Dixon Steele. What a great name for the protagonist in a film noir. As played by grizzled Humphrey Bogart, “Dix” is sarcastic, dismissive, and angry. Especially angry. He threatens a passing motorist at a stoplight on the way to a meeting. At the bar later, he attacks a guy who keeps belittling an actor friend of his.
It’s Hollywood, 1950. Steele is a famed screenwriter who hasn’t had a hit since before the war. His agent is desperate to get him work, and has an opportunity for Dix to adapt a novel by a writer he despises. Dix, convinced the book is crap, invites the hat check woman, who has just finished the book, to come over to his place to tell him the story so he doesn’t have to read it. After some understandable hesitation, the young woman agrees. It goes OK. She tells him the story. Yes, it’s awful. Dix thanks her with some cash for cab fare home. He goes to bed.
Next morning, Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), an old war buddy, is at the door. He’s now a police detective, and he’s inviting Steele to the station. Why? Turns out, to ask him questions about the murder of the hat check woman. In the early morning hours, she’d been tossed out of a moving car, having been strangled to death.
Nice setup. We’re pretty sure Dix is not the murderer. But he’s got a lengthy police record of assault, especially against women, that makes him an obvious person of interest. But turns out he has an alibi from Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), who lives in the same apartment building. She saw Dix and the woman on the way in. She tells the cops she also saw him later, after the woman left.
And now I’m set for a tense film noirish investigation into the relationships between the characters, their motivations, their dark secrets, their tattering alibis. Maybe some tense moments when someone’s trying to hide evidence. Or a shocking revelation.
Not so much. Instead, we take a detour into romance territory. Dix and Laurel meet later, sparks fly. Within a day they’ve fallen in love. She moves in to take care of him, fixing his meals, making sure he gets some rest, and especially typing up the screenplay he’s now feverishly adapting from the book.
As Laurel spends time with Dix, she becomes ever more aware of his dark moods; his sarcastic and dismissive comments about the murder give her doubts that grow … and grow.
Skip It
In a Lonely Place has some powerful individual scenes. Example: Detective Nicolai invites his former commanding officer to dinner with his wife. The chat turns to the murder, and screenwriter Dixon – who tells them he’s killed lots of people … in his movies, that is – details how the deed was probably done. The murderer was driving the woman to a lonely place. Dix gets Nicolai and his wife to sit side by side, like they’re in a car, and to reenact the way the woman was killed. The tension rises as Dix’s gripping narrative causes Nicolai to get carried away. Great scene. It gives us the creeps and raises a shadow of a doubt about Dix.
But alas. In a Lonely Place is a character study without a character we care about. I kept waiting for some insightful backstory that explains Dix’s bellicosity. That comment that he’s not had any success since the war? Perhaps Nicolai witnessed something during the war that he’d eventually share, giving us an angle into Dix’s torment? But nothing. Dix is a hothead. A hothead who may apologize later and even send money to a victim. But simply a hothead. By the end, we very much don’t want him and Laurel to wind up together because he’s all wrong for her. He’s all wrong for anyone.
Gloria Graham is beguiling and effective in a role that requires her to ignore the obvious. We naturally suspect, and she admits, her first interest in Dix was to promote her career in the movie business. But she abandons that when she starts playing house with Dix, whom she apparently does genuinely come to love. When her love is poisoned by doubt, we also think: you should have seen this coming. You knew about his history of abusing women before things got heavy.
The screenplay has a some tense scenes and plenty of snappy dialog courtesy of Dix’s incessant sarcasm. Bogart and Graham do their usual excellent jobs in their individual roles. So I give it this: It’s well made, and I admire the craftsmanship. But unfortunately I found the “love at first sight” plot device unbelievable, and I didn’t get any on-screen vibes from Bogart and Grahame as a couple. There’s a meager attempt to make this a touching love story, with scenes that slow down the pace in order to show them cavorting happily. Screenwriter Dix even comes up with a touching line of dialog for his screenplay that characterizes their relationship:
I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.
But such pretty words ring hollow when uttered by a guy with such a thin skin and a brutal right hook. If we liked Dix and Laurel a little better, if we felt for them more as people, we might have pitied them as the script dives headlong into a finale that gives neither them nor us closure.