For all the praise film-noir is lavished with (quite a lot of it valid), the majority of it relies on convention as much as the standard white-picket-fence, happy-ending 'family' film does: just invert the cliches and bathe them in deep-focus shadows. While this movie, on its surface, resembles the classic-style film noir of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, beneath the surface it's a whole different animal.
No calculating evil females or tough guys masking hearts of gold populate IN A LONELY PLACE. It's a much more wrenching and powerfully disturbing film because the murder that draws the protagonists together turns out to be of peripheral importance, while the love story between Humphrey Bogart's troubled screenwriter and Gloria Grahame's B-actress spins inexorably towards damnation completely on its own power.
The basic story has him a suspect in a killing, and her in love with him yet unsure of his innocence, but director Nicholas Ray stages the proceedings so that WE see it's not the murder that disturbs her but her own conviction that his self-destructive and volatile nature will destroy them both. To his credit, Ray never takes the easy way out of having Bogart turn monster on her.
You care inordinately about the characters, hoping hard (as Bogart's agent does in the film) that some transforming moment will come that will spare these people and allow their deeply felt love to flourish and heal them both - even as the evidence before your own eyes tells you there ain't no way. For 1950 -hell, for any year- such an unsentimental and uncompromising treatment of a tragic adult relationship is a rarity.
The shadows suffusing this excellent film come not from UFA-influenced lighting but from the Black Dahlia murder, the HUAC hearings, the death throes of old Hollywood & the moral and spiritual detachment of postwar American life. But most of all, they're projected from within the characters themselves. Grahame and Ray's own real-life deteriorating relationship formed the template for the doomed lovers, and for them, this film is an act of great courage.
For his part, Bogart (the star and executive producer) takes elements of all his previous romantic loners and blends them with the harsh, sour pigments of Fred C Dobbs, running the risk of audience rejection. His performance is unflinchingly honest, among his best work ever.
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