Rent In a Lonely Place (1950)

In A Lonely Place - In a Lonely Place review by LJ

A Hollywood screenwriter with a violent temper becomes a suspect in a murder. He starts a relationship with his neighbour, but will the case and his violent nature come between them? While it's an okay noir, since most of it rests on the strength of the relationship it didn't really work for me because it was hard to believe how quickly their love affair becomes serious.

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.