In a Lonely Place

Nicholas Ray (left) on the set with Bogart

Ray on the set with Bogart and Grahame

Nicholas Ray and Gloria Grahame

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN A LONELY PLACE         A                                                                                                      USA  (94 mi)  1950  d:  Nicholas Ray

I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.     — Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart)

As the era of McCarthyism gained momentum in 1950, Hollywood had an opportunity to reexamine itself by churning out lurid, anti-Hollywood melodramas that cast a cynical light on the movie industry as an unsavory business, where in the same year that Nicholas Ray’s film reflected a world-weary uneasiness with a self-loathing Tinseltown, two other releases followed suit, Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), revealing the downside of fame and illusion, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), which dissects the cutthroat nature of the business, all exposing a cruel underbelly of show business.  Not sure these films can be separated from the Cold War Hollywood blacklist dividing the industry against its own artists, as instead they are reflective of the times, revealing the impermanence of fame and acclaim as well as the disintegration of the all-powerful studio system.  In this backdrop, Ray produced what might be his most personal film, with the wrenching agony of his personal life intruding into the depths of the remarkably sculpted Humphrey Bogart lead character, a violent and wounded soul always on the precipice of disaster, yet clinging to his craft as a screenwriter as the lifesaver of a sinking career, the only shred of pride and dignity left in an industry that creates has-beens as quickly as it worships new faces.  Bogart unleashes what may arguably be his best career performance, struggling with the demons of his past in much the same way as the director is examining the disintegration of his own marriage, casting his soon-to-be separated wife Gloria Grahame opposite Bogart, creating an ungodly amount of tension on the set, yet the frayed nerves seem to electrify the two lead performances that dominate this film.  Adapted from a Dorothy B. Hughes noirish crime novel by the same name, with the title aptly describing the protagonist’s deep and crippling alienation from the movie industry and its inner workings, offering a less than flattering view, very much ahead of its time, becoming an existential exposé on the art of screenwriting, as Bogart plays Dixon “Dix” Steele, a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper who has not had a hit “since before the war.”  Hiding behind the veneer that he’s writing a novel, Dix routinely castigates his fellow colleagues in the business for selling out, producing hackwork in the “popcorn business,” getting all worked up into a lather when a young, well-connected hotshot producer takes pot shots at one of his friends, a down-on-his-luck, out of work actor, Robert Warwick as Charlie Waterman, an old pro, a dapper, poetry-reciting antique with a flair for the dramatic who is drowning himself in brandy at the bar.  Dix is so incensed at what he views as callous ingratitude that he punches out the privileged young producer, who is quickly carried out, leading to a confrontation on the road where he nearly comes to blows with another motorist, so right from the outset viewers see Dix as a hard-driving man with an explosive temper.  But he’s also a charming guy, sophisticated and well-versed with words, socially engaging, handling himself with ease in difficult situations, never buckling under pressure, a man’s man who has a gift of sizing up any situation, rarely surprised by unforeseen events.  Eliminating the inner voice of the novel, where a narrator offers an omniscient vantage point, voicing the protagonist’s inner thoughts and feelings, much like SUNSET BOULEVARD, but instead Ray offers a conventional storyline that actually subverts the book’s original intent with film noir elements, expanding the influence of the film industry itself and the injurious effects it has on Dix, where an unseen factor felt throughout is the pressure to remain relevant in this business, where success is often fleeting.  By eliminating access to Dix’s inner realm, Ray creates an aura of ambiguity surrounding his character, whose true motivations viewers can never be sure of.  His emotional detachment is also reflected in the world around him, where the opening shots driving down the street at night in the city of Los Angeles that draw us into his subjective point of view are reminiscent of the God’s Lonely Man portrait in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), especially the garishly lit street views passing by that offer such a “lonely” vantage point. 

The entire picture is steeped in Hollywood atmosphere, from autograph seekers to restaurants that cater to industry insiders, where Hollywood as an imaginary fulfillment is synonymous with the American Dream, with its promise of wealth, success, and fame.  When Dix is awarded the assignment of adapting a book to a Hollywood screenplay, viewed by his agent Mel Lippmann (Art Smith, blacklisted after director Elia Kazan named him) that it might be his “last chance,” he’s loath to actually read the book, believing it’s dreadfully superficial, preferring instead to invite a young hatcheck girl, Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), who’s actually read the book to describe it to him instead, as she’s obviously enthused by the contents, describing it as an epic.  Asking her to break her date with a boyfriend, he drives her home to his snazzy Beverly Hills apartment (actually using Ray’s first Hollywood apartment), running into a new neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) purely by chance, getting more sidetracked by viewing her on a balcony across the courtyard instead of listening to the story, but he pays the young girl for her services, giving her cab fare home, claiming he’s tired, suggesting there’s a cab stand just around the corner.  Nothing out of the ordinary happens until he’s awoken at the crack of dawn by a police detective, an old friend and army buddy Brub (Frank Lovejoy) who brings him down to the station for questioning, as Mildred Atkinson never made it home last night, the victim of a brutal murder, dumped from a moving car after being strangulated to death.  According to Captain Lochner (Carl Benton Reid), Dix is at the top of the suspect’s list until a young starlet named Laurel Gray is hauled in as well, offering an airtight alibi, as she saw the young girl leave the apartment on her own accord from her balcony, claiming she was eying Dix at the time, concluding “he looked interesting, and I like his face.”  Bogart’s screen charisma comes from identifying with male loners who are up against the wall yet insist on going their own way, ignoring all safe havens, yet here he’s more than a little troubled, edgy, overly defensive, with a streak of violence hiding his mannered politeness, where it’s clear he’s exceedingly smart, but also full of self-loathing, the spitting image, apparently, of a Hollywood screenwriter.  A torrid affair develops between the jaded Hollywood screenwriter and the beautiful aspiring actress, and, you guessed it, like clockwork, his decade-long writer’s block is placed in the rear view window, as he’s up all night with continuous writing, which she is transcribing, where a budding screenplay is a sexual metaphor for their passionate romance, never out of one’s sight for days on end, becoming the kind of love affair one can only dream of while also developing an inspired script.  Though she’s fallen under Dix’s spell, Laurel has some lingering doubts, exacerbated by the continuing suspicions of Captain Lochner, Dix’s history of Hollywood brawls, and the broken nose of a former girlfriend, leaving a dark suspicion in the back of her mind, wondering when this side of the man will become evident in her own dealings with him, as everyone has warned her about him, none more powerfully and more provocatively than her masseuse Martha (Ruth Gillette), with suggestions of sexual overprotection, as she keeps calling her “Angel,” telling her things like “You can’t be a nurse-maid and a sweetheart, a cook and a secretary.  You have to think of yourself,” then literally scaring the bejezus out of her before being summarily dismissed.  But her fears grow out of control after witnessing Dix take a dramatic turn from a romantic, oceanside dinner with Brub and his wife Sylvia (Jeff Donnell), stunned by the knowledge that Laurel was re-interviewed by the police without his knowledge, hightailing out of there in a cloud of dust, driving like a man possessed, running repeated stop signs until finally making an illegal turn directly into another car, causing a fender bender where he was clearly at fault, yet Dix’s reaction is to pulverize the young kid driving for having the audacity to blame him, beating him to a pulp, nearly killing him before Laurel intervenes. 

Bogart, of course, wanted Lauren Bacall for the role, which would have been a completely different picture, but Jack Warner insisted upon Grahame, who had a wide range and an edgy sense of humor, viewed as both tough and vulnerable, highly appealing throughout, right from the initial police questioning, exerting her own fierce independence, matching Bogart frame for frame, considered one of her finest performances.  After her divorce to Ray in 1952, she later married his son Anthony, her former stepson, allegedly caught with him in bed together in 1950, a scandalous revelation that effectively ended her marriage with Nicholas Ray.  Imagine making this film with her after that discovery and you have some idea of just how extraordinarily personal this film actually is.  Dix in this film is a stand-in for Ray, as he and Grahame were on the brink of divorce during the shooting (intentionally kept secret on the set or the actress would undoubtedly have been replaced), with Dix continually showing signs of bitterness, rapid mood changes, and internal resentment, becoming over controlling, where his treatment of Laurel reflects a lack of trust that was very apparent in the director’s own marriage.  The film sends out all the warning signals of domestic violence, rare in its day and age, where Steele’s agent Mel Lippmann was concerned his client may have had something to do with the young girl’s murder, which remains unsolved, though he is thrilled at the upturn of events with Dix writing again, never really seeing him this happy before, thinking a good script is the answer to everyone’s problem.  When Dix makes suggestions of marriage, presuming Laurel is on the same wavelength, he starts charting their future together, which leaves Grahame stunned and paralyzed like a cornered animal, never more isolated and alone, as she’s too afraid to reveal her actual fears, thinking that might set him off, afraid he may actually kill her, so she begrudgingly goes along with whatever he plans, even agreeing to marry him while secretly making her own plans to disappear on the first flight out of town, but she’s constantly smothered by Dix, needing her own space, afraid of being confined in a toxic atmosphere of lingering paranoia and fear.  It’s an abrupt shift in storyline, as the two were obviously very much in love, but this seismic shift is perfectly expressed by a doomed line of dialogue that Dix has been trying to work into the screenplay, the personification of romantic fatalism, “I was born when she kissed me.  I died when she left me.  I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”  Guided by this noirish turn, dreadful uncertainty lies behind every move, tainting any possibility of success, where parallel stories of romance and a developing screenplay are happening simultaneously, beautifully reflected at an intimate piano bar sequence with black jazz singer Hadda Brooks singing a sultry version of “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You,” sigfrid monleon on Twitter: "I hadn't anyone 'till you, I was a ...  YouTube (2:01), reminiscent of an eerily similar scene in Ray’s They Live By Night (1948), both enthralled by the sheer romanticism of the moment which quickly comes to an abrupt end (with Brooks notable for being the first black woman to host a TV show).  Also, significantly, the earlier focus on Bogart’s character subtly shifts to a growing interest in Grahame, a revelation who dominates the final scenes, where fear and jealousy intrude into every aspect of their lives, poisoned by their alarming mistrust, extinguishing all that’s left of their relationship which literally disintegrates before our eyes.  It’s a magnificent tribute to both Bogart and Grahame for pulling this off, shot extemporaneously, with the director having the confidence in them both, basically improvising the finale on the set to achieve those last chilling moments.  It’s a devastating picture that leaves an emotional impact, no longer feeling like a Hollywood motion picture but resembling the aching horrors of real life, capturing the essence of Dix’s inadvertent farewell message ending it all.  This murky portrait of Hollywood steeped in a disturbing atmosphere of paranoia reflects the darkened state of Hollywood just prior to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, with the industry exhibiting bad faith by turning on its own artists.  Dix’s psychological disintegration mirrors the broken voices who were censored and silenced by the Hollywood blacklist, ultimately reflecting Ray’s own view of Hollywood, where the corrosive effects of suspicion destroyed many people’s lives.

Brute Force

BRUTE FORCE         B+                  

USA  (98 mi)  1947  d:  Jules Dassin

Those gates only open three times.  When you come in, when you’ve served your time, or when you’re dead!
—Gallagher (Charles Bickford)

The Macbeth of prison break films, as there’s no happy ending to soothe the audience’s built-up anxieties, instead there is only a film noir world of death and destruction.  Ostensibly a leftist, postwar reaction to fascism, Dassin’s film elevated the American prison picture to the role of a WW II POW film, where the sadistic chief prison guard is equated to the Nazi SS officers running the concentration camps.  The timing of the film is interesting, as it was released in the summer just prior to the first Hollywood blacklist instituted on November 25, 1947, the day after ten writers and directors were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Dassin rose to Hollywood prominence in the late 1940’s with a series of taut and moody pulp films, including BRUTE FORCE (1947), THE NAKED CITY (1948), and THIEVES HIGHWAY (1949), each distinguished by an inventive camera style and shadowy imagery capturing a bleak, sometimes sadistic vision of human nature.  Shortly after completing NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950), his career in America was finished when fellow movie director Edward Dmytryk testified before a congressional committee in 1951 that Mr. Dassin was a communist sympathizer, forcing him into self-imposed exile in Europe.  One of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, his family moved to New York City when Dassin was a small child, eventually settling in Harlem.  According to Dassin, “We were so poor it was ridiculous.  At that time Harlem wasn’t entirely black.  There were about three or four minority groups living in the ghetto, at each other’s throats all the time: Jewish, Negro, Irish, and some Italian, divided among themselves and taking out their wrath and their poverty upon each other.  I was conscious of this, and of the daily problem of eating.  And it was cold...it was always so cold.”  Left-wing artistic circles abounded in New York during the Depression, where he worked in New York’s legendary Yiddish Theatre, which was founded on Brecht along with the principles of agitprop theater based on the Soviet model, working with Elia Kazan, among others, on a 1937 WPA Federal Theater Production of Revolt of the Beavers, playing the lead in a Marxist musical for children that was terminated after only three weeks by the New York police commissioner.  For five summers during this period Dassin worked as an entertainment director of a Jewish camp in the Catskills, where, among other things, he engaged the young campers in productions of Shakespeare.  At this time he was briefly a member of the Communist party, heavily influenced by the revolutionary realism of Lee Strasberg’s Group Theatre (1931- 1940), the first acting company to introduce Stanislavski acting principles, but left the party in 1939 when Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet pact with Hitler.  From Alastair Phillips, Rififi, 2009, pages 5-11:

The cultural milieu in which Dassin thrived during this period provided a formative influence on his later political and cultural sensibilities.  It was during this time that he was exposed to New York’s vital left-wing theatre then flourishing in the progressive climate of the New Deal.  Dassin would later claim, for example, that he joined the Communist Party after seeing the Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets’s episodic drama, Waiting for Lefty, set among a community of taxi drivers on the verge of a strike during the Great Depression of the 1920’s.  Like Orson Welles, Dassin also worked in radio and it was his audio adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat that led to him being noticed by the Broadway producer, Martin Gabel, who subsequently invited him to direct The Medicine Show by Oscar Saul and H. R. Hays at the New Yorker Theater.  This, in turn, led to an invitation to work in Hollywood.    

Two of the actors from the Group Theater joined Dassin in this film, Roman Bohnen, the befuddled warden, and Art Smith, the alcoholic prison doctor who is really closer to the narrative center of the film, and both would later be blacklisted (two other actors as well, Jeff Corey and Sam Levene), with Bohnen suffering a fatal heart attack afterwards, while Smith was named by Elia Kazan from his work in the Group Theater.  Later in his life Dassin forgave plenty of people associated with McCarthyism, but one he never forgave was Elia Kazan.  Dassin was included among a group of younger, socially aware, left-wing directors that resorted to the use of film noir to help them explore psychological motives under the surface, including Robert Rossen, who directed Body and Soul (1947), Abraham Polonsky, who directed Force of Evil (1948), and Joseph Losey, who remade M (1951), directors whose work carried some weight and substance, as they had known hardship and struggle in their lives, having lived through extraordinary historical events whose experiences helped define their artistic vision, something Red Hollywood (1996) director Thom Andersen suggests is “characterized by ‘greater psychological and social realism,’ by a skepticism about the American dream, and by pointed reference to the ‘psychological injuries of class.’”  After becoming dissatisfied by the conservatism shown by MGM, Dassin signed with Universal Studios after his contract expired, specifically to work for a newly formed production unit under the helm of liberal crime journalist Mark Hellinger, who advocated a greater degree of social realism within the Hollywood crime film, having just produced Robert Siodmak’s Oscar nominated film noir THE KILLERS (1947), a film that introduced Burt Lancaster, an actor with outspoken liberal sympathies.  Prison movies were most popular in the 1930’s when dozens of films were made about men serving hard time, coinciding with the hard times experienced by the general public during the Great Depression, including George W. Hill’s THE BIG HOUSE (1930), Mervyn LeRoy’s I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932), Roland Brown’s HELL’S HIGHWAY (1932), Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (1932), and a host of others, all about men trying to survive under oppressive circumstances.  Other subjects explored by this liberal group of filmmakers were outspoken films that attacked racism, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, vigilantism, and the misuse of the criminal justice system.

Enter Jules Dassin, with a script written by Richard Brooks, from a story by Robert Patterson, opening with grim, black and white shots of a solitary, cathedral-like Westgate prison compound surrounded by water, like Riker’s Island, where the austerity of the cold stone walls with an armed security tower rising overhead are subject to a constant deluge of rain, the film aches with an unrelenting sense of despair.  Instead of dangerous prisoners in their midst, where it’s every man for themselves in a Darwinian world, the real enemy is the tyrannical rule of a notoriously brutal prison system run by a particularly disreputable, yet power hungry chief guard, Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn).  What’s immediately apparent is the camaraderie of the inmates, seen welcoming a fellow prisoner back from an extended stint in solitary confinement, where Joe Collins, in a dynamic performance by Lancaster, played with a battle hardened, inner-rage, always seething with intensity in a role that made him a star, immediately sets his sights on escape, driven by a single-minded purpose to get “out,” “Nothing’s OK.  It never was and it never will be.  Not ‘til we’re out, get it?  Out!,” as there’s nothing left for them on the inside, no hope, no future, and no life.  Seen as a tight-knit group, where the main characters are introduced, Collins gathers them around as soon as he’s returned back to the cell, including Howard Duff as “Soldier” Becker, John Hoyt as Spencer, a gambler, Jack Overman as Kid Coy, a professional boxer, Whit Bissell as Tom Lister, an embezzler, and Jeff Corey as “Freshman,” where they’re all-in with Joe’s plans.  But first there’s another matter to take care of, what to do about the squealer that got Collins sent away in the first place.  While Collins visits the prison doctor for an alibi, his cellmates menacingly surround the snitch (James O’Rear) in the metal shop, taunting him with blowtorches, forcing him backwards until he falls into a huge metal-stamping machine that instantly crushes him.  So much for prison justice.  But that’s just for openers.  We see that the beleaguered and ineffectual Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen) is getting threatened to improve discipline by some political hack (Richard Gaines) whose only interest is protecting the governor from scandal, preferring to avoid problems through the use of strong-armed tactics by Captain Munsey to supposedly keep the inmates in line, whose motto is “Kindness is a weakness.”  But the doctor, the only voice of conscious throughout the film, who witnesses first-hand the demoralizing effect this has on inmates, speaks up, “I know in medicine that you don’t cure a sick man by making him sicker.  In here, you’re returning a man into the world a worse criminal than he came in.” 

Realizing that he’s one bad press release away from assuming control of the prison, Munsey deceptively drives Lister to suicide, hounding him that his wife was erroneously filing for divorce, causing him to hang himself in his cell.  It’s sadistically cruel moves like this that drive the men to band together and revolt, suddenly scrounging for things they can use as weapons as they plan an all-out escape.  However, there’s a brief flashback sequence that connects several of the men to the women they knew on the outside, creating a series of romantic threads, which may or may not be real, as the men have plenty of time mulling over their fates, but they’re intriguing by the brevity, humor, and great camerawork of these sequences, where Spencer is fleeced at gunpoint by his stylish date, Flossie (Anita Colby), taking him for his money and his swanky new car, while Lister embezzles money from his company to give his wife (Ella Raines) a fur coat.  Collins needs money for a lifesaving cancer operation, as otherwise his girl (Ann Blyth), who refuses treatment unless Joe is with her, may spend the rest of her dwindling life in a wheelchair, while “Soldier” fondly recalls the Italian woman he met during the war (Yvonne DeCarlo), smuggling food to her resistance faction, willingly taking the rap after she shoots her own father, as he was about to expose the American to nearby Italian soldiers.  While essentially the inner thoughts of the men, they offer a completely different vantage point, as we see each of them prior to their arrests.  Another unique twist is the use of one inmate named Calypso (Sir Lancelot), who sings all his lines, like a Greek chorus sung to Caribbean Calypso verse — bizarre.  Easily the most surreal moment of the film takes place in Munsey’s office to the music of Wagner, Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture - Thielemann / Münchner ... - YouTube (14:42), a clear connection to Nazi concentration camps, as he brutally tortures a Jewish prisoner (Sam Levene) for information by beating him nearly to death using a rubber hose.  Featuring outstanding camerawork by William Daniels, once associated exclusively with Greta Garbo, but his work dates back to Erich von Stroheim, the musical score is by Miklós Rósza, one of the great film noir composers.  Adding to the visual landscape is the hellish place of work assigned to this group of prisoners, as underneath the prison compound is a giant sewer system, where like Sisyphus, they endlessly excavate for a mud-drenched drainpipe that supposedly goes from one end of the island to the other, but no one is really sure.  As this is their only opening to the outside world, this is their avenue of escape.  With Munsey agitating prisoners behind the scenes, using stool pigeons as informers, Collins was supposed to align his forces with those of fellow prisoner Gallagher (Charles Bickford), a man of discretion who only signed on after his upcoming parole was revoked “indefinitely.”  It becomes a fatalistic exercise in futility once they learn Munsey has taken over as Warden and is aware of their planned escape route, waiting for them with machine guns pointed straight at them, literally daring them to go.  Not to be deterred, Collins refuses to be stopped, as this is their only chance.  With blistering results, using another stoolie as a human shield, the ensuing battle scene chaos is remarkable, meant to resemble the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz where a prison riot ran out of control for two days following an unsuccessful escape attempt.  Fueled by a hatred for fascism, the Spartacus-like revolt was meant to educate and liberate the masses, where the spectacular gory violence of the finale predates Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) by twenty years, with Peck using slo-mo for even greater emphasis, where William Holden’s Pike Bishop declares, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”