Josh Bell
Dixon Steele is not a good man. The screenwriter protagonist of director Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is volatile, vindictive, and violent, as demonstrated within the first few minutes of the film, when he tries to pick a fight with a man in the car next to him at a stoplight. One of the brilliant things about In a Lonely Place is that Ray and star Humphrey Bogart make Dix (as he’s known to his friends and associates) into someone the audience wants to root for, even as he reveals more of his brutish true nature.
In classic noir fashion, In a Lonely Place (released 75 years ago this week) begins with a murder, placing its main character in the crosshairs of the police for a crime he claims he didn’t commit. Yet it’s not difficult to believe that Dix might be a murderer, even after his alluring neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) provides him with a rock-solid alibi. This isn’t a movie about an innocent man falling victim to a corrupt system — it’s about a guilty man who’s probably being targeted for the wrong crime.
Det. Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) may have served with Dix for three years during World War II, but it’s still entirely reasonable for him to suspect Dix of killing naïve hat-check girl Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart). Brub tells his supervisor Capt. Lochner (Carl Benton Reid) that Dix is essentially inscrutable, and Dix jokes that the only thing they can arrest him for is a lack of emotion. That sense of detachment could easily be read as sociopathy, and Dix doesn’t seem particularly eager to correct the misconception.
“Dix doesn’t act like a normal person,” Laurel tells Dix’s longtime agent Mel Lippman (Art Smith) after she and Dix have begun an intense love affair. Although the specter of Mildred’s murder hangs over the film, In a Lonely Place isn’t really a murder mystery — it’s a doomed romance with suspicion as the barrier between the two lovers. Laurel is drawn to Dix, as many women apparently are, and for a while it’s easy for both her and the audience to ignore the obvious red flags, to see the brooding and tortured Dix as someone who’s simply been misunderstood.
But exonerating Dix of Mildred’s murder doesn’t exonerate him of beating his past lovers, one of whom ended up with a broken nose. He’s still controlling and emotionally manipulative, not only to Laurel but also to Mel, whose description of their decades-long working relationship sounds like an abuse victim making excuses for repeatedly forgiving a dangerous partner. The honeymoon period of the romance between Dix and Laurel lasts only until she makes the slightest deviation from what he needs from her.
That makes In a Lonely Place sound brutal and bleak, which it is, but it’s also sly and witty, like one of the hit screenplays that Dix churned out before the war. Part of the reason that Dix is so calm about being accused of murder is that he’s seen this scenario play out countless times, in scripts that he himself has written, and being in the middle of it sparks some inspiration in him.
“We solve every murder in less than two hours,” he boasts to Brub, which is both self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, a snide dismissal of Hollywood’s approach to telling crime stories. Dix scoffs at the idea of being a celebrity, but he still laps up attention from kids outside a restaurant who ask for his autograph. At dinner with Brub and Brub’s earnest new wife Sylvia (Jeff Donnell), Dix eagerly recounts his vision of how the murder went down, as Ray shines a spotlight on his increasingly maniacal face. Is he getting worked up over reliving a horrible act, or is he just rediscovering his creative passion?
For Dix, there may not be much of a difference. Once he begins his affair with Laurel, his writer’s block falls away, and Mel is quick to credit Laurel as Dix’s new muse. But proximity to a lurid murder investigation may be just as invigorating for Dix’s “artistic temperament,” as he calls it, and the dead woman isn’t going to let him down the way Laurel eventually does. He can have full control over someone who isn’t able to contradict him.
Bogart slowly hints at those cracks in Dix’s outward persona of seedy indifference, giving one of his best and most complex performances. Grahame matches him as a woman who initially appears to be a femme fatale, only to be unveiled as a genuine romantic, whose growing fear of Dix breaks her heart. She wants to be the person who can save him, but he’s beyond saving even before the movie begins.Ray structures In a Lonely Place like a thriller, but he denies the audience the definitive resolution they might expect from a crime story. Whether or not the culprit is caught or punished is a secondary concern. Everyone in the movie is already in a personal hell they can never escape.
“In a Lonely Place” is streaming on Tubi.
