“Nicholas Ray’s melodrama In a Lonely Place is one of the darkest, harshest, and most devastating love stories ever made. It’s an inside-Hollywood story, starring Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele, a gifted screenwriter with a mean streak.
“Dixon meets his dream woman, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a fledgling actress, the very night that another woman he was with is found murdered, and he comes under suspicion. The clash of movie-world scandal with local politics gives the passionate affair a broad backdrop, as does Ray’s fervent depiction of fragile, high-strung artists caught between love and work.
“Ray—who was married to Grahame at the time—endows the couple’s intimate moments with a bittersweet ardor. The stars are joined by a superb batch of character actors, in such roles as a sentimental agent and a Falstaffian thespian, in sequences that play like bruising chamber music, with two-person face-offs, triangular confrontations, and jousting quartets. Few movies suggest such a forthright flaying of the director’s soul.” New Yorker
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