Chapter 1

1950

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In a Lonely Place

DIR. NICHOLAS RAY

What’s a bleary, beleaguered Bogart doing with a supine broad in bed? Well, he must be In a Lonely Place.

Is the washed-up, volatile screenwriter Dixon Steele stalking and killing women in Hollywood? With Humphrey Bogart as the morally compromised scribe, you can’t ever be sure—even as he falls in love with his seductive neighbor (Gloria Grahame, director Nicholas Ray’s wife). Will she rescue him . . . or unearth a dark secret in his past? One of the greatest Hollywood films of the 1950s, In a Lonely Place offers many delights—not least “magnificent viewpoint switches worthy of Hitchcock,” says noir expert David Bordwell of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Bogart bought the rights to the source novel by Dorothy B. Hughes in part for its title, which was pretty much all that remained once it reached the screen: Over time, the script increasingly reflected the perspectives of its makers. For both Bogart and Ray, the film was deeply, even painfully, personal. Ray clearly identified with Steele, modeling the character’s house after the one he first stayed in after moving to Los Angeles. During the filming, his marriage to Grahame started falling apart—partly because of her offscreen life, which could have been a film noir in itself: She ended up having an affair with Ray’s 13-year-old son from a previous marriage—a fact that helped inspire the director’s classic 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. (She later married—and divorced—the young man.)

“Achingly romantic and pitch-black, In a Lonely Place functions as both love story and an evisceration of a certain kind of predatory masculinity,” novelist Megan Abbott, author of You Will Know Me, tells LIFE. “But I love it most because it offers Grahame, the quintessential actress of film noir, in her greatest role. Every scene with Grahame and an especially fearless Bogart feels dangerous, beautiful, haunted.” Though in some respects In a Lonely Place is an anomalous noir—it’s not a film of guns and mayhem—it manages, says Otto Penzler, owner of Manhattan’s Mysterious Bookshop, to encapsulate the whole genre in a few lines of Steele’s: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”

Director Nicholas Ray (left) and star Humphrey Bogart on the set of In a Lonely Place. In the hands of the two iconoclastic men, the film became a deeply personal meditation on mortality, murder, and the movie business. “In many ways, the film reflects Ray’s own self-evisceration,” noir novelist Megan Abbott, tells LIFE.

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Ray’s then-wife, Gloria Grahame, takes something less than a joy ride with costar Bogart.