Critics reviews

Grahame's performance powerfully conveys the living nightmare of realizing that someone you truly love also scares you, a pattern that's as sadly common in abusive relationships today as in the 1950s. But the film presents the relationship in the style of a classic Hollywood melodrama, as a doomed romance between two flawed but charismatic people. There are wells of darkness in the original novel that it doesn't dare look into.

While keeping the homme fatale at the center of Hughes's novel, Ray shocked viewers with a denouement possibly creepier than that of the book. In the novel Dix is a remorseless, cold-hearted killer. In the movie, though, he is equally capable of love as well as murder. For those who long to see the misanthrope redeemed by love (and really, who does not?), it is Dix's killing off his love affair that cuts to the quick. His remorse is almost unbearable.

In his 1950 noir masterpiece In a Lonely Place we find what is perhaps the director's most tragic exploration of identity.

Numerous Hollywood movies celebrate the redemptive power of love. Few trace, step by step, the progress of a love affair that brings about a protagonist's redemption only to disintegrate, canceling hope irrevocably. That is the fate of Dixon Steele in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950). Dix carves it out for himself after little more than three weeks of romantic bliss with his neighbor Laurel Gray. The cause is his inability to subdue his violent temper.

There is no noir more profoundly sad than Nicholas Ray's "In a Lonely Place" (1950), which unfolds with dark lyricism against a backdrop of violence, cynicism and suspicion. One of Ray's most indelible stories involving characters who lash out in pointless fury—and one of his most personal films—it incorporates melodrama, echoes of Shakespeare, and heart-stopping performances by Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.

Bogart achieves something exceptionally difficult in this film, allowing Dixon to be at his most pitiable when he's at his most despicable... Bogart forges one of the great portraits of an abuser, recognizing that abusers always see themselves as the wronged party. But he goes further than that, as he and Ray offer a figurative illusion of looking directly into Dixon's emotional landscape, seeing the barren realm of a man, who, like all of us, is the architect of his own loneliness.

It savagely sketches the vulgarity and shallowness of Tinseltown—the autograph hunters, the crassly arrogant stars, the vacuous audience and the moneymen eager to feed its appetite. But what makes this a heartbreaking tragedy instead of a jaded satire is that, beneath its bruised pessimism, the film still clings to the hope that art and integrity and love can survive in the wasteland—a hope that dies slowly, agonizingly before our eyes.

The film's ambitious goal is to gradually make the question of whether or not Dix killed Mildred—which constitutes its entire narrative—seem almost irrelevant. When the answer arrives, it's both too soon and much too late, and In A Lonely Place ends on a bleak, defeated note that makes its title an understatement.

Humphrey Bogart never topped the character he played in this bleak noir, an alcoholic, vindictive writer who may or may not have murdered a girl he takes home one night. Ray's direction consistently pulls focus onto the savage glint in the actor's bared teeth and flop sweat, but the director also hones in on Bogie's hangdog sadness.

Above all perhaps is a stingingly personal documentary about the breakup between a filmmaker and an actress, with Ray contemplating the self-lacerating tough-guy staggering out of the screen and all but muttering, "I was born when she kissed me..."

Bogie's greatest performance betrays no clear indication of innocence or guilt, and as Grahame ascends to the role of audience surrogate, her dilemma is all too palpable. By the end, it hardly feels hard-boiled, but it sure packs a mean punch.

Nicholas Ray's melodrama, from 1950, is one of the darkest, harshest, and most devastating love stories ever made... Nicholas Ray's melodrama, from 1950, is one of the darkest, harshest, and most devastating love stories ever made.