“In A Lonely Place” (1950)
Was ever there a director as adept as Ray at taking familiar genre elements and spinning from them a completely unexpected story? If you’re in any doubt as to the director’s preeminence in this arena, may we point you in the direction of “In a Lonely Place,” which is best, though inadequately, described as a drama with noir elements? Kicking off as a standard murder mystery, the film (and the audience) rapidly loses interest in the whodunnit plot, becoming embroiled and utterly absorbed instead in the interpersonal drama and psychological portrait that it evolves into. Dix (Humphrey Bogart, an oddly inspired casting choice) plays a hackish, fading screenwriter (metatextuality alert!) with a nasty temper who becomes the chief suspect in a murder case, only to be supplied with an alibi by his beautiful neighbor Laurel (the ever-undervalued Gloria Grahame, in a terrific turn). They fall in love, and Dix starts writing again. But in the face of mounting police suspicion, Dix’s worst aspects starts to show themselves in violent outbursts and possessive jealousy towards Laurel until, in one of the most beautifully balanced denouements of all time, he nearly kills her (throttling his own chance of redemption in the process), even as the phone rings to let him know he has been cleared. It’s undoubtedly a potboiler, and a somewhat salacious one at that, but “In a Lonely Place” is also one of the very smartest of Ray’s films, and could almost serve alongside certain Shakespeare classics as a classroom text on how character is destiny. In fact, the directorial impulses away from noir and towards psychological, character-driven drama are beautifully illustrated in the story of the film’s ending: originally, it was to culminate in real noir fashion, with Dix finding out he’s been proven innocent only after he’s actually killed Laurel. While that end would no doubt have suited a more pulpy treatment, Ray changed it to leave Laurel still alive and Dix ostensibly a free man. Somehow, the knowledge that she lives on but despises and fears him, and the fact that he has to face the future alone with knowledge of his own monstrousness and nothing so cathartic as a prison sentence/hanging to look forward to, becomes all the more exquisitely appropriate torture for the character. Pure greatness.
“On Dangerous Ground” (1952)
A true successor to the crime pics upon which Ray made his name (reteaming him with “They Live By Night” producer John Houseman, and was actually shot not long after but was unreleased for two years), “On Dangerous Ground” is a curious meld of hard-boiled noir and touching melodrama/romance, one that was little loved at the time (the New York Times’ influential critic Bosley Crowther called it “a shallow, uneven affair”) but has been gradually deemed by Ray-ophiles over the years, though it’s still not one of his best known works. An adaptation of the novel “Mad With Much Heart” by British crime writer Gerald Butler (no, not that one), the film stars Robert Ryan as Jim Wilson, a hardened, violent detective living an increasingly alienated life in the big city, where the violence seemingly threatens to consume him. But a strange sort of salvation arrives when he’s sent upstate to aid the manhunt for the killer of a young girl, only to fall in love with Mary, the blind sister (Ida Lupino, who reportedly took over in the director’s chair briefly when Ray took ill) of the mentally-ill murderer (Sumner Williams). The opening, in which we see the toll that Wilson’s existence is taking on him, is almost oppressive in its noirishness, with Ryan’s performance seeming like the personification of a clenched fist, ready to erupt into violence at any moment (he feels like a clear precursor to “Dirty Harry”). And yet there’s a fundamental decency to him, and as the snowy landscape opens up, he finds a beauty and peace that begins to change him, a change further completed by the almost saintly Mary (that her name has New Testament echoes is hardly a coincidence), who’s also lived a life at a distance from others, dedicating herself to care for her brother. It’s oddly touching, and while the semi-upbeat ending (forced on Ray, reportedly) doesn’t quite ring true, it’s hard not to be moved by these two people finding a solace in each other. Among all its strengths, one of the greatest might be Bernard Hermann’s score, one of the composer’s most undervalued.