What better way to escape the heat and Gay Pride jollities than to slip into a cool cinema to see something dark? IN A LONELY PLACE has the fatalism, the alienation and sadness, the swooney romanticism: ‘I was born when I kissed you; I died when you left me; for a few weeks I lived while you loved me.’ Some of the most memorable dialogue in film history, and this not including its wonderful use of Shakespeare 29th sonnets:
‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate…’
I still remember reading Judith Williamson’s brilliant analysis of Nicholas Ray’s use of the courtyard that separates the lovers’ apartments. The scene with Hazel Scott singing ‘I hadn’t anyone, till you’ where the way Ray films it — the lovers are enveloped in their own mutual feelings for each other, in their own world of whispers and longings, only for the police to crash in alter their mood, change their world — remains as brilliant as ever. There’s the troubling and enticing masseuse. What is Laurel’s (Gloria Grahame) relationship with her? And of course, Bogart starred and produced. What kind of courage did it take in 1950 to make a film about a violent man who can’t stop lashing out at people, who can’t control his anger, who beats his girlfriends? Even when he’s proven to be innocent of the initial crime that sparks the narrative, he’s still guilty of all of the above, and 1950 couldn’t even package it as PTSD.
The lights accidentally came on at the cinema just a few minutes before the end, just as Bogart was about to strangle Grahame, a bit of a jolt. But even that didn’t alter the the mood. It’s a spellbinding film about loneliness, violence and desire. When the police tell Grahame that Bogart is cleared of the crime, she answers, ‘yesterday this would have meant so much to us; now it doesn’t matter,’ which one doesn’t quite believe. The last line is a killer.
José Arroyo