Button-Down Era’s Rebel With a Camera

About Ray




It is a curious coincidence — but then again, as they say, probably no accident — that Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” was released in the same year (1950) as Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard.” Both films cast a dark, cynical, knowing eye on life in Hollywood, and both concern screenwriters down on their luck and hoping for a break. While neither refers to the political unease infesting the film colony at that blacklist-haunted moment, both seethe with unspoken paranoia and anxiety, with a sense of imminent betrayal and lurking menace.

I had not seen In a Lonely Place until recently, and found it great. Bogart shines in the role of the screenwriter looking for a new break, an end to his bad luck.

Wilder’s characters — the thwarted young writer played by William Holden and the moldering, reclusive former star incarnated by Gloria Swanson — are specimens of spiritual malaise and moral decay, held up to ruthless analytical scrutiny. Ray, laying hold of similarly ripe psychological material, handles it with an empathy that is at least as disconcerting as Wilder’s rigor.

I'm going to try Sunset Boulevard; haven't seen it in years.
“In a Lonely Place,” which begins a weeklong run at Film Forum on Friday, leading into “Nick Ray,” a 14-film retrospective of his work, obeys the rules of the film noir genre dutifully enough, though Ray, as was his custom when circumstances allowed, took some liberties with the original script, which was adapted by Andrew Solt from a story by Dorothy B. Hughes. There is a murder, a police investigation, a star-crossed love affair and violence that erupts suddenly and scarily. But this is not a crime story, and certainly not much of a whodunit, even though it stars Humphrey Bogart, the most recognizable movie detective of the previous decade.
Ray’s career in Hollywood was relatively brief and frequently frustrating. He flourished in the 1950s and was responsible for one of the decade’s cinematic touchstones, “Rebel Without a Cause.” That movie, like “In a Lonely Place,” takes a fairly conventional template and fills it with wild, extravagant emotions and hyperbolically expressive cinematic effects.

One of three films James Dean would make.
There is some suspense in the story but not much doubt about how things will end. Throughout, though, the details of the plot register less than the shadings of emotion, as the center of attention pivots from Dixon’s anger to Laurel’s fear. And these emotions have the effect of isolating these two loners, who had found a measure of companionship together, from each other and from everyone else around them.
“In a Lonely Place,” like “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Hot Blooded,” “Bigger Than Life” and “Bitter Victory,” is a Nicholas Ray movie whose title would suit just about any of them. There may be no other director in the Hollywood mainstream (where Ray was never altogether comfortable) whose vision is at once so bleak and so luxuriously satisfying. As the ’50s went on, he shifted from black and white to Technicolor and CinemaScope, and the deep colors and widescreen format brought his blend of Method naturalism, psychosexual subtext and operatic scale to lustrous and splendid new life.