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starring: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Art Smithdirected by: Nicholas Ray
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302801132
Format: Black & White, NTSC
ISBN: 6302801133
Label: Sony Pictures
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Release Date: January 19, 1999
Running Time: 94 minutes
Sales Rank: 14745
Studio: Sony Pictures
Theatrical Release Date: May 17, 1950
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com essential video:
One of Humphrey Bogart's finest performances dominates this unusual 1950 film noir, which focuses less on the murder mystery at the center of its plot than on the investigation's devastating effect on a fragile romance. For Bogart, already a noir icon, the Andrew Solt script afforded an opportunity to explore a more complex and contradictory role--an antiheroic persona in line with the actor's most accomplished and absorbing triumphs throughout his career.
For maverick director Nicholas Ray, the film posed the challenge of taking crime dramas beyond their usual formulas and into a more mature realm, as well as a chance to cast a jaundiced eye on the film industry itself. Its protagonist is Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with an acerbic wit and a violent temper. Tasked with adapting a bestseller, he meets a hatcheck girl who's read the book, hoping to glean its highlights before writing the script. When she's found murdered, Steele becomes the prime suspect, and a tightening knot of suspicion forms around the writer.
Steele's only, inconclusive witness is a pretty new neighbor, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), and the couple fall in love even as the pressure mounts. At first the new relationship is a tonic to the hard-boiled writer, who plunges into his script with a renewed vigor and discipline. But as the police continue to shadow him, Steele's own penchant for violence erupts against friends, strangers, and even Laurel herself, whose feelings are increasingly eclipsed by suspicion that her lover is a murderer, and fear that he'll harm her.
Bogart conveys Steele's world-weariness and underlying vulnerability, and manages the delicate task of making both his romantic yearning and sudden, murderous rages equally convincing. Ultimately, that performance and Grahame's sympathetic work elevate In a Lonely Place into what has been called 'an existential love story' more than a crime drama. --Sam Sutherland
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Quality Bogart flick
Bogart plays a mean drunk scriptwriter, and it's one of his best performances. There's a good plot to this and some great scenes, but in places the plot gets a little lost, so it loses a star.
Still well worth seeing, though.
Rating:  - One of Bogie's best -- one of Bogie's least remembered
Far and away my favorite Humphrey Bogart movie is the superb film noir, IN A LONELY PLACE (1950).
Bogie is Dixon Steele, a brilliant screenwriter with an unpredictable violent temper who hasn't had a hit film in a decade. Assigned by a producer to transcribe a trash novel, Dix learns that the hatcheck girl at a restaurant where Hollywood insiders gather is familiar with the book, so he invites her home to tell him the story. The resulting interplay between them is the movie's only bit ... Read More
Rating:  - Clumsy. But sincere.
There's something darn odd about Nicholas Ray's films. I'm thinking about this one, and Rebel without a Cause. Perhaps it's just that most movies in the 1950s were not much cop. You couldn't really call them good, let alone great. In this one the scaffolding supporting Bogart's performance as Dixon Steele (what a phony name) is quite mediocre, scarcely up to B-movie standard. The script is clunky, the dialogue poor, the second-string acting, especially the completely wooden cops and the ridiculous ... Read More
Rating: - NICHOLAS RAY, OPUS 4
***** 1950. Loosely based on Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place (Femmes Fatales : Women Write Pulp), this film was directed by Nicholas Ray. A screenwriter, violent by nature, is suspected to have murdered a young woman he received in his apartment. Soon, his new girl-friend doesn't know anymore whether he's guilty or not. Superb movie about Hollywood and exceptional performance of the couple Humphrey Bogart-Gloria Grahame. Among the bonus, there is an interesting featurette which allows director ... Read More
Rating: - Very good Noir
This is a good film. We see the "noir" side of a charming, talented screen writer, who apparently is suffering from what we might today label post traumatic stress disorder. His propensity for violent outbursts are tempered by acts of unexpected generosity. No wonder the beautiful blond neighbor finds him "interesting" and then falls completely in love with him.
Bogart and Grahame are a great match. Bogart is wonderful, as always and Grahame certainly holds her own with him. In many ... Read More
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