1950 / 94 mins / b/w
Dir. Nicholas Ray / Sc. Andrew P. Solt, Edmund North / Cine. Burnett Guffey / Prod. Robert Lord
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy
Based on the novel In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes
DCP courtesy of Sony Pictures
Introduced by Dana Polan, NYU
“The Bogart Suspense Picture with the Surprise Finish”
One of the essential film noirs, Nicholas Ray’s 1950 In a Lonely Place is based on a no less canonical literary source: the 1947 novel by author Dorothy B. Hughes, whom critic Sarah Weinman has dubbed “the world’s finest female noir writer.” Hughes’ training was as a journalist, with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and graduate studies at Columbia University. Her first book was poetry, Dark Certainty (1931), which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. It would not be until 1940 that she published her first mystery novel, The So Blue Marble, which would be followed by thirteen more, culminating in the experimental The Expendable Man (1963).
Prior to In a Lonely Place, two others of Hughes’ novels were adapted to film, The Fallen Sparrow (1943) and Ride the Pink Horse (1947), the latter of which will also be screened at this year’s festival. What makes In a Lonely Place distinctive among her works is its first-person exploration of a serial killer’s warped psyche. Novelist Christine Smallwood has written that “Crime was never Hughes’s interest, evil was. … [S]he makes that evil a sickness in the mind.” In In a Lonely Place, Hughes broke from the traditional whodunit narrative to instead emphasize the why behind a killer’s actions, here to an almost empathetic degree.
Ray’s adaptation dramatically alters Hughes’ original. His protagonist Dixon Steele’s innocence is the central question in the film, whereas Hughes’ Steele is guilty from the outset. Ray maintained Hughes’ Los Angeles setting, but, enforcing Hollywood’s infatuation with itself, Ray made Steele a screenwriter. (In the novel, Steele hopes to be a writer of crime fiction!) Ray’s Hollywood-centric story thus speaks to tensions in the postwar industry, at a time when audiences were in sharp decline. Although his innocence is in doubt, Dix’s scorn for Hollywood’s “popcorn salesmen” never is.
– Paige Wills
About Dana Polan
Dana Polan is a professor in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author of ten books in film and media studies (with three more, one co-authored, under contract for 2023) and of approximately two hundred essays, reviews, and review-essays. He is a former president of the Society for Cinema Studies, the primary professional organization for the field, and former editor of its publication, Cinema Journal. He has been knighted by the Ministry of Culture of the French government for contributions to cross-cultural exchange, and, in 2002, was selected as one of the two Academy Scholars for that year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.