Who's the noirest of them all? Bogart in a lonely place, for one.

One of the toughest but greatest roles Bogart ever inhabited was scriptwriter Dix Steele in ‘in a Lonely Place’. What makes it great are the layers he brings to the role.

To be sure, it’s dated by the conventions of the time, but you can see a naturalism that presages much of what Brando and the method actors of the next generation would bring. Of course, Bogart had established his own approach to the craft. 

The similarities between Bogart and Steele may be a bit heightened or exaggerated, but Bogart did have a volatile temper. One assumes that he was able to draw on some degree of experience.

Louise Brooks, in her outstanding essay “Humphrey and Bogey”, wrote of both Bogart and the film, “in a film whose title perfectly defined Humphrey’s own isolation among people. In a Lonely Place gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the film character’s, the screenwriter’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.”

It also helps that Nicholas Ray’s direction and blocking keeps us guessing about Dix’s character. We know he’s in love with Laurel but the story is so freighted with his background of violence. And it’s this that comes as the most problematic aspect of the character, and to some degree, Bogart himself.

There is no asking about why Dixon Steele is such a powder keg. We can assume it may be rooted in his experiences in combat during the war. But that’s conjecture; repeatedly, men mostly, make excuses for his behavior. That’s just the way he is and you just have to take him like that. It’s also a standard trope in noir that behaviors stem from origins in the individual’s unconscious and require no validation, the other side of the existentialist coin of noir protagonists as doomed victims of contingency in a random and cruel world. Neither Dix nor Laurel quite grasp what is happening to them, but each is free to determine their next move. 

Laurel is a cautious woman who’s been hurt before and moves on before she gets hurt again and finds herself in a relationship with a severely damaged man. We see him soften with her and Bogart ably conveys change with a lightness that doesn’t quite remove the sense of threat of him exploding later. Some of his endearments could almost read as demands. 

It’s also telling that Jeff Donnell’s Sylvia Nicolai studied abnormal psychology and when she’s about to expound on Dix’s pathology, her husband and Dix’s best friend shuts her down and in Dix’s agent and other best friend Mel Lippmann tells Laurel:

“…he has to explode sometimes…Years ago, I tried to make him go and see a psychiatrist. I thought he’d kill me! Always violent. Well it’s as much a part of him as the color of his eyes, the shape of his head. He’s Dix Steele. And if you want him, you’ve gotta take it all, the good with the bad. I’ve taken it for 20 years and I’d do it again.”

This is before Steele punches Mel later in the movie.

So we have some classic noir elements(1): the plot driver itself isn’t uniquely noir (murder committed, protagonist, an odd/antisocial man is the prime suspect, and the love affair that blossoms out of all this), but the brutality of the male protagonist, the resilient exterior of his lover, and the tacit acceptance of the protagonist’s violence as an expression of his masculinity and/or creativity anchor the film in the genre. The dismissal of any attempt to critically analyze Dix or in anyway get an understanding for his actions is almost a noir manifesto alone. 

As much as there is very often a Freudian context in the genre, more emphasis is laid on the existential freedom of the characters to build their stories and/or evolve over the course of the narrative. This is a compelling reason why we return to these films repeatedly and we see in the post-war dramas of this type the forerunners of Cassavetes, Scorsese, and their European counterparts. 

There’s a lot to love about this movie. The dialog is sharp and succinct and if it were delivered with more rapid-fire speech, clever enough that the film could be a comedy (well, without Dix’s blow-ups). As it is, it’s a character study of two people brought together by a tragedy, one more damaged than the other. We and she will never know the root of that damage, but Ray and his collaborators seem to be telling us that loving someone who is that scarred is not enough. Acceptance may lead to an interesting guy or a remarkable scriptwriter, but it doesn’t lead to greater self-awareness or growth. Noir means “night”, “dark” and in the absence of any meaningful way out from the recesses of psychic or physical trauma, the self - such as it is - will remain enshrouded in darkness.

Note:

Elizabeth Cowie lays out a pretty comprehensive definition of what film noir is, particularly with reference to the films of Nicholas Ray (including “In a Lonely Place”):

In film noir, a narrative of an external enigma, a murder or theft, replaces the melodrama's plot of an external event of war, poverty or social circumstance; in both cases, however, this narrative is interwoven with or supplanted by another which focuses on the personal and subjective relations between the characters. In film noir melodrama, these relations are characterized not only, if at all, by heterosexual desire, but also by perverse, sadistic, obsessive or possessive desire. Additionally, the element of fate, of chance and coincidence, which produces the characteristic under-motivation of events in melodrama, is also central to the film noir. Characters feel compelled by forces and passions beyond their reason to act as they do - in a form of amour fou. Film noir can therefore be viewed as a kind of development of melodrama so that whereas earlier the obstacles to the heterosexual couple had been external forces of family and circumstance, wars or illness, in the film noir the obstacles derive from the characters' psychology or even pathology as they encounter external events. It is just such an emphasis that links the forties films of Nicholas Ray - usually termed films noirs - such as In a Lonely Place (1950) and They Live by Night (1948) with his later films, such as Bigger Than Life and Rebel without a Cause… The emphasis on psychological motivation, including psychoanalytic theories of psy­chology (the 1940s saw the adoption of so-called vulgar Freudianism by Hollywood), was often associated with or presented as an increased realism. It provided spectacular and extraordinary characters and situations, which nevertheless could be set in very ordinary and familiar contexts (for-example, in Christmas Holiday, which is about a soldier's leave, or Lost Weekend, about an alcoholic). 

P. 130, Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women” in Copjec.

References

Brooks, Louise. “Humphrey and Bogey”. Lulu in Hollywood. Alfred K. Knopf. New York. 1983. 

Online: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/archives/louise-brooks-on-humphrey-bogart. Retrieved January 6, 2022

Copjec, Joan, editor. Shades of Noir - A Reader. Verso. London and New York. 1993.