In a Lonely Place

The lonely place is Hollywood, it's the unstable heart of relationships, the highway at night before Humphrey Bogart's eyes. The artist is a washed-up screenwriter who makes a point to "never see the pictures I write," his muse is the failed starlet from across the courtyard (Gloria Grahame), they get together at the police station after a breathless coat-check girl ("She's your audience!") turns up dead. (The Black Dahlia is a hovering specter, so is McCarthyite paranoia.) The writer is "an erratic, brutal man" perpetually one push away from a brawl, "an exciting guy" who can weave his own mise en scène, moody lighting and all, while describing a murder to friends. He's also Bogie the icon laid bare by Nicholas Ray's delicate-merciless scrutiny, a persona eroded to reveal desolating macho violence. Strangulated by suspicion, Grahame's bruised coolness dissipates: When the hand that caresses your cheek had a minute earlier nearly cracked a man's skull, does it matter whether he's the real killer? "Good love scenes should be about something besides love," the psychotic protagonist tells his distressed beloved, demonstrating via a grapefruit knife with a straightened-out edge. Movingly low-key where their Sunset Blvd. colleagues are baroquely acerbic, the characters are "popcorn salesmen" in a business of illusions, fragilely connected. Noir mystery purposely gives way to melodrama, romantic happiness is a flickering rear-projection screen of a beachfront picnic, even the POV camera from Dark Passage makes a telling appearance. Above all, a stinging documentary about the breakup of filmmaker and actress, with Ray contemplating the self-lacerating tough guy staggering out of the screen and all but muttering, "I was born when she kissed me..." Rossellini is concurrent with his own confessional line of thought, ten years later and Fellini is still catching up with La Dolce Vita. With Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Art Smith, Martha Stewart, Jeff Donnell, Robert Warwick, and Morris Ankrum. In black and white.