Just the right girl: Gloria Grahame in “In a Lonely Place”

”In a Lonely Place”, 1950. Columbia Pictures

Humphrey Bogart wanted Lauren Bacall for the part. The Studio wanted Ginger Rogers. Nicholas Ray wanted Gloria Grahame. He was right. In a Lonely Place wouldn’t be the film that it is without Gloria Grahame. One of film noir’s most defining actors, Gloria Grahame brought even her femme fatale characters a raw, vulnerable sensuality. She was not simply pretty. Her glamour and sexuality hid surprising, unexpected emotional registers. Her bad girls were human. Her good girls had a hard-won strength. Her characters were smart, daring, warm. I can never quite figure out Gloria Grahame on screen.

“Were the cinema suddenly to cease to exist, most directors would be in no way at a loss; Nicholas Ray would,” Jean-Luc Godard wrote in the 1950s. “After seeing Johnny Guitar or Rebel Without a Cause, one cannot but feel that here is something which exists only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage or anywhere else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen.” I immediately visualize Gloria Grahame’s claustrophobic fear in a close-up with Bogart, or the sinister look in his eyes in another shot just because the light only falls on his face, or the rare moment of safety and security between the two at the nightclub right before the camera cuts to a shot of a Grahame’s suddenly worried face blocked by Bogart’s half-turned face, suspicion creeping in, in the direction of her looking. Cinema must belong to cinema. In a Lonely Place is one of the finest depictions of Hollywood, and one of the most poignant films noir, and yet Ray does not feel restricted in what he has to say by the limits of the genre, or by one-sided characters (their ambivalence is more realistic and sincere than most of the more conventional characters) there is something deeply personal and subtle behind his strong narrative and visually overwhelming obsession.

”In a Lonely Place”, 1950. Columbia Pictures

Dixon Steele (Bogart) is a troubled screenwriter whose early success has now a bitter taste after his latest professional failures. And his struggles with alcohol and a short-fused temper don’t help when he becomes the prime suspect in the crime of a young woman. She was the coatcheck girl at the nightclub he had attended the night before. He had asked her to accompany him home and explain to him the plot of a current bestseller which he has to adapt but refuses to read – that’s the extent of his contempt regarding the kind of work he is now being offered. Laurel (Gloria Grahame), Steele’s beautiful new neighbour, becomes his only alibi. Their paths had crossed the night before when Laurel passed between Dix and Mildred on the patio leading up to his apartment. Wearing a light-coloured coat, her hands in the pockets, “she glanced up at him, half-smiling, as she apologized”, definitely taking a liking to him. She also happened to see the girl leave his apartment.

Laurel has got her own troubled past, as a struggling actress scarred by life, and they find something in each other, something more than love, a gentle strength in the relationship that will develop between them.

When Laurel is brought in for questioning in the morning, she is wearing wide-legged slacks (I love this word because it always reminds me how Katharine Hepburn liked to say slacks instead of trousers – “Are you sure these too should be slacks? Fine by me if fine by you,” producer Joe Mankiewicz wrote to Hepburn on the trouser suit sketch of costume designer Adrian for The Philadelphia Story), a turtleneck, a checked jacket and flat sandals. Tomboyish is not just her look, but her attitude, too. “She sits down, spots a carton of coffee, tilts a paper cup to see if there’s any in it. Salt,” writes Bernard Eisenschitz in the book Nicholas Ray: An American Journey referring to the scriptwriter Andrew Solt, “was shocked by the vulgarity of her gesture (‘It’s wrong. A real floozie will do that, she never would’), failing to recognize either its primary meaning (Laurel was woken by the police and it’s still very early) or its secondary one (her frankness, her way of making what she wants quite clear).” She’s a natural. Dix, outwardly tough, inwardly vulnerable, knows it’s a good thing she’s on his side. With her encouragement, he can write again, and he’s content with his work. But their own demons are too strong and whatever hopes and dreams Steele and Laurel might have had, they are crushed too soon and too radically.

”In a Lonely Place”, 1950. Columbia Pictures

Cool and composed, with her elusive smile, eyebrows raised and voice slightly inflicted, she strides down the courtyard in straight-lined skirts and turtlenecks – “nu fluff, please”, Nicholas Ray’s script notes – revealing a buttoned-up, controlled character. The subtle, yet optimum effect of Gloria’s costumes are part of Ray’s visual design, alluding to deeper meanings behind appearance and words. “The simpler, more direct, more honest, better it will create Laurel, flesh and blood. She the same girl in her reactions to different situations,” Ray noted in the script. Her Jean Louis costumes, striking in their simplicity and timeless elegance, all buttoned up, even her evening gowns and fur-cuffed robe, are “both erotic and very time-bound, awareness of her body, the frankness of her desire, the ambiguity nevertheless of her eroticism,” further concludes Eisenschitz.

The risks she takes are not visible. Yes, she is the right girl, but sometimes it’s not enough.

”In a Lonely Place”, 1950. Columbia Pictures