DVD of the Week: In a Lonely Place

In the clip above, I discuss Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film noir “In a Lonely Place,” the harshest, most agonized romance I’ve ever seen issued from Hollywood. It’s also a perceptive and bitter—yet still idealistic—inside-Hollywood drama, a warped police procedural, and a study in post-war trauma. Ray graces the film with intense, clenched performances from its great lead actors, Humphrey Bogart, as a once-glorious, now-struggling screenwriter, and Gloria Grahame (she was Ray’s wife at the time), as a starlet, as well as precise, poignant grace notes from a terrific range of character actors, notably Robert Warwick, as a former silent-era matinée idol now an orotund alcoholic, and Art Smith, as the screenwriter’s nurturing agent. (My encyclopedic colleague Roger Angell told me that Smith was blacklisted; a bit of Internet research reveals that Smith was fingered by Elia Kazan.)

It’s high on my list of the greatest movies of all time, and the chapter about it in Bernard Eisenschitz’s extraordinary biography of Ray (“Nicholas Ray: An American Journey,” which, sadly, is out of print) explains in fascinating detail the way in which, despite the screenplay credit to Andrew Solt, Ray made the movie his own:

[O]f the 140 pages in the script, only four reached the shooting stage without revisions.… The changes may have been made by Solt, although he had (by his own account) been kept off the set by a momentary falling-out with Bogart. More important, they were occasioned by the bond between the director and the two leading actors.

The romantic agony seems to have arisen directly from life, as, during the shoot, Ray and Grahame had separated, and here’s one way that, according to Ray (as cited by Eisenschitz), their turmoil found its way into the movie:

Nobody knew that we were separated. And I just couldn’t believe the ending that Bundy [Solt] and I had written. I shot it because it was my obligation to do it. Then I kicked everybody off stage except Bogart, Art Smith and Gloria. And we improvised the ending as it is now.

There’s an overarching point, going beyond Ray’s and the actors’ art, that should be made: the credits of Hollywood movies often don’t tell the real story of the work that went into them. It’s a mistake to think that directors were mere staging-machines for ironclad scripts; and the greater an artist the director was, and the stronger an artistic personality the director had, the likelier it was that the script was decisively altered by that director (usually uncredited). In other words, the young French critics of the nineteen-fifties who wrote of the politique des auteurs were entirely right in seeing movies as being “authored” by the best directors, and not only by means of performances and camera work. And Nicholas Ray, whose work they loved and whose films they were among the first to recognize as art, is, simply, one of the greatest directors.