Of the many characters played by the nonpareil Humphrey Bogart, that of In a Lonely Place, Dixon Steele, most hints at the hard-bitten malevolence underlying his shtick as the “tough guy” of the movies, just as it suggests the nature of the man himself and his own tendencies. Humphrey Bogart plays a burned-out screenwriter manqué, Dixon Steele, who tends toward violent outbursts that are as innate and character-driven as they are products of his screenwriter’s career, which has long been compromised by hackwork (the corrosive agent of many a man’s character). One night, while drinking with his buddies at a Hollywood hangout, his agent importunes him to look at some sensational, romantic potboiler as his next project. At first refusing, Dixon Steele takes up the task after he sees the hatcheck girl reading the book, thinking that he can have her explain the plot; then he asks her, she accedes, and they go to his apartment complex that looks on a center courtyard, which will be the evocative setting for much of the story.
This hatcheck girl, Mildred Atkinson, reads the book aloud till Dixon tires of it, sending her home and giving her some cash for the cab fare. But later that night, Mildred is murdered, and Dixon Steele is the prime suspect of the investigation. A neighbor by the name of Laurel Gray, having seen him in passing, is called in as a potential witness, and after she gives him an alibi, they start to fall in love and a relationship develops, even as her lover’s innocence remains in doubt.
Although Dixon Steele’s status as a potential murderer is the tangible concern of the police, the parallel plot of his relationship with Laurel Gray is the foremost attraction of the story; for the ambiguity of his actual character, his seething resentment and disdain, slowly reveal that his own tendencies, whether he be “guilty” or not, are those of a conflicted and lacerating man that is the victim of himself. The story plays out the consequences of this victimhood so that the ending, as surprising as it is driven by the integrity of the story, is at once unexpected and inevitable.
But can someone be the victim of himself? Is he not also the victimizer, the creator of his own suffering? The performance of Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele is the crucible of this inner conflict: he can restrain himself, as evidenced by the final restraint that spares his wife-to-be; he can also indulge himself and the worst whims of his vicious character. That Dixon Steel is a believable embodiment of his inner conflict is the surest proof of the top-notch acting of Bogart and Grahame, and of the excellent direction of Nicholas Ray, who made this film in spite of the disintegration of his marriage to Grahame—an embellisher, like Bogart, of those natural tendencies that are too close to home to be merely acted.
