Rent In a Lonely Place (1950)

Bogart plays Bogart - In a Lonely Place review by RhysH

This is the finest example of Bogart playing Bogart. I note he was the producer of the film so was able to set up the perfect Bogart masterclass. He gets some great brooding scenes, some full blown scenes of anger and, of course, some witty and vitriolic one liners. Nobody smokes like Bogart complete with the picking of the stray bits of tobacco from the tongue.

The plot is quite slight, Bogart plays Dixon Steele, screenwriter and main suspect in a murder. The main investigating detective never leaves his office and the other detective invites Steele around for dinner where Bogart gives a hypnotic performance of how the murder might have been committed. The main witness for Steele's defence is Laurel Gray who lives in the apartment opposite, wonderful cantilevered support from Gloria Grahame. The two fall in love and this, of course unlocks the writer's block. There is a genuine rapport of love between the two.

And oh, the hair. The women look as if their perms have been sculptured out of marble. Even after a restless night Gloria Grahame emerges in beautiful array, make up and hair intact.

A great 1950s movie.

All the Bulls of Bashan - In a Lonely Place review by CH

INT. DAY.

Man sits at desk and writes a screenplay by hand.

If the script for In a Lonely Place (1950) fell open at that page, any producer might snap it shut and pass on it with a droll aside or two redolent of Humphrey Bogart. This was an unlikely reaction, for the very man with a pen in hand is a sultry-lit Bogart in this wonderful variant on noir.

Directed by Nicholas Ray with a script by Andrew Solt from Dorothy B. Hughes’s contemporary novel, here is something in which no bullets fly - there would hardly be room for them amidst the one-liners, which do, however, make way now and then for a well-aimed punch or two (even Bogart’s bespectacled agent - Art Smith - does not escape his knuckles).

The origins of all this are simple enough. They always are. Screenwriter Bogart is assailed by somebody at a smart restaurant because he has not given his view about a novel’s screen potential. As chance has it, the cloakroom girl (Martha Stewart) has almost finished doing so in between handing the coats to and fro. Bogart asks if she would come home and tell him the plot. Uneasy, she breaks a date to do so, and afterwards - which was all this side of innocent (“I didn’t say I was a gentleman - I said I was tired”) - she leaves to get a taxi at a nearby junction.

That is the last seen of her, until a front page appears with news of her strangulation soon after, body at the roadside.

What with his hot temper, Bogart is a prime suspect, hauled in at 5 a.m., and soon gains something of an upper hand with the evidence of his neighbour Gloria Grahame who, hungry for him and dextrous with her eyebrows, has a view into his place.

How will it all go? Well, at first Gloria Grahame says of Bogart’s face, “I said I liked it, I didn’t say I wanted to kiss it.” All of which bears out a later observation, “a good love scene should be about something other than love.” There are more references to film-making along the way (“they’re not hot on arithmetic but they know how many minks make a coat” and “you keep making the same film, you’re a popcorn salesman”).

All light and shade (mostly shade, some of it provided by the inevitable venetian blinds), the narrative’s turns do not let up, matched by George Antheil’s score (which gives way to a nightclub scene with then-popular singer Hadda Brooks at the piano, who had a Nineties revival and here gives a wonderful scowl at the possibility of Bogart’s interruption).

As for grapefruit and film, any word-association challenge is likely to bring a reply of James Cagney pushing one into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy two decades earlier. If there is an allusion to that, it comes here at breakfast after the night before, when Bogart goes into the kitchen and struggles to cut the fruit while Gloria Grahame enters and asks, “what happened to the grapefruit knife?” “It was crooked and so I straightened it.” A shame he does not also offer her coffee: it would make a contrast with Gloria Grahame’s encountering a strong brew in The Big Heat three years later.

“It’s much harder to come back than it is to arrive,” says a rugged Hollywood type at one point. In the case of In a Lonely Place, it was not a public success in its time - but it has come back, something not to be missed. And let us raise a glass to the uncredited Ruth Warren who plays an unfazed cleaner whose hands are as attached to the vacuum as a cigarette is to her lips, even when she retorts after Bogart’s complaint about the machine’s noise, “she can’t hear it, she’s taken those pills.”

As far as the title of this piece goes, it highlights an exclamation in the film - quite possibly the only time the Biblical allusion has been made on screen.

Noir Curiosity (spoiler). - In a Lonely Place review by Steve

This has a huge cult following; directed by critics' favourite Nic Ray, and with a once in a lifetime pairing of film noir superstars Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. And it starts promisingly with Bogart under suspicion for the murder of a cocktail bar hatcheck girl, and Gloria the witness who could clear him.

But like many Ray films, after the set up, it unexpectedly becomes something else. Once they fall in love, she becomes menaced by his violent jealousy. In the source novel, he is a serial killer and she is playing with fire. Maybe because of star protocol, in the film he is just responsible for an incandescent temper, probably due to PTSD after WWII.  

A mutual friend tells the girl that if she loves the man, she has to love all of him, including his volatility... Which is really bad advice! Grahame is sensational, and Bogart is impressively menacing. But he's too convincing to be forgiven when he turns out to be innocent. The only plausible conclusion was in Dorothy Hughes' book. 

It's set in Hollywood. Bogart is a scriptwriter and Gloria a minor actor in B films. There is some interesting insider chat about the industry. It looks great. But it's a disappointment. The suspect is such a dreadful, overbearing nutcase that no one would go near him. It's two different films implausibly welded together. Points though for the classic noir title.