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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 20 |
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BOOK & FILM |
 Gloria Grahame on the road to hell with Humphrey Bogart in the 1950 film noir 'In A Lonely Place' |
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IN A LONELY PLACE The 1947 Novel vs. The 1950 Movie |
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(shown left) remains a classic of noir literature, yet the 1950 film version (shown right) made radical changes in the basic story and central character. |
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Hughes' celebrated novel
gives Bogart a great role
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If you have not read the book or seen the movie version of "In A Lonely Place," beware that key plot elements will be revealed in this column. Please read the book and see the movie first. |
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Why buy the movie rights to a distinguished mystery novel like Dorothy B. Hughes' "In A Lonely Place," then toss key elements of the novel out with the garbage?
Ah, that's always the big question from readers when they discover the book they love has been changed into something radically different when the movie version comes out. The only acceptable answer: Because a movie isn't a book.
Alfred Hitchcock turned Patricia Highsmith's "Strangers On A Train" inside out when he made the famous movie version. Highsmith's debut novel was a best seller in 1949 and remains her most famous literary work. But Hitchcock's movie is ALSO a classic, considered by some to be his finest film. Yet it's not the book.
The same argument might be made for Hughes' 1947 novel "In A Lonely Place," which director Nicholas Ray filmed in 1950. The book is still reverred--and the movie is now considered a classic of noir cinema. Yet the film turned the novel inside out.
Hughes, like Highsmith, had a peculiar sensibility about the leading characters in many of her dark novels. They often do unsavory things. Highsmith's Tom Ripley, for instance, is the protagonist of five novels, beginning with "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1955), but is also a murderer and thief. Hughes' Dix Steele, the protagonist of "In A Lonely Place," is a rapist and murderer.
What the book gives us is a direct view into the heart of such a person, although we don't realize that until the plot finally resolves itself in the final chapters. We might not want to stay with Mr. Steele if we knew from the beginning that he's guilty of the crime the police suspect him of committing.
Once you get with the thrust of the novel, you recognize Steele is a certain kind of man with a depressingly sick view of the woman's role in the world. Hughes never gives us insight into Steele's childhood, but she does provide this much information: He's a recently-returned veteran of World War II, who can't seem to get his life together after the exhilarating highs of his wartime experiences. In the end, we learn his first murder victim was a girl in Europe--and he keeps wanting to re-live that moment.
Dix Steele lives on the periphery of the movie business, claiming he's writing a mystery novel that's mostly myth. His best friend, Brub, is a Beverly Hills police detective who just happens to be working on a murder case that comes uncomfortably close to involving Steele as a suspect. Meanwhile, Steele becomes entranced by sexy Laurel Gray, who lives in the same apartment court where he's staying--in the "borrowed" apartment of a friend, who's supposedly on a trip to Latin America.
Like Tom Ripley, who would come along later when Patricia Highsmith felt the world was ready for a villain-as-protagonist, Dix Steele is living in an elaborate structure of lies, which is probably his greatest contribution to fiction.
Two of Hughes novels already had been filmed. The first was "The Fallen Sparrow" (1943), in which anti-hero John Garfield returns from fighting for freedom in the Spanish Civil War and finds himself hunted by undercover Nazis. Then came "Ride the Pink Horse" (1947), in which Robert Montgomery attempts to blackmail a gangster during a fiesta in a small New Mexico town--and gets into a peck of trouble.
Both are strongly unconventional films in the dark noir tradition. The movie rights to "In A Lonely Place" went to Santana Productions, the independent production company set up by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall after Bogart ended his long contract with Warner Bros. Though Bogart already was firmly established as American film's No. 1 anti-hero, it's likely he didn't relish playing a serial rapist and killer, so changes were called for in the screen adaptation of Hughes' novel.
Director Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt turned the story into a metaphor for McCarthy Era Hollywood, making Dix Steele innocent of the murder charges, but "guilty" because of his past activities and his associations. Steele (Bogart) is now a Hollywood screenwriter who hasn't had a hit in some time. He's resigned to the fact that he can't express his own ideas freely, but must turn mediocre novels into movies in return for large sums of money. Though he compromises his ideals, he still does what he can by severely altering the plots of the books he adapts, putting in his own point of view wherever he can.
He pays a hat check girl, who has read it, to come home with him and tell him the plot of the awful best seller he's supposed to be adapting next, rather than read it himself. When she turns up murdered the following morning, he's the natural suspect because of his history with the police--a long series of violent fights with people and his abuse of women.
The movie makes Dix innocent of the murder, but guilty of everything else but. He's a violent hothead who's clearly on a collision course with his destiny. Though he's still entranced by sexy Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), he comes close to beating her to death when he realizes she's finally going to leave him because of his violent nature.
The role was a challenging one for Bogart, who seems so credibly cruel and mean-spirited that you begin to believe he's actually revealing his true nature on screen. Ray's film therefore becomes an entirely different sort of artistic expression--a serious portrait of a deeply-flawed man who grinds down nearly everyone within his orbit.
Ray does a lot to make "In A Lonely Place" a most personal sort of film. The real-life apartment court where Dix and Laurel live in the movie is the real place where Ray lived in the same period. What's more, Ray was then married to Gloria Grahame. They separated during the making of the film and later were divorced. It' interesting to speculate on how much the odd dynamics of this story, very mysoginistic, even for its time, had on their relationship.
Both the novel and the film, though remarkably different in point of view, now seem way ahead of their time in terms of their insight into human behavior. The book seems to warn women against the hidden dangers in certain men, whose anti-female attitudes still were largely acceptable in the late 1940s. The film seems to suggest that its protagonist is an evil man, completely capable of murder, even though he's actually innocent of the murder in the foreground of the storyline.
Both book and movie deserve to be celebrated by new generations. They represent yet another example of how a book and a film can be radically different, yet both remain classics of their medium.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The book cover illustration is by Frank McCarthy and is ©2003
by The Feminist Press. The photos are from the 1950 Columbia
pictures release.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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