In A Lonely Place (1950)

As you can perhaps appreciate, it is extremely rare that I recommend a movie, especially one that came as a complete surprise to me -- an educated guess in the video rental shop that turned out to be shockingly good, a film that Columbia had no business making, except that director Nicholas Ray (REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE) wanted to do it and Bogart's production company financed it.

Humphrey Bogart made a long list of great pictures, notably KEY LARGO, THE AFRICAN QUEEN and THE MALTESE FALCON. But Nick Ray's adaptation of a pulp novel by Dorothy B. Hughes is Bogart's best performance by far, a role that blended completely with the man himself. Known for his intellect, courage and combativeness, Bogart the man inhabits IN A LONELY PLACE so fully that we're confronted with one of the very few Objectivist dramas ever made. Nicolas Ray was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and a contemporary of Ayn Rand, so there's not much doubt that her influence was strong in this uniquely talented filmmaker. Ray's wife, the beautiful and brillliant Gloria Grahame co-starred opposite Bogart. In a word -- fabulous. No one else could have done it, and it's her picture just as much as his, with equal screen time and equal weight of plot.

The plot? Purely Ray, who transformed a trashy novel about a deranged serial killer into a deeply layered portrait of a genius wrongly accused of murder. In screenwriter Andrew Solt's second draft, the genius cracks and kills the woman he loves. Ray shot it that way, then threw it out and made one of the most memorable endings in motion picture history -- the hard truth of lost trust.

Audiences hated it and critics pegged it as film noir. I found it life-giving, frighteningly real, almost un-cinematic. Completely absorbing. So starved are we for an example of art that it shocks to see such a well made, seamlessly compelling film. Sony's digital restoration was excellent. Supporting cast is great. Photography and editing are above average. Ray's conception of screen montage -- his composition and sequence of shots -- is nothing short of stupendous. He makes Billy Wilder (SUNSET BOULEVARD) and Robert Altman (THE PLAYER) look like a clumsy amateurs whose synthetic tales of Hollywood dissolve like cheap candyfloss compared to real filmmaking by a truly great American director.

I never cared much for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, although I recognized in it a snapshot of my own travail and the airhead society which I stupidly struggled to transcend. IN A LONELY PLACE gave me back my soul, a validation and salute to the best within us and how fragile we are as human beings. Keep in mind the context if you watch this movie. War is hell, and warriors come home with demons and dragons to repress and manage heroically and imperfectly.