In approximately a decade’s time, if not slightly longer, Nicholas Ray directed a corpus of artistically successful films comparable to William Wyler’s run of exceptional movies in the 1940s and 1950s, to Yasujiro Ozu’s mature work from 1949 to 1962, and to Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic experiments in the 1960s. Like Godard (who was deeply influenced by Ray, as Francois Truffaut was as well), Ray broke many of the conventions of the genres in which he worked: In a Lonely Place (1950) is a noir film, but Ray subordinated the story’s generic murder mystery to the complex romantic relationship between Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame); in Johnny Guitar (1954), Ray and his screenwriter, Philip Yordan, adapting Roy Chanslor’s novel, overturned the traditional masculine heroism of film westerns by making a woman, Vienna (Joan Crawford), the story’s strongest figure. Decades later, revisionist filmmakers continue to experiment with the outdated mythologies of the American West. Writer and director Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) features strong female protagonists and de-mythologizes romantic notions of rugged individualism and manifest destiny. In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour deconstructed the spaghetti western by creating a heroine who is Iranian and a vampire. The “Girl” (Sheila Vand) of the title speaks Farsi in a contemporary Los Angeles that Amirpour substituted for Iran, and she metes out a form of blood-drinking revenge against men who have mistreated women. I do not know if Reichardt and Amirpour had Nicholas Ray in mind when making their films, but the spirited revisionism that Ray embodied certainly survives in the twenty-first century.
Ray preoccupied himself with people marginalized from their families or communities or from larger societies: Gypsies, Eskimos, the troubled teenagers in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the drug-addicted father and school teacher in Bigger Than Life (1956), and, in In a Lonely Place, a talented writer estranged from Hollywood and burdened by a hair-trigger temper. In an essay on politically radical filmmakers (“Guilt by Omission”), Jonathan Rosenbaum observed that the important common strains in Ray’s films include, among others, “romantic fatalism,” a fragmentation of “home and security,” and “a fleeting and fragile quality of both happiness and tenderness.” Dixon Steele bears a strong disdain for the studio system for which he writes because it prioritizes profits over artistry. Worse, Dix becomes estranged from his colleagues and friends because he fails to control and limit his arrogance, his insecurity, and an anger that habitually turns into sociopathic rage. He would have killed the young driver he pummels into submission at the side of a winding road had Laurel not pleaded with him to stop. He punches his long-time friend and agent, Mel (Art Smith), during a misunderstanding at dinner, and, Mel, in shock, scampers quickly to a restroom to assess his injuries in a mirror. Laurel is initially attracted to Dix because he has a dangerous edge, but she eventually fears him and asks a friend, “why can’t he be like other people?” This raises an interesting, if troubling, existential question: why can’t anyone, really? Being yourself is a hallmark of individualism, and something most of us are free to do. It can also be a curse. Dix possesses a keen intelligence and impressive creativity, but his anger exists at an almost cellular level, like a virus that cannot be cured. His apologies and overtures for the terror he inflicts on others certainly don’t change him.
In Dixon Steele, Ray and his screenwriters, adapting Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel, crafted one of cinema’s great character studies, as fascinating and complex as Harry Powell in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), Nana in Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), Travis Bickle in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), even Kane in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). But Ray achieved something in In a Lonely Place that filmmakers in general rarely do. Think of the moment when Dix asks his friends Brub (Frank Lovejoy) and Sylvia (Jean Marie “Jeff” Donnell) to reenact the murder of a young coatcheck girl; cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s lights focus directly on Dix’s eyes as he becomes nearly intoxicated while narrating the event. Or think about the fact that Dix victimizes nearly everyone else in this story, with the possible exception of his habitually drunk “thespian” friend, Charlie (Robert Warwick). In too many films, violence is nothing more than a method or a solution within a plot and, for the audience, a tantalizing spectacle. And there is truth in filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub’s observation that Ray was “always fascinated by violence.” But with In a Lonely Place, Ray made violence a state of being, not a plot device. In real life, all forms of violence entail some kind of suffering and exact some kind of toll on their victims and perpetrators. In Ray’s film, Laurel, much like the mother and son in Bigger Than Life, lives in paralyzing fear; Dix pays a very high price himself, namely, loneliness. Violence even makes human relationships more transitory than they already are, epitomized by the poem that Dix quotes to Laurel (“I lived a few weeks while she loved me”), by Laurel’s attempt to flee to New York, and by the darkened archway Dix stands under in the film’s elegiac final moment.
— Michael S. Smith (June 9, 2020)
References:
Phil Mariani, “An Interview with Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet,” quoted in Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 336.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Guilt by Omission” in Rosenbaum, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 281-294.
- Directed by: Nicholas Ray
- Produced by: Henry S. Kesler Robert Lord
- Written by: Andrew Solt Edmund H. North Dorothy B. Hughes
- Music by: George Antheil
- Cinematography by: Burnett Guffey
- Editing by: Viola Lawrence
- Release Date: 1950
- Running Time: 94
- Language: English
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2020 Top 100 — #70