In a Lonely Place showcases a brilliant Humphrey Bogart performance in a role that amuses, challenges, and delights us – right up to the moment when it conflicts with our modern sensibilities and throws us out of the picture.
Bogart plays Dix Steele (say it fast), a screenwriter who’s on the outs with the studios and the ins with the sauce. When he brings home a good-natured and ambitious young hat-check girl to help him with a project, we think we’re in for a romantic comedy. Bogart’s quite funny in his scenes with her, and he wins us over with his cynicism and wit. But things take a turn for the worse and he’s soon involved in a murder investigation. Did he do it? Maybe he could. Will he work his way out of it? Perhaps. We’re in.
That is, we’re in right up to the moment when a police detective reads his rap sheet. The rap sheet involves beating a girlfriend until he broke her nose and put her in the hospital. I think this is supposed to show his troubled past and his capacity for violence, but we’re still supposed to feel some measure of sympathy for the man. Unfortunately, I have no sympathy for domestic abusers. This led me to change my position from “I hope things work out” to “Screw this guy, and screw anyone who sticks by him.”
So I was lost. The gorgeous cinematography and the first-class performances meant nothing to me. The conflicts and resolutions wasted my time. I didn’t care enough about the character to want to see him exonerated, and I wasn’t sufficiently convinced of his guilt in the murder case to want to see him hanged. I was just plain out.
Perhaps, in its day, In a Lonely Place worked all the way through. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that corporal punishment of one’s spouse was considered a manly duty. Today, however, I look at a man who hits a woman who can’t him back and all I see is a coward and a rat.
I have no time for either.
