In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place

Novel~ Dorothy B. Hughes, 1947

 

Director ~Nicholas Ray

Writers ~ Andrew Solt, Edmund H. North

1950, USA

Stars ~ Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy

 

Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel is the tale of a serial killer shamming his way from place to place, a psychological study with noir garb. As a female writer, she convincingly traces Dixon Steele’s infatuation with women, through jealousy and misogyny to barely checked anger and murderous intent. Steele is not quite as arrogant as Lou Ford in ‘The Killer Inside Me’, but similarly convinced he has others fooled, that he’s untouchable. It is Los Angeles, post-World War II and there’s a strangler on the loose, murdering women. Dix is pretending to be a writer and ingratiates himself with an old friend working on the case. The eponymous place is one of misogyny and anger which cannot help but flare up in Dix. He is a damaged man, a monster emerging from that fog of the first pages, prowling the streets at night. 

A prolific and award-winning novelist, Hughes’ book is ahead of its time in focusing on a serial killer’s mindset and toxic masculinity, it exudes noir suspense where the battleground is between the sexes and psychologies rather than criminality. One of its best moments is where the two very different women of his infatuation rub up against each other in his lounge. Sensationalism and sleaziness aren’t the agenda: indeed, the kills happen “off screen”, as it were. To get it out of the way: Dixon Steele is a name worthy of 'Carry On'. Dix’s descent/escalation into murderous sexism is repellent and Hughes isn’t interested in making him charm the reader, although we can see how he might be perceived to have charm to the other characters: we’re too privileged with an awareness to his inner workings and jealousy. One can almost sense it as a woman’s writing experiment in speculating about violent men, although there is a hardboiled attitude that fits it in untroubled with the thriller genre.

Developed by Humphry Bogart’s own independent Santana Productions, the film has come to feature on several “best of” lists, including from ‘Slant’ and Robert Ebert. It is obvious given the censorship at the time that was no doubt impossible for Bogart to be cast as an irredeemable serial killer, no matter how audiences were used to him being an anti-hero, which makes Hugh’s book a strange choice. The adaption is quite an altered beast from the novel, although general details remain. Here, Dix is a screenwriter rather than a faux author which opens the film’s major addition as a commentary of the Hollywood of the time. Nicholas Ray’s fifth film, ‘In a Lonely Place’ is often mentioned along with ‘Sunset Boulevard’ as insider barbs and sour criticisms of the system. Indeed, one of the more impressive meta-moments is the scene where Steele describes that just an everyday scene in the kitchen can relay that they’re in love.

Dix’s ambiguity is the film’s own: we start with his looking in a rearview mirror, giving a zinger that he never watches his own films, almost losing his cool at a roadside altercation and left framed alone against the stop stencilled in the road. It’s a neat summary of his dilemma: reflection, intelligence, temper, warning, loneliness. Such is the ambiguity of his wryness and nihilism that we aren’t sure if he’s guilty of killing the hat check girl. Although the era was averse to criticism of the military, the suggestion of PTSD is there in both book and movie, but it also riffs on Bogart’s own temperament. Louise Brooks’ wrote in Sight and Sound that,

 

‘In a Lonely Place’ gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the character's pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart.

(Brooks, Louise. Sight and Sound, Winter 1966/67,

Volume 36 Number 1, "Humphrey and Bogey.")

 

And if Dix’s character tapped into brawly Bogart’s own, the disillusion with the studio system comes from all the filmmakers. The screenplay is credited to  an authorship that is contested but includes Ray’s penchant for improvisation. Ray takes credit for rewriting the book’s ending which arguably elevates this story into a maturity that genre pictures rarely manage.

Once we have the measure of Dix, the film subtly slips to his love interest Laurel Grey. It is a much-lauded performance by Gloria Graeme, sensual, sleek, vulnerable, smart, in some ways just as elusive and slippery as Dix. It would seem that Dix also acts as Ray’s avatar, a chance to express his own difficulties with his reckless and sensitive self and the marriage to Graeme.

She was forced to sign a contract that agreed that she would not nag him, would always defer to the instructions without putting forward ideas of her own, that kind of disagreeably sexist stuff. But she did sign and in fact the shoot, despite the difficulties star and director may have been going through, apparently went smoothly. Indeed, despite the contract it plays very much as Graeme’s revenge on aggressive and possessive men. Graeme and Ray’s separation during production was kept a secret with Ray essentially living on set for a while. It is a wonder that the film doesn’t implode with all the background baggage, but rather it seems to hone so much focus and surely provided a more devastating and less tropey finale. It is an obvious passion- and passionate project.

There are plenty of quotable and sardonic lines (“What a grip. Comes from counting all that money.”), Bernett Guffey’s cinematography that delves into more grey than typical black-and-white high contrast, a memorable courtyard set between their apartments (based upon one of Ray’s actual addresses), a bedrock of strong side characters and Hadda Brooks singing to add to the jazzy heartbreak feel. Its strength is in focusing on fleeting happiness (“I was born when she kissed me…”, etc.), how people aren’t what we want them to be despite the romance, on how our key flaws ruin everything, how anger destroys what chance there may have been. How we leave ourselves in that lonely place. There’s a whole adult feel to the film that elevates it from mere genre delights to speaking of the simple tragedy of being who you are.

 

The Sweet Smell of Success

 

  The Sweet Smell of Success

Alexander Mackendrick, 1957, USA

Screenplay: Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman

Coming from Ealing, Mackendrick went to America and made this vehement attack on the noxious shwbiz gossip journalism scene. Moving stateside, the wit is less satirical and more acidic. Full of memorable put-downs and one-liners that are just desperate to punch you. The pace is at an authoritative stride and you’d best keep up. 

Elmer Bernsteins’s score keeps up the jazz dizziness and cool, never overpowering the dialogue but always paralleling the sense of characters constantly riffing. And with that heavy-hitting script and actors at their best, with that agile camera following and gliding through James Wong Howe’s wonderful black-and-white photography, it’s definitely a film where everyone is at the top of their game.

The screenplay is by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets from Lehman’s novel, and it’s a legendary script. It’s film noir with the nihilism and wisecracks transported to column writers rather than private dicks. And even if there is the implied gloss of the entertainment industry and we’re visiting high end clubs and restaurants, we’re firmly in the gutter and underbelly here. Tony Curtis practically sweats self-loathing as Sidney Falco, the press agent trying to simultaneously suck up to and siphon some power from columnist J.J. Hunsecker. Burt Lancaster as Hunsecker seems to turn the very air around him to cruelty. And boy, Lancaster and Curtis know just how to deliver those zingers. The former’s sleaziness and the latter’s ever-present ominous threat are palpable essences. Falco avoids the conscience-pricking of his secretary whilst Hunsecker connives to destroy his sister’s romance (Susan Harrison) to the decency of a jazz musician (Martin Milner). That’s the plot that barely hints at the poisonous flow of character and scheming, the hints of the incestuous and moral vacuity. All for the sake of personal weakness, cynicism and show business.

And of course, these men would never think they might be beaten at their own game.

A cold classic.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

Jack Arnold, 1954, b/w, USA

The classic Universal man-in-a-suit creature-feature. We are barely five minutes and we get from God creating the Earth and evolution (??) to a monstrous webbed-hand fossil and - shock! - a similar hand rising from the depths to claw the river’s edge. Then there’s early unintentional humour in some of the dated exposition, most of all when our protagonist explains evolution and the purpose of his research into fossils and aquatic life to the very friends and esteemed colleagues who probably have a very good idea already what he is about. 

But then we are in the Amazon jungle, which has to be credited with retaining the film’s eeriness. Our expedition party is in search of the rest of a fossil found earlier, from a type of monster that is still alive which we see surprisingly early on; no long-held suspense and reveal for this monster-suit. And it’s a seminal monster suit, designed by Milicent Patrick* and convincingly swam by Ricou Browning with the creature played by Ben Chapman on land. Certainly the creature is more fluent underwater and a little jerky up above, but its gaping visage is never less than compelling. From out of the depths the creature comes, representing all the carnal jealously, rivalry and violence barely repressed between David Reed (Richard Carlson) and his employer Mark Williams (Richard Denning), both of whom it seems the love interest Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams) has a soft spot for. 

The famous girl-and-monster synchronised swim hints at sexual symmetry and it is apt that monster often turns up and breaks out when hot personal topics get discussed. Its subtext isn’t hard to trace. Even early on, drifting down the Amazon and indulging in love talk, David says their romance may take a lifetime and Kay’s response of a kiss is interrupted by a primal jungle growl; and this isn’t the only time flirting causes prominent animal cries on the soundtrack. It’s even a feminine boat “Rita” that takes them to the mysteries of the Black Lagoon. Borowczyk’s ‘The Beast’ takes this sexual tension to its logical, comical and icky conclusion, whereas Del Toro’s ‘The Shape of Water’ sees it for romance, gliding over the barely repressed violence lurking under this scenario. And then there's Eric Langberg's thorough reading of the creature as a gay icon.

Arnold was exemplary at this, as evidenced by the many genre treasures he directed in the 50s. There are all the joys of period genre hokeyness but his work is never stupid or laughable. They may be B-movies but there is the sense he always had his eye on the big themes. For example, not only is there the Freudian stuff going on, but there are also issues of colonialism and exploitation  - the creature as nature fighting back - at the edges of all this. 

And after defining many genre tropes and highlights, Arnold can be found directing for a lot of famous Sixties and Seventies television series like ‘Rawhide’, ‘The Brady Bunch’, ‘The Bionic Woman’, ‘The Love Boat’, etc. He was a director that went where the work was, but his contribution to smart period science-fiction and horror is incontestable: Arnold is responsible for ‘It Came From Outer Space’ (which Joe Dante notes is one of the few pacifist sci-fi movies of the era, along with Arnold’s ‘The Space Children’), ‘Tarantula’, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ and ‘The Black Lagoon’ films, which surely makes him genre royalty. 

You probably wouldn’t even call ‘Creature’ Arnold’s best because he delivered so much that was good to consider, but it’s knowing and sly – screenplay by Harry Essex and Arthur A. Ross – and beautifully filmed, even with blunt-force horn blares of creature feature thrills (the first time he appears underwater and we see the face is a sincere jump scare), which of course are all part of what we came for. Quintessential monster movie fun.

  

• * “The designer of the approved Gill-man was Disney animator Milicent Patrick, though her role was deliberately downplayed by make-up artist Bud Westmore, who for half a century would receive sole credit for the creature's conception.”  - Wikipedia  

Milicent Patrick working on The Creature

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Jack Arnold, b/w, 1957, USA

Jack’s Arnold’s classic adaptation of another of Richard Matheson’s genre-defining concepts: exposed to a cloud of radiation and insecticide, Scott Carey (Grant Williams) starts to shrink, and nothing seems capable of stopping this process.

The effects – supervised by Clifford Stine – include glittery torsos, trick perspective shots, split-screen, primitive super-imposition and decent back-projection. The cat attack is a highlight, not forgetting the spider battle, but the whole scale of the project and realisation is impressive: giant drips of water (water-filled condoms), out-sized phones, monolithic stair cases, etc. Its sheer scope remains impressive.

And, of course, this all directly relates to his loss of masculinity. Richard Christian Matheson (the author’s son) says that he thinks Arnold saw in the book “this idea of masculinity being a kind of falsehood, a kind of vulnerable construct, and I think he was very fascinated by that.”* We first meet Carey charmingly bullying his wife into getting him a beer and strikingly peaks in the image of Carey trying to lay down the law from a doll house balcony. Perhaps the film misses a trick in excising the daughter character for the book and therefore establishing his virility. Evidently, he comes from a period mindset where the privilege of male dominance is a given and his shrinking loss of it is more than he can bare. He goes from a man that assumes his privilege is to get his wife to get him a beer – the punishment for this casual misogyny being that he gets exposed to the radioactive cloud that will lead to him shrinking – to self-pitying and then to a diminutive figure fighting living in a matchbox and for resources and survival in the basement. Only when Carey has fulfilled the manly business of surviving and killing and anoints himself triumphant over the universe of the basement is he ready to stop mooching and embrace his fate. The novel makes even more explicit the concurrence between Carey’s increased bitterness as his size diminishes: as Ryan Lamble says: 

“As Carey dwindles in size, so too does sense of power and self-esteem, until he becomes an embittered, deviant character who comes to hate the people he once loved.” 

It’s a vivid metaphor for toxic masculinity that never seems to date.

Wonderfully self-obsessed with its own high-concept, it remarkably takes this to its logical conclusion whilst moving through stages of kitchen sink drama, Atomic Age fear and pseudo-science, metaphysics and body-horror, primal man adventure and monster movie. We have Matheson’s fidelity to his own text to thank here (although the book doesn’t end with “With God, there is no zero”, that punchline is allowable as a concession to a happy ending), but also Jack Arnold’s strong refusal to have a trite ending with something like a serum returning Grant to his original height. 

Carey's transformation is as transcendental and as complete an odyssey as Kubrick’s ‘2001: a space odyssey’, with his established masculinity as a conditional. The closing voice-over speech can be taken as ‘50s cornball pseudo-religious sentimentalism, or evidence of Carey’s delusion and instability of sanity as he shrinks way into … nothing? The infinite? 

* Arrow blu-ray: 'There Is No Zero: Writing The Shrinking Man an in-depth conversation with author Richard Christian Matheson about his father and the creation of the original Shrinking Man novel'.