I take a look at the great Nicholas Ray/Humphrey Bogart/Gloria Grahame collaboration In A Lonely Place, from a spirituous perspective, over at The Auteurs’. A great new 35 mm print will be screening at New York’s Film Forum beginning Friday; at the 7:40 p.m. screening that evening, Ray’s wife Susan will introduce the film.
On a certain days, I think that this is my favorite movie ever. Living in LA sure helps me appreciate it. When do we get a decent They Live By Night on DVD?
@ Joel: The Warner disc of “They Live By Night,” part of the 2007 Film Noir Volume 4 box, is quite good.
One of my favorite things about this film has to do with the nature of Bogart’s character, but I don’t want to say what it is, in case some people around here haven’t caught up with it yet. But it’s pretty fascinating.
Bill – how about a hint?
Er…well, okay how about this: he’s not the kind of guy he’d like to be.
I doubt that helps you all that much, but I can’t see a way of being more specific without getting into plot.
Anyone ever read the novel it’s based on? I didn’t care for it much, the film was a lot more subtle, but it was written by a woman which makes it unusual for a pulp noir and quite stridently paints the Bogart character as a psychotic misogynist. It’s a lot different to the film so I don’t think I’m giving anything away.
Bill, do you mean he hates himself in the way, say, Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner did? He feels sick about debasing his talent for the Hollywood dime?
London – No, although that certainly fits in with my hint. What I’m talking about deals with specific end-of-film plot details.
Also, I have a feeling that if I were to reveal what I’m talking about, everyone here who’s seen the film would say “THAT’S what you were making such a big deal about??”
So just see the movie, is what I’m saying.
You mean, the way that, let’s say, he can’t quite finish what he starts?
Sort of. More to the point, he’s capable of doing things he doesn’t do.
A further thing occurs to me: this film is pretty famous and 59 years old. Why I’m being so twitchy about revealing the plot is beyond me. Glenn probably thinks I’m being ridiculous…
Bill, as someone who discusses old movies in hopes that people will seek them out, I appreciate your reticence about spoilers and don’t think you’re being at all ridiculous. Some people really do care a lot and won’t see a movie if they know the end, even if the movie is much older than they are.
That said, surely most of us here at Glenn’s place have seen it, and personally all I usually do is post a SPOILER warning. So here goes:
SPOILER SPOILER
Are we discussing the fact that although Dixon Steel is revealed not to be a murderer, we also see quite clearly that he has the potential for murder inside him?
END SPOILER.
There, is anyone not going to rent it now?
Seriously, I would love to know whether that’s what is on your mind or if you have something else to point out – I am sure it’s well worth discussing no matter what.
No, Campaspe, you nailed it exactly. I think that’s such an interesting angle for the story to take – and I don’t believe it’s the same in the novel, though I haven’t read it, but I have read ABOUT it – and I can’t think of another film that features that specific irony. Certainly you’d never see it today. Now, it’d be either one or the other.
In the novel he murders several women and there’s no mystery about it. He’s a serial killer.
I agree completely–it would be a courageous movie even if it were made now. I can’t think of many other films that paint such an unvarnished picture of male violence. (Raging Bull comes to mind.) Almost sixty years later In a Lonely Place remains an unnerving experience. When I finally saw it a couple of years ago I ended the movie thinking I didn’t much like it, despite Ray’s stunning direction and the beauty of the thing. But then I realized my response was in some sense prudish. I didn’t like being asked to look deep into this sensitive, literate and poetic man’s soul and still accept that he roughs up his women and has a violent streak that is only under the most tenuous control.
It’s fascinating to place it in the context of film noir, too. So many noir films have a theme of the returning veteran, who’s been in the battlefield unleashing the most primal side of his nature, and then has to come back to civilization and just turn it off. This movie is very up-front in saying that some men can’t ever put the genie back in the bottle.
MORE SPOILERS
London, I haven’t read much about the making of this movie. I’d love to learn more about the process by which Ray (or the screenwriters) decided to take a psychopath and turned him into an ambiguous and haunted character. What makes the end so dark is that now Dixon has to live with the full knowledge that his violence almost killed Gloria Grahame, and even though he pulled back, he’s still cut himself off forever from any real kind of love or companionship. It’s tragic. You certainly wouldn’t get that from a standard “woman narrowly escapes psycho” ending.
END SPOILER
I enjoyed the novel as a relentless depiction of a creepy, paranoid, self-justifying, pathological mindset, although I’ll agree it’s nowhere as subtle in this as the movie is. It could well be called THE KILLER INSIDE ME. The novel is also something of a technical exercise in that it’s a first person narration from Dixon Steele’s point of view, but we still don’t know who the murderer is until at least partway through the book if not until right before the end. Unless I’m misremembering.
Dorothy B. Hughes wrote two other novels that were adapted as film noir, THE FALLEN SPARROW and RIDE THE PINK HORSE. I’ve read the latter, which I also enjoyed and which is much more similar to the movie made from it.
I’m pretty sure there’s a scene about halfway into the book that makes it clear he’s killed some girl he picked up, but I’m going from memory too. I do remember being a little shocked because I thought, like the film, it would be rather more ambiguous.
I know little about the making of the movie either, but purely speculating…it could be that the reason they changed it was simply in order to get the movie made. One can picture your average producer listening to the pitch of the story and a frozen, rictus grin slowly settling over his face. If that was the case, perhaps it was one of those times where having to tone it down made it much more interesting?