Monday, 15 January 2018

The trouble about these Hollywood dames ~ Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) (work in progress)

A response (work in progress) to In a Lonely Place (1950) ~ Bogart and Grahame

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 January
On first viewing Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1950) (work in progress), as screened at Saffron Screen, on Monday 15 January 2018 at 8.00 p.m. (in the restored form from 1977)



Multiply, despite a police Captain who [says that he] has a microphone that is set up to record interviews, the film treats contamination of evidence (or even whether the matter is relevant) as if it is no part of its remit, or within its purview. Whereas it is sufficiently clear that even an innocent person, suspected of a crime (let alone one with a sizeable dossier at police HQ), will not, for the moment, want to act in a way that openly calls into question the independence of someone who claims to be a witness. (No more so than the police themselves will want there to be such an opportunity for embellishment of the evidence and / or for another witness 'to be found' ?)

If Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1) is right that it falls to consider In a Lonely Place in the category of noir, then maybe such a flavour of the inauthentic that pervades everything is apt – or, contrariwise, maybe it is a reaction to a film that seems to aim at being plausible, but where so much remarkably does not succeed in giving that impression, that, as its saving grace, we invoke the concept of film noir ?




Attribute to Grahame’s character Laurel that she has seen it all before (with Mr Baker)*, or that Humphrey Bogart is a case, before the diagnosis existed (or before Taxi Driver (1976)), of post-traumatic stress disorder, but :

 * Roger O. Thornhill (Cary again, with Hitchcock in North by NorthWest (1959)) is far more alarmed, though wildly drunk, by having been set behind the wheel of a car than Grahame as passenger – we see the vehicle objectively career, and also from the driver / passenger point of view - on one heck of a ride (we should either not have been shown that at all, or, if we are not intended to withdraw our belief, Grahame has not to react as if this is quite usual driving)

 * As Adam Feinstein made a very case for, at Cambridge Film Festival 2016, Michael Curtiz did some unjustly neglected work with The Breaking Point (1950), and not just in Casablanca (1942) (with this film’s male lead and Bergman) :



* This film just shows why Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (2011) was really so conventional (it felt as if, without acknowledging it, it was importing Peter Mullan from Ken Loach / Paul Laverty’s My Name is Joe (1998) ?)


All of which is calling out for some other film-references (assembling here, in alphabetical order) :

* The Artist (2011)

* Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017)

* Mulholland Drive [Dr.] (2001)

* […]


End-notes :

 * But Laurel doesn’t seem to have the signs of having seen it all before even of Audrey Hepburn, as Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) (even though, obviously, the oral sex in the gents is mightily toned down from what Truman Capote wrote – fancifully, although collected with three other stories in a slim volume, IMDb calls it ‘a novel’…)




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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