2. In A Lonely Place
In Nicholas Rays In a Lonely Place, Humphrey Bogart, in what may be his best performance, plays Dixon Dix Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter assigned to adapt a novel. One night at a nightclub he takes home a hat check girl, Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart) who has been reading the book Dix is set to adapt and whom he gets to describe the novel to him. The next morning Dix is brought in to the police station. Mildred has been murdered. Dix knows one person who can give him an alibi, the woman who lives across his apartment in the same courtyard, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame). Laurel provides Dix with an alibi, but we know that Dix has anger issues, as evidenced by the opening scenes where he gets in to a fight at the night club, which makes us wonder if its possible that Dix really did kill Mildred. Dix and Laurel begin a relationship but the mystery of whether Dix killed Mildred hangs over the film. Dixs anger escalates to a point in the film where he nearly kills a man in the middle of the road, all while Laurel watches. We soon learn, as critic AO Scott put it, that in this world, it doesnt what you did do, but what you might do. The mystery of whether Dix killed Mildred means nothing- what matters is Dix is capable of murder. Bogart makes Dix both sympathetic and terrifying ; a man we want to love but know is capable of horrible things. This puts us in the shoes of Laurel, whom Grahame, then the wife of director Ray, portrays with both toughness and tenderness. Maybe the best way to sum up the film and the doomed relationship at its heart are the lines spoken by Dix to Laurel: "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.