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Abstract

An auteurist favourite from the writings of the Cahiers du cinéma critics onward, the

reputation of the work of Nicholas Ray has suffered somewhat as a result of the director’s

early critical deification. His status as a prominent target for the backlash against auteurism

has meant that little criticism has yet felt comfortable in attempting a revised analysis of his

oeuvre. This analysis, however, takes just such an approach, casting a deliberately sceptical

eye over the reception of one of Ray’s most critically lauded films, In a Lonely Place, in

order to demonstrate, and deconstruct, the overbearing influence of the mythology

surrounding the figure of the director himself upon its interpretation. The powerful influence

of the auteurist tradition within the critical reception history of Ray’s work has meant that

analyses of In a Lonely Place have tended to construct it as a tragic lament for the persecuted

artist-outsider—and thus obscured the more nuanced interrogation of Dixon Steele’s

character that the film, in fact, articulates. This analysis argues that, although the film can

undoubtedly be interpreted as a self-reflexive interrogation of the film industry, its director’s

larger-than-life “auteur” image should not be allowed to overshadow the far more complex

one the film presents of the conflicted authorial presence at its centre.

Keywords: Film, Self-Reflexivity, Auteurism, Classical Hollywood

Authorial Rebellion and the Rebel Auteur: Commercialism, the Artist, and the Self-

Reflexive Cinema of Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place

At the heart of In a Lonely Place (1950, dir. Nicholas Ray) lies a self-reflexive examination

of the industry which produced it. The decision of principal screenwriter, Andrew Solt, to

make protagonist Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter—

one of several significant diversions from the Dorothy B. Hughes source novel, the most

obvious being that Dix does not turn out to be responsible for the murder at the narrative’s

centre—turns a portrait of one man into a portrait of an industry: and not a very flattering one

at that. There is a marked critical tendency, however, to attribute the film’s unfavourable

view of Hollywood not to Solt, but to Nicholas Ray. Geoff Andrew, for instance, begins his

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analysis of the film by drawing attention to its “autobiographical” nature.1 “Ray felt less

affection for Hollywood than Solt,” writes Andrew, “and the unglamorous depiction of the

milieu […] can probably be attributed to the director.”2 In arguing thus, Andrew indicates his

affinity with auteurist interpretations of Ray’s films which present their “passionate

identification with society's outsiders” as rooted in the director’s “own troubled relationship

with the film-making establishment.”3 A favourite, if often controversial, subject for

auteurists from the work of the Cahiers du cinéma critics onward—Godard famously once

went so far as to declare that “cinema is Nicholas Ray”4—Ray is consistently viewed, in the

words of Pam Cook, “as stylistically testing the boundaries of the Hollywood codes of

representation.”5 As Cook points out, this view of Ray has combined with “the myths

surrounding [his] dramatic conflicts with the Hollywood studio hierarchy” to create an image

of the director as “the archetypal romantic artist, in a continual state of crisis vis-à-vis the

world”.6 It is an image which the director himself undoubtedly had a hand in cultivating,

often bemoaning the constraints placed upon his work in Hollywood, and even quoting the

line “I’m a stranger here myself”—from his 1954 Western Johnny Guitar—to characterise

his uneasy position within the industry.7

However, just as Pamela Robertson has argued that auteurist readings of that film

have too often constructed it as “the story of a man’s struggle and alienation” at the expense

of obscuring potential feminist and queer interpretations, I would contend that the powerful

influence of the auteurist tradition within the critical reception history of Ray’s work has

meant that analyses of In a Lonely Place have tended to construct it as a tragic lament for the

persecuted artist-outsider—and thus obscured the more nuanced interrogation of Dix’s

1 Geoff Andrew, The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall (London: BFI Publishing, 2004): 46.

2 Ibid.

3 Geoff Andrew, The Film Handbook (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990): 232.

4 Jean-Luc Godard, “Bitter Victory,” in Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1972): 64.

5 Pam Cook, “The Auteur Theory,” in The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook (London: BFI Publishing, 2007): 413.

6 Ibid.

7 Geoff Andrew, “A Stranger in a Strange Land,” New Statesman, 05 January, 2004.

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character that the film, in fact, articulates.8 This analysis intends to argue that although the

film can undoubtedly be interpreted as a self-reflexive interrogation of the film industry, its

director’s larger-than-life “auteur” image should not be allowed to overshadow the far more

complex one the film presents of the conflicted authorial presence at its centre.

The film opens as Dix makes his reluctant way to “Paul’s”—a club frequented by the

Hollywood elite, where murder victim Mildred Atkinson works as a hatcheck girl—to be

talked into adapting a popular novel by his long-suffering agent. These introductory scenes

emphasise for the viewer two critical aspects of Dix’s character: that he resents the hack

studio work in which he is employed, and that he has a propensity for violence; the two

combined make for a volatile Hollywood existence. At Paul’s, he is assaulted from all sides

by reminders of the lowly position he occupies in the Hollywood hierarchy. The friend of a

young autograph-hunter tells him not to bother accosting Dix because “he’s nobody”—and

Dix agrees with her. He is decidedly unenthusiastic about adapting Althea Bruce—

threatening, “I won’t work on something I don’t like”—and is increasingly antagonistic

towards Lloyd Barnes, the director assigned to the picture, who he accuses of being a

“popcorn salesman”. Although momentarily cheered by his meeting with fellow “nobody”

Charlie Waterman—a drunken, has-been actor who is clearly considered an embarrassment

by everyone but the screenwriter—the two shot which isolates them—looking equally

despondent—from director and agent after Dix’s outburst leaves us in no doubt that their

outsider allegiance should be read, not as a soothing antidote to the ravages of the Hollywood

system, but as a disquieting premonition of Dix’s lack of future within it (Fig. 1). When an

upstart producer insults his friend, the screenwriter snaps and attacks him. “There goes Dix

again,” an onlooker quips.

8 Pamela Robertson, “Camping Under Western Stars: Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar,” Journal of Film and

Video 47, no. 1/3 (1995): 41.

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Fig. 1

The film opens, then, having all the potential to be interpreted as a straightforward

lament for the lonely place the artist occupies in Hollywood. Dix—and the independent,

artistic voice he seems to represent—is thrown into conflict with commercialism at every

turn. Even his clothes set him apart—his sharp black suit, silk handkerchief and polka-dot

bowtie couldn’t look more out of place set against the grey business wear of the industry

types around him. Dix’s bitterness towards the restrictive authorial demands of commercial

story-telling is reinforced when he comes face to face with his audience in the character of

Mildred Atkinson. Mildred is a girl who knows what she wants in a picture, and she wants

what Hollywood is selling. Indeed, her status as a consumer ideally suited to Hollywood

formulism is, I would argue, pushed to the point of parody—something which leads me to

read her, not as straightforwardly as J. Hoberman does, as the “embodiment of Hollywood’s

imagined audience,” but specifically as a representation of Dix’s stereotypical, cynic’s view

of what Hollywood audiences are like.9. She actively prefers predictability in her narratives,

telling Dix upon meeting him at Paul’s that she always reads the end of a book first.

9 J. Hoberman, “Bogart’s In a Lonely Place at Film Forum,” Village Voice, 15 July, 2009.

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Represented in Mildred, the Hollywood audience is unmistakably uncultured and low-brow.

When Dix takes her home with him so she can tell him the story of Althea Bruce, for

example, her propensity for malapropism and mispronunciation is stressed. She uses “risky”

to mean risqué, bacteriologist becomes “bac-ter-ogolist” and, despite Dix’s repeated attempts

to correct her, Althea becomes “Al-ai-thea”. That this in itself can be interpreted as a

malaprop mispronunciation of the name Alethea—which comes from the Greek αληθεια,

meaning truth—only reinforces Dix’s view that Hollywood narratives and their audience

have absolutely no regard for artistic integrity. The screenwriter’s instinct to recoil from the

expectations and demands of a popular audience, and the authoring influence they are

expected to have over his work, is highlighted here: he grows increasingly uncomfortable

during this scene—a shot from his point of view emphasises his retreat across the room from

Mildred—as the roles of screenwriter and audience are reversed; Mildred is now the story-

teller, Dix her passive audience.

As Mildred becomes both the voice of Hollywood’s audience and an enthusiastic

mouthpiece for a formulaic story here, it is easy to see why many critics have interpreted her

subsequent murder as a kind of narrative wish-fulfilment—the literalization of Dix’s death-

to-commercialism attitude and desire to silence its authorial demands upon him. Stefano

Masi, for example, reads Dix as “a writer who, not able to express himself, explodes his own

violent creativity against the world that surrounds him. Reality, in return, materialises a

phantasm of the writer; that is, it interprets his own contempt in the confrontation with

Mildred and realises it.” 10

Such criticism is often clearly influenced by the tales of Nicholas

Ray’s own struggles with the industry. Jean Wagner, like Masi, reads Dix’s violent nature—

which fosters police suspicion that he is Mildred’s killer—as the frustrated expression of his

10

Stefano Masi, Nicholas Ray (Milan: Il Castoro, 1995): 30.

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disillusionment with the “superficial” world of the cinema, which is stifling his creativity.11

“What’s admirable in Nicholas Ray,” she writes, “is that he succeeds in convincing us that

there is only one possible attitude: to hit one’s fists against everything in reach. If we find Dix

somewhat crazy, he is one of those magnificent fools for whom we would gladly exchange

many normal people.”12

Dix, here, is the very image of the “romantic artist, in a continual

state of crisis vis-à-vis the world” that Pam Cook sees as defining Nicholas Ray in the critical

imagination.13

Hitting one’s fists against everything in reach is assumed to be an attitude

shared by character and director, and Wagner appears convinced that the audience is

encouraged to sympathise with—and, indeed, approve of—Dix’s violent behaviour as a futile

but laudable protest against a world in which he is unable to make his voice heard.

This interpretation is highly problematic, however. Firstly, I would argue that the

audience’s potential to sympathise with Dix is deliberately curtailed, right from the film’s

opening shot in which—despite seemingly sharing his subject position looking out through

the front windscreen of his car—they are simultaneously confronted with his reflected gaze in

the rear-view mirror (Fig. 2). This sense of disrupted identification and uneasy distance

characterises the audience relationship to Dix throughout—indeed, it is integral to

encouraging their uncertainty as to whether or not he is Mildred’s murderer, an enterprise

which also requires that they begin to fear what he is capable of: something accomplished by

allowing them to be a fly on the wall in the detectives’ office as they discuss his record for

assault, and violence against women.

11

Jean Wagner, Nicholas Ray (Paris: Rivages, 1987): 97. 12

Ibid., 97-98. 13

Cook, “The Auteur Theory,” 413.

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Fig. 2

I would argue that it is not just Dix’s innocence the audience is intended to

interrogate, however, but his stance of artistic superiority. There are several moments of

heightened self-reflexivity which punctuate Dix’s confrontation with Mildred, for example,

which encourage the audience to observe the screenwriter dispassionately, and make them

more open to questioning his artistic pretensions. Mildred’s admission that she “used to think

actors made up their own lines” prompts Dix to reply that “when they get to be big stars they

usually do”. The line consciously plays upon audience recognition that it is itself being

spoken by a “big star” and, in its willingness to exploit Bogart’s star persona to amusing

effect, is knowingly complicit in the Hollywood model of star power its speaker is seemingly

so keen to denigrate. What’s more, Dix’s lament for the authoring power of the star in

Hollywood is further undermined, I would argue, by the fact that the star in question owned

the controlling share of the film’s production company, had final approval of its script, and is

credited in its opening seconds even before the title appears.14

The fact that In a Lonely Place

deliberately draws attention to the discrepancy between its own reality and Dix’s artistic

14

See Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: BFI Publishing, 1993).

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ideals suggests that the audience is urged to take his pronouncements on such matters far

more lightly than most critics have previously allowed.

Dix is the butt of another self-reflexive joke when he flees from Mildred into the

bedroom as she continues her enthusiastic account of Althea Bruce’s melodramatic plotline.

He looks out of the window to see Laurel gazing down at him from her balcony across the

courtyard (Fig. 3). This, surely, is the beginning of a Hollywood love story? Sure enough, the

play of their gazes not only echoes Althea Bruce’s first glimpse of love-interest Channing—

as described by Mildred moments earlier—but is a gender-reversed version of the scene she

is actually in the process of describing as Dix goes to open the window—“[a]nd from his

station, with his binoculars, Channing can see into her room”. This, however, seems to be lost

on Dix. The screenwriter who believes he can spot a hackneyed plot a mile away—he decides

he will not like Althea Bruce before he has even read it—is blind to the irony of the fact that

the narrative of his own life seems to be mimicking the Hollywood formulas he dismisses as

trite and unrealistic.

Fig. 3

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This brings me to my central objection to interpretations such as Masi and Wagner’s

which mould Dix in the romanticised image attached to the film’s director. Such criticism

accepts without question the “fact” of Dix’s artistic genius. And yet, I would argue, there is

very little evidence that Dix has any talent—much less “genius”—left at all. His last picture,

by his own admission, “stunk” and—as Lloyd Barnes points out to him—he “[hasn’t] had a

hit since before the war”. He responds to this defensively by accusing the director of never

having had a flop because he has “made and re-made the same picture for the last twenty

years”. However, Dix’s implied claim that his own work is unpalatable to audiences because

it is innovatory and anti-formulaic rings hollow. If he was writing hits before the war, surely

he was once just as adept at reworking narrative formulas to great commercial returns. The

fact that his stories are no longer selling is no evidence that he has risen above the constraints

of commercial formulism and is now producing avant-garde screenplays that are anathema to

his employers; he has simply lost his touch. Indeed, he freely admits to “need[ing] the

money,” and yet is noticeably unable to produce one commercial hit in order to pay the bills.

Approached in this context, Mildred’s murder becomes not the fulfilment of the artist’s wish

to silence the authoring voice of commercialism, but a blackly humorous literalization of

Dix’s status as the screenwriter suspected of having killed off his audience. It can still be read

as an act of cinematic wish-fulfilment, but rather as one which enacts Dix’s desire for

revenge upon an audience which has deserted him thanks to the failure of his talent—a failure

he compensates for through the self-authored, fantasy image of Dix the intellectually superior

artist.

Lacking an audience, Dix seeks validation in his relationships with women. Women

provide Dix with an audience throughout the film: from Laurel’s intrigued glance when they

first meet, to the focus on the wary looks Sylvia Nicolai throws him during dinner, they are

continually shown observing Dix with both fascination and fear—indeed, if the film’s own

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audience is encouraged to identify with anyone, it is with the film’s women in their conflicted

observation of Dix. Once he has found a willing audience in Laurel, Dix, for a brief

honeymoon period, is able to work again. This authorial renaissance is yet another idealistic

fabrication, however, founded upon Dix’s insistence that Laurel remain the screenplay’s sole

audience for as long as possible. Isolated, away from Hollywood reminders of previous

artistic failures, and with Laurel’s insightful ability to cure him of his defensive artistic

posturing through gentle mockery—“Genius is going to beddy-bye,” she asserts playfully in

an attempt to convince him to stop working and get some sleep—there seems to be hope for

Dix.

This fragile existence cannot be maintained, however. Laurel begins to lose her faith

in Dix’s innocence under the weight of police suspicion, tainting her validating presence for

Dix, who becomes increasingly unstable. Self-reflexivity is again called upon to reveal the

discrepancy between Dix’s compensatory, self-authored view of the world, and the reality of

his and Laurel’s relationship. Upon waking from a nightmare about Dix, Laurel walks into

the kitchen to find him fixing breakfast. She compliments him on the love scene in his

screenplay. Dix responds that “[a] good love scene should be about something else besides

love. For instance, this one: me fixing grapefruit, you sitting over there, dopey, half-asleep.

Anyone looking at us could tell we're in love.” The audience’s reading of this “love scene,”

however, produces a very different interpretation, the visual gulf between Laurel and Dix

speaking volumes about the fragile state of their relationship (Fig. 4). Dix’s final, delusional

attempt to rewrite that relationship as a whirlwind romance—pushing Laurel into an

engagement she clearly does not want—precipitates Laurel’s flight from him and his descent

into the near-psychotic state of possessiveness in which he tries to strangle her.

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Fig. 4

Once more, it is Dix’s fear that he has lost his audience’s sympathy which provokes

his violent behaviour, for without Laurel he returns again to that lonely place he occupied at

the beginning of the film. That lonely place is not, however, as many auteurist critics would

have us believe, that of the artistic genius engaged in doomed rebellion against commercial

Hollywood. In a Lonely Place may give an unflattering portrayal of its Hollywood milieu, but

it is equally unflinching in its portrayal of its protagonist. In claiming that Dix is “one of

those magnificent fools for whom we would gladly exchange many normal people,” Jean

Wagner, for instance, falls into the trap of upholding the very misreading of Dix’s character

that his delusional self-authoring intentionally perpetuates.15

The film itself, however,

actively warns against such a romanticised interpretation of Dix’s character. For years, those

around him have been using his supposed brilliance as an excuse for his volatility. His agent,

for example, makes a claim not unlike Wagner’s when he says that Dix is “dynamite,” so

“has to explode sometimes”—“dynamite” here denoting a violent instability inextricable

from a “dynamite” talent. In doing so they have become blind to the true nature of his

15

Wagner, Nicholas Ray, 97.

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troubled state—a fatal misreading which may have cost Dix his sanity, and almost costs

Laurel her life.

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Bibliography

Andrew, Geoff. The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall. London: BFI Publishing,

2004.

---. The Film Handbook. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

---. “A Stranger in a Strange Land.” New Statesman, 05 January, 2004.

Cook, Pam. “The Auteur Theory.” In The Cinema Book, edited by Pam Cook, 410-418.

London: BFI Publishing, 2007.

Godard, Jean-Luc. “Bitter Victory.” In Godard on Godard, edited by Tom Milne, 64-66. New

York: Da Capo, 1972.

Hoberman, J. “Bogart’s In a Lonely Place at Film Forum.” Village Voice, 15 July, 2009.

In a Lonely Place. Directed by Nicholas Ray. 1950. Sony Pictures Home Ent., 2003. DVD.

Johnny Guitar. Directed by Nicholas Ray. 1954. UCA, 2005. DVD.

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Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Masi, Stefano. Nicholas Ray. Milan: Il Castoro, 1995.

Polan, Dana. In a Lonely Place. London: BFI Publishing, 1993.

Ray, Susan, ed. I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies. Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1995.

Robertson, Pamela. “Camping Under Western Stars: Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar.”

Journal of Film and Video 47, no. 1/3 (1995): 33-49.

Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. Cambridge, MA:

Da Capo Press, 1996.

Telotte, J. P. “The Displaced Voice of In a Lonely Place.” South Atlantic Review 54, no.1

(1989): 1-12.

Thompson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Knopf Doubleday,

2008.

Villella, Fiona. “Shadows on the Horizon: In a Lonely Place,” Senses of Cinema, November

2000. http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/feature-articles/lonely/.

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Wagner, Jean. Nicholas Ray. Paris: Rivages, 1987.