In a Lonely Place (1950)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Nicholas Ray

It's taken me more than one viewing to warm completely to In a Lonely Place. In the film Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter who finally gets the chance to work on an adaptation of a best-selling novel. Unfortunately, the novel is clearly trash, and the assignment clearly hack work. Still, it just might jumpstart his failed career. After Dix is wrongfully implicated in the murder of a hatcheck girl from the Hollywood bar he frequents, he begins a romance with Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a neighbor in the Hollywood bungalow court where he lives, who gives him an alibi but isn't really sure he's innocent. (Grahame, who was married to Nicholas Ray at the time, is quite good in one of her rare lead roles—watch the way emotions subtly register on her face in close-ups.) To complicate matters further, during the war Dix was the commanding officer of the detective investigating the murder (Frank Lovejoy), a man whose contented family life and straightforward view of the world are the opposite of Dix's isolation and tangle of confused attitudes.

I think what initially distanced me from the film is something I now see as one of its prime virtues—that while it contains elements of familiar genres of the time, in the end it doesn't really conform to any one of them. It resembles those pictures like A Star Is Born and Sunset Blvd. that show the unflattering side of Hollywood. Like those films, it depicts life in the motion picture industry as a precarious one where it is too often necessary to sell out to achieve career success, where success can turn to failure with one flop, where those branded as failures are shunned as pariahs. It is a story of postwar alienation, of a man who seems unable to return to civilian life and simply resume where he left off. It is also in part a murder mystery, a police procedural, and one of those films in the Hitchcock/Lang vein that show a falsely accused man trapped in a web of circumstance. It is at the same time the story of an unlikely romance between two people very different from each other. Yet the film never settles completely into any of these predictable genres.

Equally unpredictable and category-defying is Bogart's interpretation of Dix. In the end, though, it is his character that ties all those disparate elements together, for ultimately the movie is a character study of one of the most intricate and compelling men to be found in films of the era, a man whose personal and professional lives have hit bottom and whose greatest obstacle to his way back is himself. Bogart makes the most of the role and delivers one of his most intriguing performances. He seems to bring something of nearly every part he had ever played to Dix. With his sudden rages and explosive aggression, Dix can be as scary as any of Bogart's early gangsters, even though these outbursts are always followed by remorse. Dix is as coldly cynical as Bogart's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, as disappointed and bitter—but still susceptible to the allure of love—as his Rick in Casablanca, at times as caustically witty as his Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. This is a man whose self-loathing is projected onto the entire world around him and whose mistrust of other people approaches the paranoia of Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Yet Dix is not merely a synthesis of Bogart's previous roles, but rather a unique creation that advances Bogey's screen persona further into anguish and ambiguity than he had ever taken it before.

By the end of the movie, most of Dix's problems have sorted themselves out. But the one thing that can't be put right is his relationship with Laurel. His need to control her—his suspicion, possessiveness, and demands for total, unquestioning loyalty—eventually prove too much for her. "Dix doesn't act like a normal person. . . . I'm scared. I don't trust him," she finally admits, realizing the relationship is doomed. Cleared of a murder charge and with his script finally completed, Dix may be a free man with a revived career. But that freedom and success will not be shared. Dix is a man driven by self-destructive inner forces beyond his control, a man destined to be marooned by his own inability to trust others.

Raw Deal (1948)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann

From the mesmerizing opening sequence, it's clear that Raw Deal is something special. A car pulls up to a fortified fence labeled "State Prison" and as the gates open, we hear, over eerie theremin music, Claire Trevor in an ominous voice-over: "This is the day . . . the last time I shall drive up to these gates." As she walks down a long hallway, dressed entirely in black and wearing a black widow's veil, cocooned in silence except for the click of her high-heeled shoes on the floor, she continues, "I don't know which sounds louder—my heels or my heart. It's always like this when I come to see him." The man she has come to visit is her lover, Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe), and very soon he will be escaping from prison to claim his share of the loot from the robbery for which he has been jailed.

The escape from the prison in Oregon has been engineered by a vicious hoodlum named Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr), the man Joe worked for and for whom he has taken the rap. From his headquarters in Corkscrew Alley in San Francisco, Rick has dispatched his henchmen, Fantail (John Ireland) and Spider, to make sure the jailbreak will fail. But Rick's plans to get rid of Joe go awry when Joe takes hostage Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), the secretary of the lawyer who was arranging a parole for him, and pursued by both the state police and Fantail and Spider, sets off with the two women on an odyssey to San Francisco to find his double-crossing ex-partner, get his money, and leave the country.

Raw Deal is one of several films noirs that director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton made in the late 1940s, and to my mind the best of them, an underappreciated gem that approaches the caliber of the best examples of the genre from this period. Martin Scorsese, in his film A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), cites the Mann-Alton collaborations as notable films of the time, ones that with their distinctive style and visual atmosphere had a huge impact on him as a young moviegoer and later as a film director. On the basis of this movie, I would say that his admiration is clearly justified. For one thing, Raw Deal is a brilliantly edited movie. With its fluid alternation of close-ups, medium shots, and long shots, and its creative combining of sound and image, it is virtually a textbook of film editing. Even more impressive is Alton's photography. Masterfully executed lighting effects, stunning use of deep focus, creative alternation of the static and moving camera, inventive camera placement (with the camera often mounted very low looking sharply up, or very high looking sharply down)—again the film is virtually a textbook of cinematography.

Another virtue of Raw Deal is the way Mann tells the story in such a dynamically visual way. The film contains several standout set pieces. During a stop along the way, at an isolated taxidermy business on the beach in northern California called Grimshaw's, O'Keefe has a long, very physical fight with Ireland in a back room full of stuffed animals, the lengthy scene filmed in near-darkness (above). In a sequence that predates Fritz Lang's The Big Heat by several years, Burr hurls a dish of flaming cognac in the face of a woman in a restaurant after she bumps into him and spills her drink on his jacket. (This is filmed by having Burr appear to toss the flaming liquid directly at the camera—actually probably at a pane of glass in front of the camera.) "She should've been more careful," he says nonchalantly afterward! The movie's finale, a nighttime confrontation and shootout in Corkscrew Alley as Burr watches from a window above, is another stunner. For any fan of American film noir, Raw Deal is simply a must-see.

Will Smith in Famous Actors and Actresses

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Famous Actor Will Smith

High Sierra (1941)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Raoul Walsh

In 1936 Humphrey Bogart got a contract at Warner Bros. on the basis of his sizzling performance as the gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. For the next five years Warners couldn't figure out what to do with him, typecasting him as a vicious thug in pictures like Dead End (1937) or giving him roles for which he was clearly unsuited, like the stableman (complete with unsteady Irish brogue) besotted with Bette Davis in Dark Victory (1939). It wasn't until Bogart got the lead in High Sierra (a part he campaigned hard for after several other actors turned it down) that he got a role which allowed him to showcase the paradoxical qualities of toughness and vulnerability in the same character that later became a trademark of his screen persona. The movie made him a star.

In High Sierra Bogart plays Roy "Mad Dog" Earle, a jailed criminal who has seen better days. His former gang boss bribes corrupt officials to pardon Earle so that he can lead one last big heist, a jewel robbery at a swanky mountain resort in California, that will set them up for the rest of their lives. From the beginning, it's clear the plan has big problems. The inside man at the resort (an unrecognizable Cornel Wilde) is clearly unreliable. The two men who are supposed to help Earle in the robbery are rebellious and, worse, at odds over a woman (Ida Lupino) who ends up falling for Earle. And Earle becomes enamored of a handicapped young woman (Joan Leslie) he meets on the way to California who doesn't return his affection but is willing to let him pay for a healing operation before dumping him.

The screenplay was co-written by John Huston. High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, which Huston wrote and directed later the same year and which also starred Bogart, are seminal forerunners of film noir, the genre that dominated American films of the late 1940s and early 1950s and was a huge influence on the French New Wave. These two pictures are the transitional works between the two studio genres that prefigure noir—the gangster movie and the private detective movie—and full-blown film noir of the postwar period. Between them they contain most of the key elements of film noir: a self-sufficient outsider as the movie's hero, criminal activities (High Sierra's focus on a heist anticipates noir masterpieces like The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing as well as countless other examples of the genre from the late 40s and early 50s), treacherous comrades, lurking danger, pervasive cynicism, and external circumstances that lead to a tragic outcome from which there is no escape. Add to the proto-noir sensibility of these two movies the high-contrast Expressionistic look of Citizen Kane, also released in 1941, and a good case could be made that this was the year American film noir was born.

Aside from its importance as a defining moment in Bogart's career and in film noir, High Sierra is tremendously entertaining. Bogart lands on his feet in this movie, and as an actor he never faltered again. (Although plainly the main character, Bogart was second-billed after costar Ida Lupino and even received a lower salary, an indication of his status at Warners at the time and of the studio's uncertainty about him as a leading man. After this picture, he would always receive top billing.) Lupino, whose character, like Bogart's, is at once gutsy and sensitive, expertly conveys these contradictory traits. Like Bogart, she would become a specialist in this kind of role. Raoul Walsh's direction is typically forceful, creating a vivid atmosphere of isolation and doom against the landscapes of the Sierra Nevada. The end of the movie—as Bogart drives higher and higher into the mountains, pursued by the police, and the trap tightens—goes beyond the Production Code stricture that crime must be punished and pushes into the noir concept of a flawed but somehow noble man betrayed by people and by fate.