Rating: 
Summary: Film Noir + Emotional Depth
Review: Nicholas Ray's film noir is a departure for Humphrey Bogart and for the film noir genre itself. Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), a washed-up screenwriter with a flashpoint temper and a violent streak, is equal parts Rick Blaine and Fred C. Dobbs. Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) is the antithesis of the dumb blonde. The script by Andrew Solt from Dorothy B. Hughes's novel has all the crisp, Chandleresque dialogue of the best film noir but with an emotional intensity not usually associated with the genre. The film works better as a romance between two damaged people than as a crime drama. George Antheil's score works wonders at underscoring their anguish. Dix's agent Mel Lippmann (Art Smith) asks the old hack to dinner to consider adapting a Harlequinesque romance novel that hack director Lloyd Barnes (Morris Ankrum) is eager to shoot. On the way to the restaurant Dix nearly gets into a fight with a passing motorist and upon arrival at the bar DOES mix it up with some sonofaproducer who calls Dix's old buddy Charlie (Robert Warwick) the washed-up drunkard actor that he is. The semiliterate coat check girl Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart) gushes about the novel that Dix is up for adapting, so rather than read it, Dix invites her to his apartment to tell him the story. She has to break a date with her boyfriend to do so but as Dix says, "There's no sacrifice too great for a chance at immortality." When one of Dix's old war-buddies-turned-police-detective Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) pays Dix a visit at 5 a.m., he thinks it's because the producer's son filed a complaint. He's wrong. The coat check girl has been murdered and thrown in a ditch. Dix's best defence is new neighbor Laurel Gray who saw the girl leave Dix's apartment alone. Dix falls for Laurel because she has a nice face. But she's a little more cautious. DIXON STEELE: Go ahead and get some sleep and we'll have dinner together tonight. LAUREL GRAY: We'll have dinner tonight. But not together. There are plenty of laughs supplied by Art Smith, Robert Warwick, and Ruth Warren as the cleaning lady who can never get either Dix's or Laurel's apartment clean. At its core, though, IN A LONELY PLACE is about two lonely people who clearly need but will not allow themselves to have each other.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating!!!!
Review: Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, released by Columbia Pictures in 1950, was long regarded as one of star Humphrey Bogart's minor films, as were most of the Columbia released Santana productions he made both during and after his lengthy and legendary tenure at Warner Bros. Now, the film is considered to contain one of his strongest performances. The Production Company was Bogart's own (Santana was the name of his yacht), which he started in 1948 and sold to Columbia Pictures in 1954. In a Lonely Place is not a whodunit, but it is cleverly disguised as one. The murder and suspense play a backstory to the study of an emotionally sick man involved in a world of strange tensions. The world is Hollywood and although a studio or camera are never seen on the screen, the film captures the loneliness, the lushness, and the edginess of it all. This remains one of the filmmaker's greatest and most deeply resonant features, and one of Bogart's best roles.Bogart plays Dix Steele, a fading screenwriter suffering from creative burnout. He is hired to adapt a best-selling novel, but instead of reading the book himself, he asks the hatcheck girl at his favorite nightclub to read the book and simply tell him the plot. The next morning, the girl is found brutally murdered, and Steele is the prime suspect. There isn't enough evidence to arrest him, but he's so good at thinking like a killer, and is always so up-front about what's on his mind, the police are forced to suspect him. "I'll be going now," he tells them. "Unless you plan on arresting me for lack of emotion." It is the would-be starlet who has starred in a couple of B-pictures, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a new tenant in Dix's apartment complex, who provides him with a solid alibi. Soon, they begin a romance in spite of Gray's lingering concerns that the violent Steele might in fact be the deadly killer, plunging the audience into an intriguing and suspenseful mystery, which quickly becomes a backdrop to the troubled romance between the two wonderfully realized characters. A lesser director may have established Dix's innocence earlier on and although the spectator naturally assumes Dix is guilt-free (indeed, he does have an air-tight alibi), screenwriters Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt go to great lengths to play with audience expectations, although the film is more about the loneliness and despair in Tinseltown than about the murder mystery surrounding it. We don't see for ourselves that the cynical, alcoholic, and abusive Steele did not kill the hatcheck girl, and of course we have doubts since there is a limited amount of suspects. The only other suspect is Henry Kessler, who was Mildred's boyfriend. Dix, however, claims to have gone to sleep right after directing the girl to walk a block and take a cab home, but he is unable to provide the police with an alibi, and a tightening knot of suspicion begins to form around the writer. It is Mrs. Gray who claims she saw the hatcheck girl leave the apartment complex alone and provides him with one, and the couple fall in love as the suspense mounts. At first, the new relationship is invigorating for the hard-boiled writer, who plunges into his latest 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, causing their relationship to spiral and her love to turn into mistrust, and fear. 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. It gave him a role he could play with complexity, because the character's pride in his art, his selfishness, drunkenness, and lack of energy, stabbed with lightening strokes of violence, were shared by the real Bogart. 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. The film is a desperate tale of fear and self-loathing in Hollywood cleverly posing as a taut noir thriller. It is the closing lines of the film version, which Dix had written into his
screenplay, that lingered in my mind longer than anything else. "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me." That powerful line sums up Dix's love life, and the film, extremely well
Rating:
Summary: A truly wonderful film.
Review: Now, if Columbia Classics would only include it in their DVD catalogue...
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Bogart, Ray, Grahame,Solt,Lovejoy, etc
Review: One test for me is re-viewing and I've seen this film around ten times. The tenth time I found the initial scene between Ms Grahame and her lesbian masseur both witty and gripping as the almost sadistic masseur twisted, leant, squeezed with each vicious word her distaste for Ms Grahame's man, and I guess, for all men. But this is a film rich in such moments - including the apparently obligatory night club singing scene which was a cliche of the forties films - with the excellent singing performance interrupted by the enraged Dixon Steele (Bogart) as he physically attacks HIS BESPECTACLED BEST FRIEND AND AGENT at his table. Personally I find this film superior to REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. It is especially well written by Andrew Solt and Mr Ray gets fabulous performances out of all concerned. It is at the one time a film self deprecating about its own medium as an art - much irony within the film about the cliches of film - as well as a searing comment on post traumatic stress as the character played by Mr Bogart is clearly a victim of war. Indeed, I count the film amongst the best of its time which seems to get better with age. Brilliant in black and white.
Rating: 
Summary: Bogart loses his temper
Review: Temper tantroms by Bogart abound. Heartbreaking ending
Rating:
Summary: Nicholas Ray at his best.
Review: The cast is greate but it's the director that deserves the merits. The story of a hollywood screenwriter with a violent temper is tald briliantly here in what is one of director Nicholas Ray's greatest master peice. He directed "Reble Without a Cause" that also has a leading rolle of a violent yong man were only one woman can sooth his restlesness. A great classic and an unexpected plesure.
Rating: 
Summary: In a Luney Place
Review: The starbright status of Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, and Frank Lovejoy fails to carry this crater-filled tale of a woman's worries about the propensity to violence of her beloved. The narrative rises to a promising start with a mysterious murder to which Bogart seems marginally linked, but then the story wanes straightaway into a muddled exploration of his erratic behavior. And given the shaky, shifty ground on which psychology now rests, this study looks like primeval ooze! Is Bogie mentally deranged, artistically tempermental, viciously manipulative, or what? There's never a clear answer, and, given forties/fifties chauvinism, Grahame apparently assumes it's okay if her man roughs up women or bops proteges-- just as long as he's not capable of murder! And there's nothing in the plotline to elucidate her motivations or calculations. There are so many sinkholes in the story that the film seems clumsily overedited. When Bogart and Grahame first meet, they almost immediately make moon-eyes. Next, they're viewed in a writer/secretary relationship that appears almost chaste. He's not paying her, so how is she supporting herself? And what's this about a former lover? Or is that superfluous masseuse her lover? The one merit this movie might have is the challenge to figure it all out!
Rating:
Summary: Content Superior; Transfer Average
Review: This film lives up to its reviews as a complex, interesting trans-genre film that is among Bogart's best performances. See it if you like films of the period, like Bogart, and/or want to have first-hand knowledge of a revered film noir. Criticisms here about poor transfer are valid, probably prompted by Columbia (Sony) making such a big deal on the disk about the pains-staking "restoration." If we were not told of the restoration efforts, you would not imagine any were done: there are still plenty of scratchy, dull scenes, and on my disk, and one digital break-up. It's still worth seeing, and maybe owning, but the movie studio, in the future, should make less ballyhoo about there restoration work, since it raises expectations beyond what is delivered. Joe Oliver
Rating:
Summary: One of Bogart's Best!
Review: This has to be Bogarts second best film behind The Maltese Falcon. Even though its a little known trip through the Film Noir world it offers so much more. When ever I speak of Sunset Boulevard I have to mention In a Lonely Place because it attacks Hollwood witht the same dry and often harsh wit. At certain points this movie even outdoes Sunset Boulevard interms of pacing and dialogue. I always find myself sencond guessing on the sanity of Bogarts character. The flick offers up some Staples of Film Noir Grahame is brilliant and so is Lovejoy as his faithfuly committed best friend. The story is built around Bogart's character obssesive nature towards his work and his underlying need for balance but in the world of noir the underlying tension of shady thoughts and desires always creep into the dark side of town. Grahame offers up so much unease and uncontrolled sexuality its never easy to root for her in this flick. The movie is dark as night, it offers up death,sex, happiness and sadism and a truly gut wrenching scene between Grahame and an all too eager and attentive stocky female masseuse. Buy it love it and watch it over and over again! One of the best Film Noir's and one of Bogart's best fims!
Rating:
Summary: first rate!
Review: This is my favorite Bogart film. Grahame is some kind of woman, luminous, unflappable, and she gets what she wants. Just an incredible film. Why doesn't anyone know about it?
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