A Film Canon

In A Lonely Place extrapolates a new, dark Hollywood reflexivity from high noir, but forestalls its potentially elegaic (Sunset Blvd) or satirical (The Bad And The Beautiful) modes with a raw, convulsive disillusion encapsulated in screenwriter Dix Steele's (Humphrey Bogart) response to the brutal murder of a beautiful young assistant. Not only does Steele refuse to exhibit any "shock, horror or sympathy", but he deflects legal into narrative self-defence, claiming that he would never have written a film in which the murder occurred as it did, responding to his cross-examiners with a wry prescience of the extent to which their tone and manner has been shaped and modified by his industry, and, most strikingly, elevating everything to a hypothetical register whose logical conclusion is that, even if he didn't commit the murder (and this is by no means clear), he easily could have, and, more generally, that he is less of a hard-boiled character than someone who knows the hard-boiled persona intimately, and is constantly contemplating and experimenting with it. Hence the paradoxical, uneasy character of the central romance, founded on neighbour Laurel Gray's (Gloria Grahame) provision of an alibi that is technically correct, but invented by her as a gesture of trust, as well as Bogart's convocation of all his previous performances into an extraordinary, sophisticated pastiche, whose most consistent characteristic is a dark, dangerous playfulness: "Tell them to look for a man like me, but without my artistic temperament...which may or may not be phony".