Ray turned that all on its ear in casting Bogart as Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with a vicious mean streak and fading career. In the film’s very first scene Dixon trades words with a man at the stoplight next to him and almost ends up in a fistfight, and in the very next scene he winds up pummeling another man at the bar he frequents with his long-suffering agent Mel Lippman (Art Smith) and other Hollywood heavies. Because we are so used to seeing Bogart as a tough guy, these scenes don’t immediately register as pathological, although in hindsight they become deeply troubling. The story takes an early turn when Dixon invites Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), the sweet-faced coat-check girl at the bar, back to his apartment to relate to him the plot of a novel he is supposed to adapt but doesn’t want to read. Mildred rightly suspects that Dixon has other things on his mind, and if he does, he doesn’t act on them, instead sending Mildred home at the end of the night, an event that is witnessed by his new neighbor, a seemingly icy blonde aspiring actress named Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame).

The next morning Dixon is summoned to the office of Captain Lochner (Carl Benton Reid) by Detective Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), an old Army buddy he hasn’t seen since the war. Turns out that Mildred was murdered some time after she left Dixon’s apartment, and since he was the last one to see her alive, he naturally becomes the police’s chief suspect. When questioned about it, Dixon replies with an air of calm collectedness laced with dark humor, which in another film would simply register as Bogart-style cool, but here starts edging toward the sinister. His complete lack of empathy for this poor girl who was strangled to death and left on the roadside suggests a fundamental hole at his core—something much deeper and worse than just being hard. Laurel is brought in to provide her witness that Dixon sent the girl home and them went back into his apartment, which establishes a connection between them that soon blossoms into an increasingly passionate romance. Laurel is at first resistant to Dixon’s advances, but he is relentless in his pursuit, and soon she is all but living with him and tending to all his needs as he works furiously on a new screenplay, the first time he has been so creatively productive in ages.

Yet, questions remain about Dixon’s culpability in Mildred’s murder, and his behaviors alternately suggest innocence and guilt. The film’s dramatic centerpiece, and probably the most unsettling moment in Bogart’s entire career, takes place at Brub Nicholai’s house when he and his wife Sylvia (Jeff Donnell) invite Dixon over for dinner. They begin discussing the case, and Dixon describes what he imagines probably happened to Mildred, which he asks Brub and Sylvia to act out. As he describes how the assailant might have slipped his arm around Mildred’s neck while driving and then slowly but surely caught her neck in the vice-grip of his elbow and squeezed the life out of her, Dixon’s eyes flash with unsettling excitement and he leans further and further forward, commanding the increasingly uncomfortable couple to enact the violence with more and more intensity. Ray and cinematographer Burnett Guffey (who would go on to win Oscars from 1953’s From Here to Eternity and 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde) dramatically light Bogart’s face in such a way that he becomes literally monstrous, as if he escaped from a Universal creature feature from the previous decade, and Bogart plays the moment with an almost drooling sense of exhilaration. Is this just the intensity of a writer in the grip of a passionate description, or is it a psychotic allowing his murderous glee to slip into the light for others to witness?

That question hangs heavy over the second half of the film, as the romance between Dixon and Laurel is poisoned by her increasing suspicion that he is, in fact, a psychotic killer. Her fear of him and his violence forces her to play a role from which she increasingly wants to escape; meanwhile, Dixon becomes more and more possessive, which makes him seem that much more terrifying. The fact that he is a violent man with a hair-trigger temper is given incontrovertible proof when he nearly beats a man to death after he cuts him off on the road, an event that Laurel witnesses and starts her journey down the spiral of doubt. Because Dixon is played by Bogart—the iconic Bogie—our tendency is to read his apparent psychosis and violence as the lashing out of a misunderstood artist, the remnants of a darker man who is on the road to redemption. But, the further the film goes, the more unlikely that seems. In a Lonely Place achieves an absolutely unrelenting grip because Ray plays so expertly on our associations, turning them inside out and against us, forcing us to identify with Laurel because, like her, we can’t believe that the man we love might be a remorseless killer.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Columbia Pictures / The Criterion Collection