In A Lonely Place (1950)

Humphrey Bogart is Dixon Steele, an embittered and washed-up Hollywood screenwriter who pays hat-check girl Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart) to help out with a script read-through one night.

When she’s found dead the next morning, Steele comes under suspicion until his actor neighbour, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), gives him an alibi.

Dix and Laurel fall in love but police suspicion sours the affair, as well as Dix’s violent temper which alarms Laurel.

She agrees to marry him, but after he attacks his agent Mel (Art Smith), she plans to leave him and he attacks her.

Even though the real murderer confesses they split up, their relationship destroyed by Dix’s violence.

The story of a woman slowly coming to suspect that her partner is a murderer harkens back to 1940s melodramas such as Suspicion (1941) and Gaslight (1944), but the way the relationship is depicted here is much more nuanced and adult – more frightening in its barely contained violence.

Film noir isn’t always as dark as it’s cracked up to be, but Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is one film where the desolation cuts to the bone.

Dixon ‘Dix’ Steele
Humphrey Bogart
Laurel Gray
Gloria Grahame
Brub Nicolai
Frank Lovejoy
Captain Lochner
Carl Benton Reid
Mel Lippman
Art Smith
Sylvia Nicolai
Jeff Donnell
Mildred Atkinson
Martha Stewart
Charlie Waterman
Robert Warwick
Lloyd Barnes
Morris Ankrum
Ted Barton
William Ching
Paul
Steven Geray
Junior
Lewis Howard
Frances Randolph
Alice Talton
Effie
Ruth Warren
Henry Kesler
Jack Reynolds
Martha
Ruth Gillette
Dr Richards
David Bond
Swan
Guy Beach
Mike
Mike Romanoff
Joe
Arno Frey

Director
Nicholas Ray