A lonely place
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | A lonely place |
| Original title | In a lonely place |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1950 |
| length | 94 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Nicholas Ray |
| script |
Andrew Solt , Edmund H. North |
| production | Robert Lord |
| music | George Antheil |
| camera | Burnett Guffey |
| cut | Viola Lawrence |
| occupation | |
| |
A lonely place (Original title: In a Lonely Place ) is an American crime drama by director Nicholas Ray from 1950 based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes .
action
Dixon "Dix" Steele is a well-known screenwriter in Hollywood who had his last big hit before his service in World War II . Meanwhile he writes irrelevant odd jobs, sits lonely in his apartment and gets angry about small annoyances. His agent Mel Lippman wants Dix to rewrite a bestseller for a film adaptation, so he meets with him and the director in a nightclub. Mildred, the nightclub cloakroom lady, happens to be reading this book. When Dix wants to leave, he is too tired to read the book. He asks Mildred if she can tell him the contents. She accepts and accompanies him to his apartment. When they arrive at the apartment building, they meet a new tenant, Laurel Gray. In the apartment, Mildred Dix explains the plot of the book. The book is cheesy and ordinary, Dix gives Mildred taxi money and she leaves.
The next morning, Dix is woken up by his army buddy Brub Nicholai. Brub is a police detective and takes him to his superior, Captain Lochner. It turns out that Mildred was murdered that night, and Dix is a suspect. Lochner is particularly critical of Dix, as he has a criminal record for several physical injuries committed in the affect . Laurel, Dix's new neighbor, appears at the police station and exonerates Dix by saying that she saw Mildred Dix's apartment leave, but alone. Since Dix outwardly shows no sympathy for the murdered woman, he remains on Lochner's list of suspects - on the drive home, however, he anonymously sends two dozen white roses to Mildred's family. Dix's temper also makes Brub's wife Sylvia and Mel Lippman suspect that he might be the murderer.
Dix and Laurel like each other straight away and he suspects that she lied for him and did not see Mildred leaving. He goes to Laurel and finds out that she is a budding actress. They begin to fall in love and work on the script together. Dix is becoming more and more approachable and friendly. But the police investigation into the murder case continues and Lochner reassigns Laurel to the presidium. When Dix finds out about this, he freaks out and races through the streets at high speed at night until he hits another car. Nobody gets hurt, but the other driver is upset. Dix knocks him down and tries to attack the unconscious with a stone, which Laurel can prevent. Now Laurel doubts Dix's innocence as well.
Laurel can no longer sleep without sleeping pills. Although she loves him, she is afraid of Dix. When Dix asks for her hand, she only accepts his request for fear of what might happen if she refused. She later confides in Mel that she wants to travel because she can no longer bear the situation. In the evening Dix celebrates an engagement party, which ends dramatically when he learns that Mel and Laurel have sent off his finished script on their own initiative. Thereupon he breaks Mel's glasses, Laurel flees the restaurant.
After Dix found out that he had made a comeback with his script , he rings the doorbell at Laurel's apartment - but there is a heated argument when he catches her packing the suitcase. Dix almost strangles her under her screams until he can control himself. The phone rings and Brub informs Dix that Mildred's killer has been found: Mildred's friend Henry Kesler has confessed to the murder. The relationship between Dix and Laurel can no longer save that. While Dix is leaving, Laurel recites a sentence from the script written by Dix: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."
background
The film was produced by Humphrey Bogart's own company Santana . Oscar- winning Jean Louis was responsible for the costumes, and the future television director Earl Bellamy acted as assistant director .
In the novel In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes , the character of Dix is a crime writer who supports the police and his old army buddy Brub in the investigation of a series of murders that he himself has committed. In the novel, however, Laurel and Sylvia Nicholai Dix's crimes are tracked down. The novel, written from the killer's point of view, had to be clearly rewritten because of the rules of the Hays Code . Dix was now a screenwriter in Hollywood and none of the murders are shown in the film. In the first version of the film, Dix was supposed to kill Laurel in the final scene, only to be arrested by Brub. But director Nicholas Ray didn't like that ending. He did not want violence to be spread as the solution to the problem. So he had the end sequence shot again a short time later and sent almost everyone involved from the set to let the end arise in an intimate atmosphere.
Nicholas Ray and leading actress Gloria Grahame were married to each other while filming. They were married from 1948 to 1952, by the time In a Lonely Place was shot, it was already over. Grahame married Tony Ray in 1960 , one of Nicholas Ray's sons from his first marriage, with whom she had already had a relationship during her marriage to Ray. The director described his relationship with Grahame, who he thought was primarily interested in his money, and how it affected the In a Lonely Place film set , in 1978:
“I got married once in Las Vegas. With Gloria Grahame. I didn't like her very much. I was mad about her, but I didn't like her very much. (...) I finally married her because she was pregnant and I had promised her to marry her. (...) The joys of working with Bogart on In a Lonely Place took away some of the pain of lost money when I faced reality. Gloria and I had some pretty bad fights, which made it imperative for us to be as professional as possible on set, which we did, so we didn't worry Bogart or my producer Bobby Lord any more. "
German version
In Germany, the film was initially only shown in the original language with subtitles. In 2011, a German dubbing was made at Film- & Fernseh-Synchron GmbH , Munich, which Arte first broadcast on January 2, 2012. Cosima Kretz was responsible for the dialogue script and dialogue direction . Ekkehardt Belle speaks for Humphrey Bogart as Dix Steele, Melanie Manstein for Gloria Grahame as Laurel Gray, Tobias Lelle for Art Smith as agent Mel Lippman and Norbert Gastell for Robert Warwick in the role of the worn-out actor Charlie Waterman.
Reviews
For the film-dienst , Ein Einsamer Ort was a “black” Hollywood film with a staged staging that captivates with Humphrey Bogart's laconic, precise play and cleverly hypothermic dialogues, but because of the overly theatrical aspects in the great emotional and tension aspects Dramaturgy and recognizable production constraints not entirely convinced ”. Cinema described the film as "a masterpiece of the mood in Hollywood during the paranoid McCarthy era".
The Hamburger Abendblatt noted in its film review that "Nicholas Ray [...] turned the thriller about misogyny and male violence into a parable about the McCarthy era and the communist hunt at the time". The film is therefore "not only an exciting and convincing psychogram of a serial killer (long before the populist wave), but also an attack on the 'American way of life'" - although this apparently refers to the novel, there is none in the film Serial killer.
The American film critic Eddie Muller , who is considered a specialist in film noirs, lists In a Lonely Place as his favorite noir film. A Hollywood studio film has never come as close to "personal filmmaking" as it was with this film. The film manages without typical noir iconography and illuminates the gloom of souls.
Awards
In 2007, A Lonely Place was listed on the National Film Registry .
literature
- Dorothy B. Hughes: In a Lonely Place (English edition). Feminist Press, 2003, ISBN 1-55861-455-9 .
Web links
- A lonely place in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- A lonely place at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ In a Lonely Place (TCM). Retrieved March 1, 2018 .
- ↑ Hans Schmid: In a lonely place: The American Dream between Humphrey Bogart and Donald Trump. In: Telepolis. Retrieved June 18, 2017 .
- ↑ Nicholas Ray: I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies . Ed .: Susan Ray. University of California Press, 1993, pp. 173-174 .
- ↑ German synchronous index: German synchronous index | Movies | A lonely place. Retrieved March 1, 2018 .
- ↑ A lonely place. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 25, 2017 .
- ↑ See cinema.de
- ↑ See Hamburger Abendblatt , July 22, 2004.
- ↑ Top 25 Noir Films. Retrieved February 10, 2020 .