In a Lonely Place
1950
Director: Nicholas Ray
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame
My enduring memory of In a Lonely Place is that of an apartment building. In the relatively straightforward story, so much of the action takes place within two apartments and the Spanish courtyard that separates them. How the apartments change or are changed throughout the course of the film is reflective of how the central relationship in the film changes in this suburban film noir.
Dixon Steele (wow, what a name, played by Humphrey Bogart) is a hard drinking Hollywood screenwriter on the verge of being washed up. His agent lands him a gig adapting a crappy sounding romance novel, and instead of reading it himself, he hires the coat check girl at his favorite hangout to come home and tell him the story of the novel; after all, she’s read it, and he hasn’t. Troubles arise when the very same coat check girl is found brutally murdered only hours after she left Steele’s apartment. When Steele’s neighbor Laurel Gray (Grahame) provides him an alibi, the two strike up a romance. But Steele has a dark streak, and his involvement in the murder case remains undetermined.
