Classic Movie Review: In a Lonely Place (1950)

In a Lonely Place (1950) 

Directed by: Nicholas Ray.

Written by: Andrew Solt and Edmund H. North based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes.

Starring: Humphrey Bogart (Dixon Steele), Gloria Grahame (Laurel Gray), Frank Lovejoy (Brub Nicolai), Carl Benton Reid (Capt. Lochner), Art Smith (Mel Lippman), Jeff Donnell (Sylvia Nicolai), Martha Stewart (Mildred Atkinson), Robert Warwick (Charlie Waterman), Morris Ankrum (Lloyd Barnes), William Ching (Ted Barton), Steven Geray (Paul), Hadda Brooks (Singer). 

 

Humphrey Bogart, like many actors of the studio era, gets a kind of bum rap that he was a one note actor – that he played the same character in every one of his movies. He played tough guys to be sure – principled characters who often self-sacrificed. You see that in performances like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon – and that’s what people remember him for. And yet, when he played less idealistic characters – more flawed men, he truly shined. It’s why The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of his best performances. And it’s also why In a Lonely Place is one of his very best – really, one of the very best performances I have ever seen anyone give. And he is matched by the remarkable Gloria Grahame – who when she was at her peak in the early-to-mid 1950s, she was as good as any actress in history. In a Lonely Place is a film noir – it has the trappings of one anyway. But it’s really a tragic, doomed love story between these two wounded characters.

 

In the film, Bogart plays Dixon Steele – a screenwriter, who once had success, and is now down on his luck. The alcoholism has certainly played a factor – as does his temper that comes out when he’s drunk. His latest job is to adapt a soapy best seller – and he doesn’t really want to do it, but doesn’t have much of a choice. But he doesn’t to read the novel – so when the hat check girl at his bar – Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart) tells him that she just finished the novel, he invites her back to his place. During this long, boozy night, she tells him the entire story of the novel – he can predict where it’s going before she gets there. But she’s over exciting, and bores him – and eventually he kicks her out. The next day, she turns up murdered – and Dixon is a natural suspect. His alibi witness comes in the form of his neighbor in his Hollywood apartment building – Laurel Gray (Grahame) – who notices the pair when they come home, can overhear some of the conversation, but vouches for him when he says she left on her own accord sometime after midnight. They pair, who didn’t know each other before, meet at the police station – and there is an immediate, raw, sexual connection between the pair of them. They fall in love, quickly – and he stops drinking, and writes that screenplay based on that novel – but making it his own, instead of a straight adaptation. Things are great between them – but there is still this murder investigation hanging above them, and the stress of the writing. And when Dixon starts drinking again – that temper flares up. And Laurel cannot quite be sure that he’s innocent. Maybe he is a murderer.

 

So, yes, there is a murder here – it is a whodunit to a certain extent. But the film doesn’t really concentrate on that aspect of the film. This is a film about this doomed romance between the two of them, and what that nagging suspicion does to them. Dixon is a flawed character to be sure – he isn’t the classic dope at the heart of a film noir – the type of guy who has been duped by the femme fatale. Is he a good man? He is certainly capable of being a good guy, but the drinking, and that temper is always lurking in the background. Late in the film, something breaks between them – when he does get violent. And now, everyone knows just what he is capable of, and that cannot be put away.

 

The film has a fascinating story in terms of its production. Grahame and director Nicholas Ray were married at the time – and their relationship was volatile throughout, with multiple separations and reconciliations. Apparently it was during production of this movie that Ray found Grahame in bed with his son from a previous marriage – who was 13 at the time (she would marry the son, more than a decade later). Ray perhaps even slept on the set of this movie during the fights that ensued. There were elements of the relationship that echoed theirs – and there were other elements that echoed Bogart’s relationship with his much younger wife, Lauren Bacall. This is one of those studio films that feels extremely personal to those making it – and there is a reason for that.

 

Bogart is great here. To a certain extent, he is playing off his own image as the tough guy – but showing the darker side of that. Dixon is a weak man, who cannot get out his own way. Grahame is playing a character not unlike Joan Fontaine’s role in Hitchcock’s Suspicion – where she thinks her husband (Cary Grant) may be a murderer. But she makes her character more conflicted. You feel her hunger, her need for Dixon. Recently, an idiot on twitter (I won’t say who) raised the ire of film twitter by claiming that no actor from the classic Hollywood days could hold a candle to Daniel Day-Lewis or Meryl Streep – that their performances would look tacky and overly dramatic compared to what they can do. That’s idiocy of course – and exhibit A may just be In a Lonely Place. While it’s true, acting styles have changed in the decades since this film has made, this is still a film in which the connection between these two is communicated silently – that lust, that need, that desperation is all there, and all unspoken. It’s two of the best performances you will ever see.

 

In a Lonely Place ends as it must – as we expect it will from the beginning. Ray and his writers do a fascinating thing near the end though – they giveaway the solution to the murder to the audience, before he does it to the two main characters. It makes that painful ending even more painful – because we know what they don’t. This is the type of love story that hurts – and that ending makes it even more so.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Johnny Guitar (1954)

Johnny Guitar (1954)
Directed by: Nicholas Ray.
Written by: Philip Yordan and Ben Maddow (uncredited) and Nicholas Ray (uncredited) based on the novel by Roy Chanslor.
Starring: Joan Crawford (Vienna), Sterling Hayden (Johnny 'Guitar' Logan), Mercedes McCambridge (Emma Small), Scott Brady (Dancin' Kid), Ward Bond (John McIvers), Ben Cooper (Turkey Ralston), Ernest Borgnine (Bart Lonergan), John Carradine (Old Tom), Royal Dano (Corey), Frank Ferguson (Marshal Williams).

Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar is one of his very best movies – a Western that ranks among the most wildly over the top films ever made, and yet, somehow, hits all the right notes. Read 10 different reviews of Johnny Guitar, and you’ll likely read 10 different interpretations of what it all means. One of the great things about Johnny Guitar is that it seems to support all these different views on what it all means – and is also deliriously entertaining to boot.

The movie may be called Johnny Guitar, but he is far from the protagonist of the movie. Sure, his arrival in town helps to set in motion the plot, and in some ways he will “save the day” in the end, but for most of the movie, Johnny takes a backseat in the proceedings. The real protagonist is Vienna (Joan Crawford), an ambitious businesswoman, who Johnny rejected five years earlier when he was a gunfighter, and didn’t want to settle done. In the intervening years, Vienna made a lot of money as a prostitute, and now owns a gambling den and saloon on the outskirts of a town who doesn’t want her there. She doesn’t care. She knows the railroad is coming, and with it, lots of people who will want her. The townsfolk are scared of this development, and are futilely fighting progress.

No one more so than Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma Small. Crawford, whose baby this was, wanted Claire Trevor to play the role, but the studio insisted on McCambridge. Apparently Crawford hated McCambridge, and the feelings were most likely mutual, and while that didn’t make for a comfortable set, it aids the movie greatly. Emma is one of the great screen villains of all time – a seething ball of pure hatred who cannot take her eyes off of Vienna. She is apparently in love with The Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), another outsider to the townspeople, who are convinced that he and his gang held up the stagecoach and killed Emma’s brother. The movie starts with them all coming to Vienna’s saloon to arrest the Kid and his gang – but Vienna stands up for them. Nonetheless, town elder John McIvers (Ward Bond), gives the Kid and his gang 24 hours to clear town – and Vienna 24 hours to close up shop. He has no real authority to do this, but who’s going to stop him? Besides, it’s Emma who is calling the shots – she runs the bank and with her brother dead, is now the richest, most powerful person in town. What Emma wants, Emma gets.

The surface of Johnny Guitar is wonderfully colorful and over the top. Critics in 1954 were distracted by the melodrama on the surface of Johnny Guitar – they complained about the goofy plot (it is), overwrought score (which it is, unless you’re attuned to Ray’s wavelength) and the undeniable camp of the movie. They dismissed the movie, but right from the start the French loved it – both Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut were big fans, and they saw everything going on beneath the over the top surface of the film.

For one thing, it appears clear now that Johnny Guitar was a commentary on McCarthyism. While the screenplay is credited to Philip Yordan, we know now that the real writer was Ben Maddow, then blacklisted. How more people didn’t see this at the time is a commentary about how shallowly many people watch movies – because it is impossible to watch the scene where the townsfolk brutally question Turkey, one of the Kid’s gang, telling him “just tell us Vienna was one of you and we won’t hang you”, only to, of course, hang him after he does precisely what they say.

But that’s just one level of Johnny Guitar. The film has also been called a “Freudian” Western, for the way it deals with sexuality, and questions everyone’s sexual motivations throughout. Nearly every character is drawn sexually to Vienna. The Dancin’ Kid is in love with her, but she simply uses him for sex – and even that stops when Johnny rolls into town, looking to make up for lost time. Johnny loves her as well, and in perhaps the film’s best scene, they talk long into the night, and he gets her to “lie to me”, in a conversation dripping with cynicism between these two. And Emma, of course, is in many ways in love with Vienna herself – which is precisely why she hates her so much. McCambridge’s performance is wildly, madly over the top, and yet it is perfect for the movie – one of the greatest portraits of self-loathing ever put on screen.

Johnny Guitar plays with Western clichés from the outset – from gender reversals (Truffaut said the film was like Beauty and the Beast – with Sterling Hayden as the beauty), and as one character says of Crawford – “I’ve never met a woman who was more  man” – and later Vienna will say of Emma, when she is questioned why she wants to hang The Kid if she loves him – “He makes her feel like a woman – she hates that”. The men in the movie are weak, easily bent and played by the two women – and eventually the men realize that the smartest thing to do is just stay out of their way.

Nicholas Ray had a long, distinguished career as a filmmaker – although he is undeniably more highly thought of now than he was when he was working (he only got one Oscar nomination in his career – for writing Rebel without a Cause). Johnny Guitar is as good as anything he has ever made – films like In a Lonely Place (1950) or Bigger Than Life (1956), which like Johnny Guitar are more interesting the deeper you delve into them. At long last, Johnny Guitar was finally given a proper DVD and Blu-Ray release, and it’s now available for all to savor. It is a true masterwork.

The Best Films I've Never Seen Before: The Lusty Men (1952)

The Lusty Men (1952) *** ½
Directed by: Nicholas Ray.
Written by: David Dortort & Horace McCoy based on the book by Claude Stanush.
Starring: Robert Mitchum (Jeff McCloud), Susan Hayward (Louise Merritt), Arthur Kennedy (Wes Merritt), Arthur Hunnicutt (Booker Davis), Frank Faylen (Al Dawson), Walter Coy (Buster Burgess), Carol Nugent (Rusty Davis), Maria Hart (Rosemary Maddox), Lorna Thayer (Grace Burgess).

There was always a wounded masculinity about Robert Mitchum – one of the great actors of all time. He is one of those actors who says a lot without saying anything – you can read the pain his characters have lived through and with in his every facial expression. He was only 35 when he made The Lusty Men in 1952, but he seemed older, more broken down than that. This is one of his best performances, as an rodeo rider who has finally called it quits after a great career. He has had too many injuries, and he doesn’t think he’ll recover from his latest one – at least not enough to continue on the circuit. Yet despite the fact that he has made lots of money over the years as a star on the circuit, he is broke. He spent the money on booze, cards and women and no he’s left with nothing but his broken down body. And this is just the beginning of the movie.

Mitchum is Jeff McCloud who after his injury returns to his rundown childhood home in Texas – it was rundown when he left it 20 years before, and its still rundown now. He meets a nice young couple Wes and Louise (Arthur Kennedy and Susan Hayward) who dream of buying his childhood home and setting up a ranch there– but have nowhere near the $5,000 needed to do so. Wes works as a cattle hand at a nearby ranch, and since he recognizes Jeff from his rodeo days, he offers to help get him a job at the same ranch. Wes has ulterior motives however – he idolizes Jeff and wants him to help him become a star on the rodeo. If Jeff will help, Wes will give him 50% of whatever he wins. Much to the chagrin in Louise, Jeff accepts – and soon Wes is a star on the rodeo, and suddenly to him life on that ranch doesn’t seem all that great. He starts drinking, partying, chasing women and getting a big head. Meanwhile, Jeff is starting to see what he missed out all those years by growing closer to Louise.

Nicholas Ray often made films about outsiders – about people who chose to take chances and live a life where freedom meant more to them than responsibility. The Lusty Men is in many ways similar to those other films – including such films as Rebel without a Cause (1955), In a Lonely Place (1950) and my personal favorite Bigger Than Life (1956). And yet, in some ways, it is actually quite different. It’s the same because both Jeff and Wes have to make the same decision Ray characters always make – to either be the outsider, or be tied down to family. Most of the time, Ray seemingly came down on the side of being the outsider – that playing it safe was the same as death. In The Lusty Men, he seems to be saying just the opposite. The movie ends with Jeff embracing his outsider status, and being punished as a result, whereas Wes gets to go back and live the life he dreamed about all along – and simply lost his way for a while on the rodeo. Perhaps that’s why to me, The Lusty Men, while an excellent film, doesn’t quite live up to the best of Ray’s work – because the ending feels a little forced and unnatural to me. Throughout the movie there are other such moments – the three leads are all great in their roles, but the supporting cast of largely stock characters feel hollow to me. But it was the ending I was disappointed in – it didn’t feel to me that Ray truly felt his ending.

I first heard of The Lusty Men a while back when I was talking to a friend about Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008) a film I had loved, and he was lukewarm on. He suggested I see The Lusty Men, because it was similar, but to his mind better. The two films are in many ways similar – they are both about broken down former stars in their field whose bodies have betrayed them, but have no other real skills they can fall back on – and probably wouldn’t want to even if they did. I still think The Wrestler is a better film – I remember watching that film at TIFF for the first time, and having to walk out of the theater in tears at the end of the film. The Lusty Men didn’t hit me the same way – and it goes back to what I said before. I think Aronofsky felt the ending to The Wrestler – it is after all similar to how he ended Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain and Black Swan. Yet I think if Ray had his way, The Lusty Men would have ended differently. Sometimes the ending makes all the difference.