In A Lonely Place (1950)

In this article, we will be looking at 2019’s book “1001 Movies to See Before You Die” and going through each film in a random order that I have chosen. We will be looking at what constitutes this film to be on the list and whether I think this film deserves to be here at all. I want to make perfectly clear that I won’t be revealing details from this book such as analyses by film reporters who have written about the film in question, so if you want the book itself you’ll have to buy it. But I will be covering the book’s suggestions on which films should be your top priority. I wouldn’t doubt for a second that everyone reading this article has probably watched many of these movies anyway. But we are just here to have a bit of fun. We’re going to not just look at whether it should be on this list but we’re also going to look at why the film has such a legacy at all. Remember, this is the 2019 version of the book and so, films like “Joker” will not be featured in this book and any film that came out in 2020 (and if we get there, in 2021). So strap in and if you have your own suggestions then don’t hesitate to email me using the address in my bio. Let’s get on with it then.

In A Lonely Place (1950) dir. by Nicholas Ray

When I first watched this film, I thought that Humphrey Bogart’s acting was absolutely amazing and it was one of his greatest performances. Honestly, it is difficult to rate his performances because they are all really good, but “In a Lonely Place” stood out to me as being particularly thorough and kind of paranoid.

There were obviously some critics that agree with this but there are people who concentrate on the ending and its, well its strange abruptness. Variety Magazine states this:

"In In a Lonely Place Humphrey Bogart has a sympathetic role though cast as one always ready to mix it with his dukes. He favours the underdog; in one instance he virtually has a veteran, brandy-soaking character actor (out of work) on his very limited payroll ... Director Nicholas Ray maintains nice suspense. Bogart is excellent. Gloria Grahame, as his romance, also rates kudos…”

Bosley Crowther obviously could not get enough of the movie and so, he seems to become the ultimately fan-boy in his statement here:

"Everybody should be happy this morning. Humphrey Bogart is in top form in his latest independently made production, In a Lonely Place, and the picture itself is a superior cut of melodrama. Playing a violent, quick-tempered Hollywood movie writer suspected of murder, Mr. Bogart looms large on the screen of the Paramount Theatre and he moves flawlessly through a script which is almost as flinty as the actor himself. Andrew Solt, who fashioned the screenplay from a story by Dorothy B. Hughes and an adaptation by Edmund H. North, has had the good sense to resolve the story logically. Thus Dixon Steele remains as much of an enigma, an explosive, contradictory force at loose ends when the film ends as when it starts.”

Roger Ebert put it on the list of his great movies and the Rotten Tomatoes website gave it a 98% rating. Andrew Sarris gave it a brilliant review with a quotation that stated: "I was born when I met you. I lived while I loved you. I died when you left me"... Only an actor with Bogart's terminal irreverence could break through the banality [of these lines] to the other side of wild romanticism.”

About fifty years after the movie was released, another critic named Ed Gonzalez made a really cool comparison between the film and book and the book by Albert Camus entitled “The Stranger” and here is what he had to say:

"Not unlike Albert Camus' The Stranger, Nicholas Ray's remarkable In a Lonely Place represents the purest of existentialist primers ... Laurel and Dixon may love each other but it's evident that they're both entirely too victimised by their own selves to sustain this kind of happiness. In the end, their love resembles a rehearsal for the next and hopefully less complicated romance. This is the existential endgame of one of Ray's smartest and most devastating masterpieces.”

So, universally a great film? I think so too.