Saturday, May 28, 2016

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO - #485


Of all of Whit Stillman’s films, The Last Days of Disco is by far my favorite. It’s the most full realization of his unique vision, and the most watchable on repeat viewings, offering multiple complete story arcs for its ensemble of characters. It was also what, for many years, we thought would be his final film. In a move worthy of Terrence Malick, Stillman would wait 14 years to release his next movie, 2012’s Damsels in Distress [review]. For all we knew, we were never getting him back.

Released in 1998, The Last Days of Disco takes us back to the early 1980s, when disco was enough of a cultural phenomenon to inspire mass hatred across America. (One spliced-in news report of a public burning of disco records is so exaggerated you’d not believe it were it not real.) The screenplay follows a handful of twentysomethings over the better part of a year, as they realize the young professional life they were promised is not exactly as described. They are fresh enough that what university their peers attended still matters, but on the precipice of having enough experience to discover it really doesn’t matter at all.


The group that Stillman follows congregates at a Studio 54-esque nightclub, mostly at the behest of Des (Chris Eigeman), one of the club’s managers. If they can’t get in through the front door, he sneaks them in through the back. This doesn’t always earns him points with his bosses. Junior ad man Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin) is persona non grata, but he keeps weaseling his way in, convinced it’s the access that keeps him employed.

More important to the social group are Alice (Chloe Sevigny, Manderlay [review]; Big Love [review]) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale, Snow Angels [review]), two assistant editors at a major publishing house who, despite attending the same college, weren’t really friends until now. Mirroring their roles in Stillman’s latest, Love & Friendship, Sevigny’s Alice is more naïve and impressionable, while Beckinsale’s Charlotte spews advice incessantly. Her helpful hints are often born of jealousy and intended to position herself better, whether she realizes it or not. In fact, as Alice’s fortunes rise both in romance and at work, Charlotte pushes to get in ahead of her. She even ends up dating Jimmy not long after Alice has moved on to Tom (Robert Sean Leonard, DeadPoet’s Society).



The characters in The Last Days of Disco bear a striking resemblance to those in Metropolitan [review], just a few years further down the line when they are no longer living at home and no longer able to rely on the same level of handouts from their family. All are anxious to make their mark in the world, but at the same time, they find that it’s not as easy as they expect. As Jimmy and Des complain at one point, they keep being branded as “yuppies” despite the fact that neither has a job that feels upwardly mobile or professional, much less lucrative.


But this is where disco comes in. Stillman has cast he discothèque as a metaphor for cultural change. The dancefloor bouillabaisse mixes all types together, and the scene offers different promises to each. Charlotte sees it as the harbinger of a real sexual revolution where women will have control, whereas Josh (Matt Keeslar), a freshman district attorney, sees it as a great equalizer where anyone can be whomever they want. His interpretation is particularly ironic, since being who they want to be is exactly what these young adults are failing at.


As episodic as Barcelona [review], and yet as socially contained as Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco provides Stillman with his most pronounced opportunity to place his idealized caricatures within the real world. Released from the manicured confines of their Manhattan apartments or the exile of a foreign land, the ensemble here steps closest to a recognizable world of any of the films. In fact, though released last, it fits the trilogy as a middle piece. A cameo of Audrey and Jack from Metropolitan shows us that there is some hope for these anxious wannabes, while an appearance by Ted from Barcelona (Taylor Nichols pulls double-duty) points a way of escape for the young men. The fact that unlike the other films, however, the characters all find their place by the end, or at least believable direction to the same, gives The Last Days of Disco a greater sense of finish. (We are still completely ignoring that Barcelona epilogue.)



By this go-around, Eigeman had perfected the fast-talking cynicism routine that had serviced him through Stillman’s previous efforts. Des fully embraces his role as a scoundrel, and his well-rehearsed routine of dumping women by telling them he has realized he is gay is tinged with equal parts savvy and machismo. And if we ever doubt Stillman’s sympathy for the cad, there is a Tarantino-worthy debate between Josh and Des over whether The Lady and the Tramp reinforces an unhealthy obsession with the bad boy or shows that a gadabout can really change.

The Last Days of Disco really belongs to Sevigny and Beckinsale, however. Though Alice bristles at being compared to a kindergarten teacher, Sevigny has never been more wholesome or confident, disguising her real charm as plainness. And Beckinsale’s performance is marvelously knowing. She treats Charlotte’s bullshit with the utmost sincerity, so much so that at times you can’t help but nod along and say, “Yeah, but she’s right, you know.” Frankly, by the end, I kind of feel like Charlotte and Des are the ones who’ve really got if figured out. They don’t see the value in conventional delusions.


The best part about The Last Days of Disco, though, is that it’s pragmatic without lacking hope. Stillman appears to judge his characters less, and to embrace their foibles without the wry irony of his earlier films. Perhaps it’s his own heartfelt  love of disco, just as he loves all dance crazes, and his full embrace of it that allows him to spread his wings a bit more. Or perhaps it’s just the confidence that comes from having made a few films. Regardless, The Last Days of Disco remains his crowning achievement. Nearly two decades later, it’s fun, and touching, and just plain likable.


Which makes it all the more ironic that if The Last Days of Disco has one real flaw, it’s that the dance-obsessed Stillman is not very good at directing the dancing itself. The club scenes are stiff and subdued, and never match up to the rhythms of the soundtrack. The discothèque is too brightly lit, removing any mystery or allure; it never feels like the type of place you’d really want to be. That may be the only advantage the “true-to-life” 54 has over its rival. Mark Christopher’s grim mess was released just a few months after Stillman’s triumph, to much more fanfare and failure proportional to the same. It’s coked out and seedy and mired in the 1970s, and Christopher makes Studio 54 look like a real good time, whereas Stillman is stepping forward toward the neon 1980s with little lingering nostalgia, a move that makes all the difference.



Sunday, May 22, 2016

BARCELONA - #807


I can’t imagine a more withering critique from a Whit Stillman character than Fred, the caustic American patriot in Stillman’s 1994 film Barcelona, realizing that the Spanish partygoers he’s with won’t dance because they consider it too early in the evening. To combat this ridiculous revelation, Fred puts on a limbo record and sets up a pool cue to serve as the stick everyone is intended to shimmy beneath. To say it doesn’t go down well would be an understatement.

Stillman’s second film in many ways could be seen as a sequel to his first, Metropolitan [review], even though they don’t quite share any of the same characters. The three movies in Criterion’s A Whit Stillman Trilogy are a thematic series, exploring different pockets of life in the 1980s. Barcelona, which is the middle film in terms of release but more likely the third in terms of the narrative timeline, breaks the tradition set by the others by not just taking place in Spain, but the American transplants who are visiting there, Fred (Chris Eigeman) and Ted (Taylor Nichols), are from Chicago rather than New York. Not that it matters in Stillman’s world. Absent of accent or dialect, the cousins are two pieces of the same upper crust that Stillman bakes for all his movies.


The movie begins with Navy man Fred arriving at Ted’s Barcelona flat on an advance mission to prepare the way for the arrival of his fleet. Set near the end of the Cold War, the visitors must face political unrest and anti-American sentiment. Ted is a salesman who has been living and working in Barcelona for a few years. He is acclimated to the scene, running in an international circle that mostly deals with foreign business, hanging out with women who present at trade shows (never was quite sure what that meant). Recently heartbroken, Ted is trying to live a religious-fueled life, theorizing that much of the failure of love in Western civilization is down to our obsession with physical beauty.

As a pair, Ted and Fred could easily be Jack and Nick from Metropolitan, with Nichols once again playing the neurotic thinker and Eigeman his sarcastic foil. Fred takes his job seriously, but little else, and quickly skewers his cousin’s philosophy while simultaneously sapping some of the vanilla out of Ted’s game by telling the ladies Ted is an S&M daddy with a leather fetish. Ted’s own commitment to his beliefs is ruined shortly thereafter, when the so-called homely girl stands him up and sends her pretty friend Montserrat (Tuska Bergen) in her stead. Ted falls for her, and gets serious fast--though their dating is complicated by the fact that Montserrat is in an open relationship with a reporter (Pep Munné) who not only is obsessed with beauty, but also American vulgarity and conspiracy theories. He believes Fred is a C.I.A. agent.


Barcelona is light on plot, but as you can tell, heavy on story. The episodic script follows the cousins over a month or so, focusing on their social life and their mishaps as strangers in a strange land. Unlike Metropolitan, which tracks one outsider infiltrating a small group, the leads here are outsiders in a much larger venue, with no real potential to fully assimilate. Amusingly, Stillman juxtaposes Fred’s boorish behavior with the bruised sensitivity of proud Americans who just can’t understand why everyone doesn’t think their cool. The way the two men get along with their Spanish lovers and their friends is the source of Barcelona’s humor and drama in equal measure. The separation is even evident in acting styles. The American’s are far more caricatured, the Spaniards more natural. (Including a pre-Mighty Aphrodite Mira Sorvino, wholly immersed in her role as a Barcelona girl who strikes Fred’s fancy.)


More important that the cultural divide, though, is the relationship between the cousins, which has vacillated between love and hate since they were kids. Ted can’t handle Fred’s humor, and believes him to take advantage, regularly borrowing without asking permission or returning what he took. Yet, they are also the only family they have and will stick with each other when it counts. Their realization of this--and where the two boys playing around overseas have to finally try to be adults--comes after a few misconceptions about Fred’s real identity leads to him being shot. Honestly, Barcelona suffers after this story turn and never really finds its balance. While the first 2/3 of the movie is fairly footloose and fancy free, the final third tries for a gravitas it never quite lands, complete with a pat coda that comes off as wholly unnecessary. Like the indie director was trying to placate his new corporate bosses.

Still, that first hour or so is what will draw you back to repeat viewings. In my write-up of Metropolitan, I compared Stillman’s creation of a self-contained world to that of Woody Allen’s, but I think with Barcelona there are more comparisons to be made between the two auteurs. Beginning with the simple credits (lettering on a black field, traditional music) and carrying through the light filmmaking approach--there are no zooms, and only the subtlest of camera movement--one can’t help but think of some of Allen’s more recent European-set movies, including Vicky Cristina Barcelona [review]. Ted and Fred could be the usual Allen stand-in cleaved in two--though, one would never mistake the writing for Woody. Stillman’s comic tone is far more droll.


Also like those recent Allen films, Barcelona seems more like a lark rather than one of Stillman’s more considered efforts. Which isn’t to suggest he didn’t take it seriously, but more that he maybe let the process take him where it would rather than bearing down on a greater meaning or story. It’s a carefree vacation abroad, with the extraneous philosophizing being merely a pretense. That stuff is the jazz that Fred so abhors, and we’re all really here to limbo.



Saturday, May 21, 2016

METROPOLITAN - #326


Whit Stillman released his first film when he was nearly 40: Metropolitan, an erudite, witty portrait of New York rich kids nearly half his age. That was in 1990.

I graduated high school in 1990. If memory serves, I saw Metropolitan sometime in my first year at college. Its appeal for me was similar to the appeal of F. Scott Fitzgerald or the portraits of the upper class in Vanity Fair magazine (which I particularly like to read for when it all goes wrong and some millionaire has to cover up a murder). It has a voyeuristic draw. I am the outsider with my face against the glass, or peering over the fence. Or, in the cases of The Great Gatsby and Metropolitan, I am Nick Carraway or Tom Townshend: the outsider invited to crash the party.


Metropolitan’s Tom is played by Edward Clements, a first-time actor who, interesting bit of trivia, went on to become a preacher in Canada and never made a film again. For the majority of the cast, this little examination of manners and morals was their only acting work, adding not just to the movie’s indie cred but also its sense of realism. These are not actors with pre-formed personalities. Even the ones who would go on to do other things, like Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols, we know mostly from the other movies they made with Stillman. Like Woody Allen before him, Stillman is telling a New York story that is very much contained by his own worldview--urbane, dry, knowingly self-involved, and totally enticing.


Stillman’s story takes place over the course of one winter break and follows a group of well-to-do college students from party to party, though focusing mostly on the after parties, when the rich boys and the debutantes drink, play cards, gossip, and wax philosophical. Tom joins this group by sheer accident. He is leaving the same soiree as his soon-to-be new friends, and they mistake him for having dibs on the taxi they want. In truth, Tom can’t afford the cab ride and intends to take public transportation home. The other kids completely ignore his explanation, however, and rewrite his narrative for him: he was getting in the cab, they can all share, and he might as well come to their friend Sally Fowler’s house.


It’s a great example of how the privileged operate. How they perceive the situation must be true. This is perhaps the most pronounced theme of Metropolitan. To these spoiled students, perception is everything. Whether it is judging an experience they never actually had or fretting over their reputations, how they look at the world and how it looks back at them is paramount. Maybe it’s unfair to lay this on them because they come from money, because as we’ll discover, Tom, the would-be poor boy and socialist who is too good for such social events, is no different. He hides his family background until the situation requires a revelation, and he professes to prefer reading literary criticism to actual literature. “You don’t have to have read a book to have an opinion on it,” he said (and thus predicting the internet). He is no better than the people he criticizes, and he also falls quite easily into their lifestyle.


The literary discussion Tom has mainly centers around Jane Austen, and Mansfield Park in particular, a book described in the film as being about the morality of a group of children putting on a play. The comparison here is obvious, as we are watching not just a fiction (Tom hates fiction because he knows someone made it up, it never happened) being acted out by a group of young people, but a fiction about a group of young people whose whole social interaction is its own kind of performance. It’s all about your tux and your dress. (Stillman, of course, would go on to release a Jane Austen adaptation this year, Love and Friendship, only his fifth film, and a very good one at that; it’s what inspired me to dig back into his earlier work.)


Amidst all this conversation, we also get to peer in on the personal dramas that affect each participant. The Mansfield Park debate, for instance, is actually part of the flirtation between Tom and Audrey (Carolyn Farina), a gamine who has a crush on the ginger-haired intruder. Audrey is the nice girl, arguably pure of heart, and Tom’s treatment of her gives us our clearest indication that he is not the staunch idealist he would pretend to be. In fact, he’s rather judgmental, letting his preconceived notion of what the rich kids are like color how he interacts with them. There is also an irony to how quickly he gloms onto the story Nick (Eigeman) tells about another trust-funder who treats women badly. Tom’s behavior may not stray into the date rape allegations Nick contrives, but he is callous to Audrey’s feelings. In fact, the whole group lacks any empathy, for the most part. Their selfishness is in wanting their problems to matter above all others. Thus, Tom’s mistreatment by Serena (Elizabeth Thompson), a girl with a boyfriend at every Ivy League school, is tragic to him, but he never gives a thought to how it affects the other boys in her pen-pal chain, much less Audrey.


On paper (or, I guess, your screen), I imagine my descriptions of Metropolitan make it sound insufferable. Why would anyone want to watch a bunch of spoiled college students blowing smoke up their own asses, like some kind of cinematic equivalent of a Vampire Weekend record? Well, that’s the charm of Stillman. Like the aforementioned Nick Carraway’s narration of Gatsby, Stillman’s own storytelling is a wonderful mix of genuine affection and gentle disdain. His humorous writing serves as a self-critique. He is not afraid to let his characters sound ridiculous, even as he forgives them since they are so incredibly earnest about it. It’s basically the core of all his movies, showing the self-absorbed slowly become more aware of the world around them, eventually stepping out of their comfort zones to get on with life. Eigeman is always the quintessential Stillman hero/rogue, in that he believes the bullshit most of all, even while affecting an air of indifference. He’s obnoxiously charming, and at least here, the guy who is pretty much exactly who he says he is. (See also Greta Gerwig’s well-meaning buffoon in Damsels in Distress [review]. Given her love of dance crazes, she’d surely dance the cha-cha-cha with Nick.)


For much of the group, their changes require them stepping away from the cliques. Sally (Dylan Hundley) and Jane (Allison Rutledge-Parisi) find other men to date; Nick leaves to visit his family. The optics change, as well. While most of Metropolitan takes place inside New York apartments, the final scenes force Tom and Charlie (Nichols) to leave the familiar, acknowledge how helpless they are (neither can drive), and essentially try to have a real experience. The fact that it’s one they concoct to defend Audrey’s honor, cobbled together from various white-knight scenarios straight out of the sort of books Audrey would read, right down to Tom’s comical derringer, turns out to be a sly send-up on Stillman’s part. These boys have a lot of growing up to do.


Yet, there is real change by the time credits roll. The final scene of Metropolitan is no longer Tom walking alone, as he tried to do the morning after the first party, but he and Jack and Audrey having to figure out how to get home from the Hamptons, hitchhiking on the side of the road. It’s the same light-of-day camaraderie we will see at the end of The Last Days of Disco [review], when the main cast leaves the nightclub and heads off to whatever is next. In this fashion, Whit Stillman’s films are always about characters in a state of becoming--perhaps not a strange view for a man who suddenly started making movies as he approached middle age to adopt. It’s a bit Sherwood Anderson, this shift from sales and advertising to the role of artiste, but for Stillman, it’s a shift that paid off.




 

Sunday, May 15, 2016

THE NAKED ISLAND - #811


Years before he turned his camera toward making the unsettling, atmospheric horror movies Onibaba [review] and Kuroneko [review], Japanese filmmaker Kaneto Shindo undertook far more grounded subject matter in the 1960 release TheNaked Island. This neorealist paean to the tough life of one rural family is an unflinching study in the drudgery of survival, a year in the life fashioned into a graceful narrative about struggle and failure and finding success simply by sticking together.

Shindo’s screenplay focuses on a family of four: a father, a mother, and two young sons. One is old enough to go to school, the other is not. The school, like most everything, is across the waves on another shore. So isolated is the family’s island, in fact, that they have to sail to a different island just to fetch fresh water. This trip is made several times a day, to get water for the family meals as well as to feed the meager crops that grow on the hillside that oversees the homestead. Theirs is not an abundant life out there on the ocean. Catching a fish is a cause for celebration. Literally. In one divergent sequence, the family goes to the mainland to sell a fish one of the boys caught and have a day out. With a little money to burn, they dine at a small restaurant and ride a funicular: simple joys hard earned.


Hardship is the key here. Shindo wants to show us how rough the family has it and how it takes all four of them to get by. He approaches the narrative in the manner of a documentarian, avoiding any editorializing, and outside of one tragic moment, eschewing any large drama. There are only small occurrences. A spilled bucket elicits a slap, but then husband and wife (played by Shindo regulars Taiji Tonoyama and Nobuko Otawa) pick up the pieces and carry the remaining bucket jointly. Not a word is exchanged between them.

In fact, hardly a word is exchanged in the entirety of The Naked Island. 40 minutes pass before we first hear a human voice, and even then it is children chanting and singing. There are only a couple of lines of dialogue in the whole picture. Again, it’s about those small occurrences. Shindo’s intent is to use the “silence” to focus us on the everyday action of the family’s routine, and by stripping away all else, imbuing those actions with added importance. In the absence of distraction or convenience, work is everything. If the routine is broken, if they fail to fetch the water, if they fail to maintain the small patch of land that sustains them, the family will have nothing.


Though this may make The Naked Island sound tedious or claustrophobic, the film is anything but. Shindo artfully gives the story scope by showing us more than the immediate area around the individuals. He regularly pulls back to show us the island and the ocean, the natural splendor that surrounds them. There is an irony here, in that what we see might resemble paradise, but it’s far from a vacation spot for those who live there. They aren’t sending out postcards of their shoreline. Accompanying Shindo and director of photography Kiyomi Kuroda’s camerawork is Hikaru Hiyashi’s evocative music. The Death by Hanging-composer adds an elegiac touch to some of the scenes, and a melodic counterpoint to others. His rhythms lend a sense of ceremony to the daily ritual.


As difficult as life on the island may seem, one can’t help but think that Shindo intends to draw some kind of comparison to modern living. How less predictable are most people’s lives? How many people don’t leave for work at the same time each day to perform the same tasks day in, day out? It seems only the rewards are different. Yet, it’s hard to see The Naked Island as any kind of indictment of modern excess. On the contrary, Shindo does not evoke any romantic notion of a simple life. I am not even sure we can intuit any kind of existential satisfaction in a job well done. By the end, the father is as inscrutable as ever, and the mother even harder to understand. As the only character to outwardly show her dissatisfaction--be it in the momentary respite she finds in the bath, or a breakdown she suffers in the movie’s penultimate scene--we can only guess as to what is going through her mind as the movie ends. She lowers her head so the brim of her hat shields her eyes, and we are left to read the bottom half of an expression that reveals very little. There isolation continues, and though they have each other, we must wonder if it is enough. When they go to town, they are outsiders, but yet the boy who goes to school has found community, making him part of something larger and, arguably, more meaningful. Is it possible that Shindo is really telling us that no family is an island?

I suppose that’s for each of us to interpret and debate, and it’s part of what makes The Naked Island so intriguing.


Though, were you to want to know more, you can certainly dive into the usual extras, including two features with the director himself: a 2011 video interview and an older commentary track featuring both Shindo and Hiyashi. Other extras include actor Benicio Del Toro (Traffic [review]) expressing his love of the film, and also a bit from film scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit.


This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

IN A LONELY PLACE - #810

Note: The screengrabs here are from an earlier DVD release and not the Criterion Blu-ray being reviewed.


Oh, the sick mind of a writer. And nothing so perverse as believing your particular brand of sickness is special.

I’ve been fascinated by In a Lonely Place for some years now. Film noir at its best, In a Lonely Place is a cynical, hard-bitten favorite. So much so, I wrote about in my most recent (currently abandoned) novel, as there are similar themes to be had in both. Here, let me cut and paste the pertinent section from the rough draft, which explains some of what the movie is about: 



When I was done with Leandro, I drove over to a revival theatre in Santa Monica where they were showing an old Humphrey Bogart movie. In a Lonely Place, 1950, directed by cinema himself, Nicholas Ray--a dark-side-of-Hollywood picture. While I was waiting for it to start, eating a box of Jordan almonds, I wondered what I would do next. Leo drew the line at giving me Adam’s address. He said that didn’t pop up right away, he’d have to go farther into the system, and that would leave fingerprints. I would have to find Adam some other way. Last I heard of him, after Brianne left him and we moved here and the divorce, he was still in Oregon working for that computer company. I didn’t suppose it would be too hard to find out if he was still there.

The movie was amazing. Bogie plays Dixon Steele, a washed-up screenwriter with rage issues. One night he takes a coat-check girl back to his apartment to talk about a book he’s supposed to adapt, and after she leaves his place, she never makes it home. The police chief decides Bogie did it, that he was really living out one of the lurid scenarios he writes for the pictures. Enough people keep telling that story that other folks start to believe it, including the one person who shouldn’t, the actress who provided his alibi and whom he then fell in love with. There is enough pressure that before they know it, they really are in an old Hollywood potboiler. There’s no way out of it then, and Bogie ends up back where he started. The lonely place--where murders are committed, stories are imagined, and the broken-hearted reside. I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.

Leaving the theatre, I noticed a poster advertising an upcoming retrospective of the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Images of Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Pierre Léaud. Temptresses, gangsters, and teenagers. I’d have to come back for that.



Movies come up a lot in my book. And detective fiction. Rest assured, I’ll be taking a pretty heavy pair of scissors to the above. I can see tons of things I’d cut right now, get it down to the bones. Much like Dix eventually savages the book he’s meant to turn into a faithful screen version. The way the coat-check girl (Martha Stewart) describes the imagined romance novel, I can’t help but think of Leave Her ToHeaven, and maybe that’s the kind of sharpness Dix brings to his script. We can only guess. All we know of the unseen screenplay is what the onscreen author tells us.


Dix is a sinister storyteller, one who doesn’t shy away from the more gruesome details of a plot. Naturally, when the police, including an old buddy from his army days who’s now turned detective (Frank Lovejoy, The Hitch-Hiker [review]), show the wordsmith the murder scene photos and outline their own timeline for how Dix killed the girl, he starts to puzzle through the potential suspects and motives himself. He even relays his own version to that buddy and his wife (Jeff Donnell, The Sweet Smell ofSuccess). As he spins the yarn, directing them at to act it out at the same time, Ray and director of photography Burnett Guffey (The Strange One [review]) isolate the light on Bogart’s face, making it look the way it does when a kid telling ghost stories at camp holds a flashlight under his chin. The irony is Dix can’t imagine himself doing it, despite every one else thinking he probably did. Or, to clarify, he can’t imagine himself doing this particular murder. He never wavers in his belief he didn’t, not even when he cruelly jokes with his agent that maybe he did. There’s truth in that wicked humor, and little that Dix is capable of some pretty nasty business. He has violent spells that give everyone pause. The same light lands on him when the moods take over, a visual cue to let us know that we are heading into darkness. It’s almost supernatural--even if now we recognize him as a man with anger management problems, perhaps even some PTSD from his combat service, and the classic patterns of an abuser. He erupts, attacks, and then is sorry, making amends through grand gestures and promises to never do it again. Dix is a hard man to like, and yet we do anyway, because he’s still Humphrey Bogart. Playing on the actor’s star power, Ray messes with our perceptions. We have a feeling Bogart is the good guy, because he most often is, and so we put our faith where no one else can.



In essence, we are the lover that the actress who falls for Dix can’t be, because we put aside our doubts and put our faith in the supposed inevitability of a Hollywood happy ending. The noir twist here is how the stories about the writer, rather than the ones he crafts himself, take their toll on Laurel (played by Nicholas Ray’s real-life (and estranged) wife Gloria Grahame (The Big Heat, Sudden Fear [review]). Laurel lets her imagination get the better of her; she can’t separate the violence she’s witnessed from the violence Dix is accused of perpetrating. It’s a shame when you let a thing like a dead body get in the way of a good love story, but then again, as Dix explains, “A good love scene should be about something else besides love...Anyone can look at us and tell we’re in love.” This little bit of poetry is delivered during the scene where the film really turns. He’s making her breakfast, and Laurel is groggy, having taken sleeping pills to (unsuccessfully) block out her nightmares about Dix beating another man. Where earlier in the film she saves him with her alibi and pulls him out of his slump by taking care of him, now he’s her caretaker, right down to the domestic chores--though the results aren’t quite the same. There is a wonderful metaphor embedded in this scene: Dix is trying to prepare Laurel’s breakfast grapefruit, but he is having a hard time because he has straightened out the curve in the grapefruit knife, thinking the bend is not supposed to be there. All the better for stabbing things with...?


Bogart and Grahame are a natural screen pairing. They are attractive and confident, and they both have a bit of a speech impediment. She is aloof, and then a rock, and then a bundle of nerves that grows more tangled even as she unravels. (Dix will never straight her out!) Fascinatingly enough, Laurel’s not opportunistic. The failed actress never pushes the more successful scribe for a part in his new movie. This makes Laurel less the femme fatale and more the stable good girl. Dix has no nemesis but the one buried inside him.


Nicholas Ray manages to both have his tongue in his cheek when dealing with this Hollywood nonsense and be perfectly serious when relaying the rest of his tale. In a Lonely Place goes to some deep recesses and sifts around in the muck, yet it also maintains the aura of illusion. The scenes around Dix and Laurel’s apartment complex are played with an almost sitcom-like airiness. It’s classic Hollywood at its finest, and also a subversive, self-reflexive tribute to the system that spawned it. Joining the pair is a cast of eccentric characters and Hollywood types: a nebbish agent, a one-time matinee idol turned drunk, a controlling masseuse, a raven-haired actress on the prowl, the producer that’s also the son-in-law of a studio chief and whom no one respects. All that’s missing is a studio fixer. Even the coat-check girl is a type, she’s the wide-eyed movie fan who can’t believe she’s rubbing elbows with celebrities. In a Lonely Place is a cautionary tale: motion pictures are a deadly business.


Elsewhere on Criterion’s disc of In a Lonely Place, the camera is turned on the filmmaker. The 1975 documentary I’m a Stranger Here Myself caught up with Nicholas Ray while he was working as a teacher, at the time he was shooting We Can’t Go Home Again [review]. The movie details Ray’s cinematic philosophy, shedding light on his approach to character, his championing of the outsider, and how he expects to communicate with the audience. John Houseman, Natalie Wood, Francois Truffaut, and others also chime in to talk about the filmmaker. Early in the doc’, Ray talks directly about In a Lonely Place, including how he came to the film’s knockout ending.

Among the other extras is a 1948 radio adaptation of Dorothy B. Hughes original novel for In a Lonely Place. (Hughes also wrote the source book of Ride the Pink Horse.) Performed for the Suspense series, it stars Robert Montgomery as Dixon Steele, a would-be novelist and serial strangler. Though a Los Angeles story, there are no Hollywood trappings, and the portrayal of Dix’s compulsive behavior is far less complex, despite being related from a first-person point of view. Is it possible Bogart’s dismissal of then novel he’s supposed to adapt in the movie version a meta joke about In a Lonely Place’s own source material.


This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.