In A Lonely Place

Nicholas Ray - 1950
Nicholas Ray and the 'social problem' movie

Socially consciousness film-making has always laid itself open to charges of heavyhandedness. This is the criticism (for all the positive evaluations also made) most often laid in front of Nicholas Ray's Knock On Any Door (1949). Coversely, the fuzzy Hollywood liberalism we know, hate and love could be charged against a subsequent work of Ray's In A Lonely Place (1950). Hollywood liberalism is determined to take a moral postion- certainly, male violence should be condemned- but its ideas of simple solidarity and goodness prove abstract and unsustainable in a modern life. Ray clearly was a liberal, but his work demonstrates an intelligence to realise that position's modern tragedy. Hence the romantic pessimism of a They Live By Night (1949), Rebel Without A Cause (1955), or Bigger Than Life (1956).
Ray's filmography, his style, has however the quality of breaking the bounds of its script or its clearly encoded 'message'. Ray's technique, his montage and his compostions, enable both Knock on Any Door and In A Lonely Place to transcend, and give reflexive comment upon, any straightforward classifications.
The two films, the ealier directly confronting, on its surface, the particular social problem of delinquency, the latter, on its surface, a portrait or description of a particular (violent) kind of man, both seem to me to in fact be responses to the same debate; 'how should well-meaning types confront violence and misery?'
The films' obvious connection to one another is that they were the two collaborations between Nick Ray and Bogart. Bogart's awesome star persona, almost mythic for my generation, adds to the power of Ray's close framings of that beautiful shipwreck of a face. The intial identifaction with Bogart's point of view is in place. Were Knock On Any Door to be the worthy piece of brow-beating implied by some, Bogart's 'Andrew Morton' would take on an Atticus Finch-esque status of of proclaiming what is wrong and right. The development of Ray's movie is, however, to show Bogart-Morton as himself inadequate in his attempts to either reform or defend the young delinquent placed in his charge, 'Nick Romano' (played by John Dereck). Ray doesn't tell us it's the economic situation to blame, putting the words in a 'voice of truth' mouthpiece, but it shows it to us. He shows how even the well-meaning liberal is ultimately cuaght out by the social condtions. Bogart can try to help, the audience can try to help, but, ultimately, a good conscience at this stage won't tackle the real problem; systematic inequality.
In A Lonely Place has a different use of Bogart, in that the problem- violence- is in fact a part of 'Dixon Steele', the audience's identified-with alter-ego. The charming, manic, lonely scriptwriter, who may or may not be a murderer, acts in the centre of the film to force the audience to consider how they react to violence not only in others (in Nick Romanos), but also in themselves. Again, Ray does not dole out paliatives that Steele-Bogart is 'not like us' or is ultimately redeemable. Ray is not heavyhanded, his world is not a simple equation for sypathetic liberals to solve.
Yet Ray's films go beyond a bourgois pessimism at the misery of life. A kind of romance in Ray, often called his 'poetry', is accesible in his visual style. The shadows that create doublings, the attention paid to his vertically stacked compositions, create worlds of not only obvious beauty, but of a particular kind of detailed beauty. The sense of complexity, of multiple perspectives, of curiousity and investiagtion into the world, is where Ray can avoid charges that a film like In A Lonely Place hands out inadequate tools to solve its problems. In a sense, In A Lonely Place does have an 'answer' to how the misery and violence of the world should be confronted. Ray asks us, with his doubled mis-en-scene and full-frameed evoaction of location, to look carefully, always closer, always further.
We can also find this call in the film's narrative. The repetition of Steele's sending condolences to the family of a deceased- an incidental bit of character shading the first time around- reflect's back on the earlier action and the man's own character. Simply showing ambiguity- tenderness coexisting with violence in Steele, shifting perspectives by a track-out in a restaurant scene- opens a world of constant reframings. We are given different worlds that reflect on each other, and ask for constant vigiliance.
The distinctive rythms of a Ray film further answer, firstly, to a wish not to over-simplify, and secondly to combine with this a desperate, concrete attempt to understand and to act. Ray uses balanced compositions, closer shots, and aggressive 'pushed to the audience' framings to create downright beautiful harmonies, with different punctuation marks, such as the medium-close shot, used to create specific feelings (examples of this kind of expressive editing would be Knock On Any Door's opening, In A Lonely Place's violent car journey, and some very effective breaks of the 180' line to add punch, by the viewer needing to recognize the image, in certain dialgoue scenes). Yet Ray's symphonies include harsh, to push the point let me say atonal, chords. His peculiarly tight, direct framings go beyond the harmonies we find in, say, Wyler. Stabs of violence, photographs of the dead girl, interrupt the pleasure of the melody. Above all, the desperate lunges, the urganecy, the fast sharp movements of his actors. These expressionst tendencies, perhaps at their starkest in Johnny Guitar (1954), seem like attempts to break through his clear classical harmonies in search of some kind of truth beyond easy answers or hand-wringing. At their peaks, these moments push beyond the limits of the traditional narrative film towards a sense of flesh, vitality, the concrete realness of life. Isolating an action, by emphasising it beyond its necessary narrative weight, asks us to conder it precisely and closely; to look into the details.That the problems of Knock On Any Door (social delinquency) and In A Lonely Place (our violence, loneliness) persist through the films' conclusions is, perhaps, no more than a feature of any film that deserves to be called moral. How Ray rises above well-meaning but heavyhanded 'social problem' films, in Knock On Any Door, is his condemnation of liberal complacency. In A Lonely Place asks how we can understand those who are different from ourselves, who appear to, or really do, have antisocial interests and urges. It doesn't answer as Nick Romano does- 'how can anyone really know how someone else feels?- but rather demands its audience to listen, to try to understand better. If Laurel Grey had got to know Dixon Steele better, perhaps she wouldn't have jumped to the wrong conclusions, his final lonely walk would have been avoided. Perhaps if we, judging as we do, could keep our ears to the ground a little more, the Nick Romanos and Dixon Steeles of this world wouldn't have to suffer alone.