Killer inside me
(Warning: details from the novel and film discussed in explicit detail)
Reading Dorothy B. Hughes' 1947 novel In a Lonely Place and watching Nicholas Ray's 1950 adaptation is like experiencing the difference between night and day: Hughes' novel takes place mostly at night it seems, in dense fog; you often confuse the misty Los Angeles evenings for Dix Steele's twilight view--occasionally there's the glare of a passing streetlamp, but it quickly fades into the haze.
Ray's film feels as if it takes place mostly in sunlight; even its interiors radiate the glow of studio kliegs--the film is described as a noir but if we adhere to strict definitions it breaks one rule of noir: not a lot of shadows onscreen. The look of Ray's films can diverge from the norm (see his debut work They Live By Night) but in this case he opts for the standard-issue brightness of a Hollywood production--why?
Because, I suspect. Where the novel does what novels are uniquely qualified to do--put us in intimate contact with the contents of the protagonist's head--Ray leans into cinema's tendency to regard exterior surfaces, viewing Steele (Humphrey Bogart) through the near-unknowability of his craggy bright-lit mask of a face. 'Mask' is the key term I think; as Steele is grilled by police for the strangling of a young woman one is forced to ask: "did he or didn't he?" for near the length of the picture. That the novel is reworked to feature an older man (Bogart was 50) who draws women to him (Louise Brooks on Bogart: "When a woman appealed to him, he waited for her like the flame waits for the moth"); that Brooks believes this performance comes closest to the Bogart she personally knew; that Ray had Steele's apartment complex set modeled after his own residence (the Villa Primavera in West Hollywood) when he first came to Los Angeles; that Ray insisted on casting his own wife Gloria Grahame as Steele's lover and later fiance Laurel Grey; that at one point while Grahame and Ray's marriage was falling apart Ray moved into Steele's apartment set for the rest of the shoot--these elements seem to help cast and filmmaker identify with their characters, galvanize their performance, goad them into delivering to the big screen something urgent and alive.
The Beverly Patio Apartments resembling Ray's former residence adds saltpeter and sulfur to an early exchange: "You can see into my apartment but I can't see into yours." "I promise you I won't take advantage of it." "I would if it were the other way around." Andrew Solt's dialogue (with additions by Ray) and Ray's own visual ideas (realized by set designer Robert Peterson) suggest an important thesis of Hughes: that women are more perceptive than men and men, if they could share this ability, would only exploit it.
Can't help comparing this to yet another 1950 film about Hollywood, Billy Wilder's masterpiece Sunset Boulevard. Where Wilder proudly flaunts his insider credentials (casting Gloria Swanson and Erich Von Stroheim as silent star and her former director, adding Buster Keaton and Hedda Hopper and HB Warner and Cecil B. DeMille--playing himself--to the margins), Ray betrays familiarity despite himself (the dialogue where Steele begrudgingly accepts a novel to read and perhaps adapt into a script--and the people who argue, wheedle, kibitz at him from the sidelines--sound as if transcribed from real life). Wilder's is the more polished script--every line is honed for maximum wit--but Ray's (or rather Solt's with Ray contributing) has his characters talking normally, with one notable exception of a line: "I was born when she kissed me I died when she left me I lived a few weeks while she loved me." Significantly it's not everyday dialogue but a fragment Steele thought up--possibly on the spot--and seeks to insert in a script somewhere, to some yet undetermined purpose ("A farewell note?" "I don't know."). There's poetry in Steele (and Ray, and Bogart) only this is real life (or an uncanny facsimile thereof) and they're not sure what to do with it.
Ray's ending--reportedly improvised with the actors on the set--throws his and Hughes' intentions into stark relief. Hughes paints a blistering indictment of the male gaze and ego, lost in a fog of self-delusion; Ray working with Bogart holds up a mirror. One is not necessarily inferior to another--Hughes persistent use of fog as a metaphor for Steele's interior state is both a necessary narrative strategy (if we knew Steele's thoughts with perfect clarity all the time the novel would have zero tension) and a superb prose realization of a major theme (women know the score, men are constantly fooling themselves); her powers of empathy are such one is compelled to wonder (how can she know so much about toxic masculinity?). I submit that Hughes' tour de force resonates in other works, from Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me to Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, and its impact as a consequence has been muted by the many (occasionally skillful) imitations.
Further submit that Ray's ending is not necessarily a dilution of but a radical twist on a genre trope, fashioned by Ray from the simplest materials. Steele sits outside Laurel Gray's room, waiting. He lights a cigarette and his hands start to shake; he looks up and his eyes are two great goblin lamps spouting fire. When Steele explodes it isn't in the stylized manner of a predator pouncing after prey but a domestic brawl, graceless and ugly and distressingly familiar to anyone--everyone--who has experienced a troubled relationship.
Being guilty might actually feel better for Steele--he admits "I'm a serial killer!" and everyone throws up their hands to respond "that explains everything!" As things stand Steele can't blame abnormal sexual urges or phases of the moon or early childhood trauma; he can't be arrested, can't escape, can't be executed for being what he is (which technically speaking isn't a crime). Steele--like Bogart within him or Ray behind him--is all out of excuses; he has no one left to confront but himself.
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