Sometimes you come upon a book or a movie you can’t figure out how you had missed earlier.  I haven’t seen all of Bogart’s 75 films, though 30 wouldn’t be far off,  and some more than thrice.  Somehow I’d never heard of, much less seen, In A Lonely Place, 1950.  Directed by Nicholas Ray, famed bad-boy director of the 1950s (Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar and such tabloid titles as A Woman’s Secret and The Lusty Men) I had been doubly deprived.

Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a tough, troubled screen-writer, in a great Hollywood apartment set up, with rooms around a lush garden, and plenty of gates, doors and windows to look through and pretty neighbors to look at.   He’s got a saintly agent [Art Smith] who keeps pushing him to write, and some colleagues he jousts with over writing from the heart or selling out. Oh, and their are cops.

He talks an effervescent young secretary [played by Martha Stewart, the earlier one] in to coming to his place to tell him about a book –which she loved, ecstatically– for which he is supposed to write a screenplay, and which of course, he loathes the very idea of.  She escapes his worldly clutches that night but is found dead, pushed out of a speeding car, the next morning.  Steele is the prime suspect, even as he is falling in love with a Laurel [Gloria Grahame,]  a great blonde, and witness to the fact that the young woman had left Steele’s apartment without him.

So the murder plot, and sketchy police procedural are the scaffolding, but what is really the matter for Nicholas Ray, is Steele’s character and its response to pressure — from the outside, under the stress of a police tail and interrogations, from trying to break a writer’s block and earn some money, from a new and dangerous relationship  and, pressure from the inside, the sources of which we don’t know [though the recent war and ‘combat fatigue’ are likely suspects.]  He has an explosive temper, against friends and strangers alike, mitigated by his ‘genius’ and manic enthusiasms.  When he finally asks Laurel to marry him, and she is deeply worried that he might in fact be the killer — that he has shown himself to be capable of it– she says, “What’s the rush, Dix?”  He replies, “No rush.  No rush at all.  You’ve got ten seconds to say yes or no, two hours to get a ring, four hours to get to the airport and in six hours we’ll be in Las Vegas on our honeymoon.’ [All my paraphrase]  Some women just love men like that!  Her terror increases.

In a dark, terrifying car ride — one of several– Dix tries out some lines from the book he is working on, and which she types the manuscript for:

“‘I was born when you kissed me.  I died when you left me.  I lived a few weeks when you loved me.’ How does that sound to you?”

Since she is on the verge of fleeing for her life, and we know it though he doesn’t, the lines do just the work, on us and her, the writer [Andrew Solt] and director wants.

There’s no use in filling you in on anymore.  The acting is terrific.  Bogart, two years away from Key Largo and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and one year before The African Queen, is dark, haggard, haunted and violent.  As one critic says, in the added material on the DVD, there seems to be no acting at all; Bogart is revealing his own inner demons.

Interestingly, Steele is a writer, resisting making a so-so novel into a movie; “In a Lonely Place” is a very interesting movie created from the more pedestrian novel of the same name, by Dorothy Hughes. According to the included comments on the movie, the ending was completely altered, arriving at the stunner we see in the film.

Have a non-popcorn evening.  A shot of scotch might help, Bogart’s favorite sip.The ending is one of the saddest I can remember in my movie going life — a fully etched, black and white, definition of being In a Lonely Place.