In a Lonely Place

Saw In a Lonely Place, a Bogart picture where Humph plays an embittered screenwriter. He establishes himself as a hero by sticking up for down-and-out actors and by slugging the smug money men. He has a girl around for a few innocent drinks and then, after leaving his apartment, the girl winds up dead. Yes, it's shaping up to be a bog-standard mystery picture. Fortunately, we're saved from the rather rote emergence of the villains and the drug connection and the whatnot of conventional mysteries by the film changing focus to Bogart's romantic relationship and the film pivots and becomes a rather harrowing story of domestic abuse.

The writer is implicated in the crime and even though we viewers know he didn't do it, it starts to seem like the kind of thing he would do. He has explosive tantrums, lavishing her with gifts the next day. I've never experienced domestic abuse (thank heaven) but this rage/guilt/sweetness cycle is textbook as far as I know. By the end, we get into some true 50 super-melodrama, but it's left me fairly rattled.

Bogart's most famous films have him as the hero or anti-hero at worst, but before the Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, he was type-cast as a gangster. It's shocking for me to see him be menacing but boy does he deliver with the tantrums and the rage. At one point he's cradling his girlfriend's head and it looks exactly like he's strangling her. The film cleverly subverts the fist-fight that opens the film. Initially, it establishes him as a hero, but in retrospect is clearly the actions of a man with a short fuse and little self-control. The film strips away the tropes of action and romance films, revealing their hackneyed short-hands to be creepy and ominous. By the end, his small circle of out-of-work friends seem less like a band of true artists and more like the losers table, huddling together for company and turning a blind eye to each other's gaping flaws. A tragic and creepy film.