Genre: Crime

Closing out our Bogie Fest series, celebrating the legendary performances of Hollywood icon Humprey Bogart, is Nicholas Ray’s 1950 masterpiece In A Lonely Place!

Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with talent to spare and a temper he can’t quite control. When a young woman he briefly encounters turns up dead, suspicion settles on him almost immediately. And the unsettling part is…it doesn’t feel entirely misplaced.

What makes In a Lonely Place stand out in a filmography stacked full of classics is how it subverts expectations of the noir genre. Directed with a quiet intensity, letting silences stretch and emotions simmer, the violence occasionally erupts in very upsetting aways. And Bogart, often the embodiment of control, lets something fray at the edges here. His Dix is charming enough…until he’s not.