relationship, which is sacred and special and deeply touching because it is so fragile and so innately doomed. There are no happy endings for people like Dix and Laurel, just different kinds of sadness.

In that respect, In a Lonely Place is something even rarer and more remarkable than a celebrity screenwriter. It’s an honest, convincing love story, in no small part because the big, brooding, bleeding and ultimately doomed love underneath it all is less triumphant than deeply tragic.

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