Sunday Morning! “In a Lonely Place” Novel vs. Film

In the same way that people who talk all the time about their love of shopping will never really find the one purchase that makes them happy, you realize at a certain point that men who talk constantly about their successes with women will never be secure with one woman, or a hundred. There’s a sort of gnawing insecurity that some people have inside them which no amount of flattery or placating will assuage. And you notice after a point that the men who are the quickest to put women down and talk up their own alpha male prowess are really overawed and terrified by women and generally can’t stand themselves. The internet is full of these self-loathing peacocks.

But, maybe, everyone’s a little insecure.

These thoughts came up this week as I finally got around to reading “In a Lonely Place” by Dorothy B. Hughes. I’ve long been a fan of the movie (every December 2th, I celebrate the birth of Humphrey Bogart) which is one of the very few I can think of (maybe Raging Bull is another) to deal with pathological male insecurity. It’s rightly seen as a classic today; as is the novel. But I really was not prepared for how different they are.

The character at the center of the novel, Dix Steele (I know, I know) is a loser of a type fairly typical in noirs: a drifter, a layabout, he’s lacked any sense of purpose since the war days when he was flying on bombing runs in Europe. For the men returning home from the Second World War, the options were fairly stark: submerge themselves in domestic normalcy or float from one place to another, one job to another, one bar to another. Traditionally, in these noirs, the latter sort winds up compounding his essential rootlessness with women problems; the dames he encounters are, in general, good girls who want to domesticate him, or conniving femmes fatales who seek to drain him and dispose of him. You’ll remember, for instance, this was the triangle in Nightmare Alley.

Hughes turns it all upside down; what we’d call “subversive” today, though the noir genre lived by subversive twists. Here, the hard-boiled narrator seems to have women problems that are more internal: the women he sees as wicked are more likely afraid of him and with good reason. Rather than femmes fatales, he’s an homme fatal. Recently arrived in Lost Angeles, Dix is staying in the home of a friend who’s away, helping his old buddy Brub (what’s with these names?!), now a police detective, solve a series of random sex killings, and trying to find love with an aspiring actress. We soon suspect our narrator is leaving a few things out: the friend’s not really away, the sex murderer is the one telling the story, and the duplicitous femme fatale is trying to save herself from him.

Being placed in the mind of an actual lady-killer is unnerving enough and you can see how the novel likely influenced later writers like Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith. Dix is a bit of a talentless Mr. Ripley. The novel lays bare the pathetic neediness of this character, and the misogyny at the heart of quite a few noirs. Dix needs women to give him something they can’t- some missing part of himself- so he takes much more.

The problem, for me, was the prose, which is as flat as a police report. Noir also tends towards this sub-Hemingway style, and I get where a man as devoid of imagination or nuance as Dix would be a bit of an unexciting narrator. But, somehow, Highsmith and Thompson were able to get around this problem. One can only read so many sentences along the lines of “he walked into the apartment and dropped his keys on the table,” ya know?

The Nicholas Ray film In a Lonely Place is so different as to be the story of a guy who’s also named Dix Steele who maybe lives near the guy from the book. This Dix Steele, played by Humphrey Bogart, is a screenwriter in Hollywood who has a clever way with words and outward charm, but hasn’t had a hit since before the war. One night, he picks up a coatroom girl at his favorite club to help him work on the adaptation of a novel he never read (a clever touch!) and sends her home early. The next day, she shows up dead and Dix becomes the main suspect. I’m not sure we ever suspect him, although the film dangles the possibility he really is the killer until the end.

However, in the process of being interrogated, he meets his neighbor, an aspiring actress played by Gloria Grahame, and they start a relationship. Both of them are bright and witty; ironically enough, the film is better written than the book. And they both seem to genuinely like each other. Dix doesn’t worry much about being called a killer, but he does have a distinct insecurity that explodes in rage and possessiveness when things don’t go quite his way, while the actress is the type to run away from relationships. The focus of the film is thus whether these two people, who really do fall deeply in love in the film, will be able to make it work as Dix finds success with his latest work; or will they lose what might be each one’s last chance for romantic happiness.

In a lonely car

Which is to say, if the novel tries to make the reader’s heart race, the film tries to break it. The climax of In a Lonely Place remains devastating to this day. It was supposedly largely improvised. Bogart was not exactly unfamiliar with outbursts of rage in his own life, and director Ray’s marriage with lead actress Gloria Graeme was disintegrating at the time the film was being made, which adds a painful aspect of verisimilitude to the proceedings. Quite different from the book, it’s very hard not to wish these people could make it work. But, we also realize, they really won’t. As Steele has one of the characters say in his script, knowing it’s foreshadowing their own end:

 I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.

In some ways, the thought of a man so flawed he’ll never find the love that might heal him is more disturbing than another serial killer. Maybe because it’s much more common. Again, the internet if full of these guys.

And so, what are YOU reading, watching, playing, pondering, or wrestling with this weekend?