<I>In a Lonely Place</I>, Directed by Nicholas Ray, USA, 1950*

9-Arts Reviews_CAFP_9.qxp 15/02/2019 10:10 Page 86 ARTS REVIEWS In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray, USA, 1950* Reviewed by Ann Hardy One autumn night, a score of therapists met to watch a film that was older than most of them. In a Lonely Place is the story of a brief relationship between screenwriter and war veteran, Dixon (“Dix”) Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and his glamorous and sophisticated neighbour, actress Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame). Shot in black and white, the film is spare: in a few short minutes we meet Dix and discover that he has not been able to write anything original since before the war, surviving by churning out screenplays of popular novels. We also learn that he is violent; indeed we see him in a number of fights, and are told that he broke the nose of a previous lover. His justification for his violence is always the same: “They had it coming.” Here is a man who is dangerous, but all that is bad is projected outwards. The story develops when Dix is suspected of murdering Mildred Atkinson, a naïve young woman, who lives with her aunt, and checks coats at Dix’s favourite bar. Dix invites Mildred to his apartment to tell him the story of a novel for which he has to write the screenplay, but which he is too apathetic to read. The next morning Mildred is found dead and Dix is taken to the police station for questioning. He is released when an alibi is provided by Laurel, who has just moved into the apartment opposite, and who saw Mildred leave. Dix and Laurel begin a relationship and we see a honeymoon period during which Dix can write again. In keeping with the censorship rules of the time, little is depicted but much is implied. We understand that their relationship is sexual, because they make one another breakfast (and I particularly enjoyed the symbolism of Dix scooping out Laurel’s grapefruit). However, as the police investigation continues, the relationship becomes strained; Laurel witnesses another violent incident and begins to doubt Dix’s innocence. Dix, sensing her ambivalence, becomes increasingly possessive. Friends are powerless to intervene as the film heads towards its climax. As a group, we were gripped. What fascinated me, however, was how professionals working with distressed couples could see this relationship differently. Was Dix abusive? The room was split; half seeing a clear depic- tion of coercive and controlling abuse: Dix does not let Laurel out of his sight … The other half saw only his care and concern for her; he is worried because she has been taking sleeping pills. “There was no domestic violence!” one therapist argued. “He tried to strangle her!” another retorted. Tempers frayed. Had we seen the same film? How had you managed to not see what was so clear to me? * This film was viewed in a Film Night screening on 5 October, 2018, at Tavistock Relationships, London. Couple and Family Psychoanalysis 9(1) 86–89 (2019) 9-Arts Reviews_CAFP_9.qxp 15/02/2019 10:10 Page 87 ARTS REVIEWS 87 One clue to this disparity was that the filming of In a Lonely Place coin- cided with the break-up of Gloria Grahame’s marriage to the film’s director, Nicholas Ray. Indeed, during filming, Ray moved out and began sleeping on the set. We are, in a sense, watching two separate stories: the fictional ending of the Dix–Laurel affair and the actual ending of the Ray–Grahame marriage. Laurel’s pain is so real, because it is also Gloria Grahame’s, caught on camera by her husband to parade to the world. The film reads like a palimpsest, with both the surface and the deeper text visible. The therapeutic gaze is represented in the film by the character of Sylvia, the wife of Dix’s old army buddy, who “took abnormal psychology in college”, and treats us to the insightful diagnosis that, “There is something wrong with Dix”. She is, of course, correct, but she hazards no interpretation of the origin of his neurosis. I was left wondering about the war, which had throttled Dix’s creativity and would have been such a recent trauma for many in the film’s audience in 1950. Would we now diagnose PTSD? Our debate also considered the extent to which violence, or a preoccupa- tion with violence, was shared within the couple. We know very little about Laurel, only that she ran away from a rich man who wanted to marry her; she needs to be in control—she initiates the relationship and, at the beginning at least, sets the pace. Some saw in this a prototype of a strong, independent woman. Others were unconvinced: what does it say about a woman that she hits on a murder suspect in a police station? Laurel seems to share Dix’s lack of empathy for poor murdered Mildred—unconcerned that she was dead, merely that Dix did not do it. In life, Dix mostly shows contempt for Mildred. His agent admonishes him: “Remember, Dix, she’s your audience.” So it is the despised audience who has been murdered, and the actors do not care. As my colleagues debated, I found myself lost in my own reverie. In 1950 my parents would have been nineteen and twenty; a year later they married. I can imagine them seeing the film on a date. They were Mildred Atkinsons. How would they have interpreted it? I think they would have seen a love story, that my father would have liked seeing Bogart acting tough, and that my mother would have cried that it didn’t have a happy ending. They would have been untroubled by the lack of realism: Gloria Grahame sleeping in false eyelashes and a corset; Bogart’s fist never quite connecting with the jaws of the men he slugged. “We don’t want reality, we want escapism”, my mother would say. Was this a love story? Some of us thought so, seeing two damaged, but remarkable people, whose chance of creating something together was wrecked by suspicions introduced from outside. Others saw the bursting of a fantasy, which could never have survived. I was left feeling that for both Laurel and Dix, the love that was lost belonged to an earlier time, and that this deficit was encapsulated in lines from the screenplay Dix finally manages to write, and which is quoted by both characters: “I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few short weeks, while you loved me.”.

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