Title: In A Lonely Place
This is another of a series of book / film comparisons. This time I read the book first. I can’t remember how I stumbled upon it, but in doing a bit of research on it, I discovered that a film was made of it. Not only that, but it’s considered one of the classic film noir and is on some best films list (like the Time Magazine Best Films of all Time). Seeing that it starred Humphrey Bogart sparked my interest even more. Between The Maltese Falcon, Dark Passage, and The Big Sleep, I’ve seen Bogart now in several of his noir classics (not to mention non-noir classics like Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen).
The first thing that was very surprising is how different the film is from the novel. Yes, they have the same major characters. Bogart stars as Dix Steele, a man with personal demons. His best friend from the war turned police detective, Brub, and his wife Sylvia are also in both. In both cases, Laurel Gray is Steele’s love interest.
In the film, a young woman is murdered that was last seen with Dix. The police immediately suspect Dix. When his history of acts of uncontrollable rage is discovered, he becomes their top suspect. Initially convinced (and indeed, his alibi) of Dix’s innocence, Laurel becomes alarmed when she witnesses one of Dix’s violent rages. The pressure builds on Dix and he begins to lose control. As he is strangling Laurel in a blind rage, the phone rings and it is Brub telling him that he has been cleared. Although now known to be innocent of the murder, the horror of the attack permanently destroys Laurel’s and Dix’s relationship.
In the novel, Dix is a serial rapist and murderer. Brub is working the case. It becomes a cat and mouse game as Dix tries to discover what the police know without tipping his hand regarding how important it is to him to find out. Unlike the film, Laurel Gray is no meek pushover. She is much more from the classic femme fatale mold. Dix and Laurel have an intense relationship of mutual passion and jealousy. Brub’s wife, Sylvia, is nearly nondescript in the film. Here, she plays a critical role. From the first moment that she sees him, Sylvia suspects that something is off with Dix. At the end, it is her actions that trick him to confess.
Although the film and the novel are quite different, the common theme between the two is misogyny. Even though in the film Dix is innocent of murder, his unreasoning rage is a prototypical example of toxic masculinity. One man calls him a name and he nearly beats him to death. He orders Laurel around like she’s his personal servant. Instead of asking to marry her, he essentially orders her to marry him. When he thinks that she’s going to leave him, he would have killed her if not interrupted. Granted that this was filmed in 1950, but even by those standards he demonstrates a contempt if not hatred for women.
In the novel, Dix is even more contemptuous of women, and not only because he rapes and murders them. He has a maid that he treats as sub-human (usually just refers to her as the harridan). He sees Laurel as a possession. He doesn’t like to even let her out of his sight. Somehow he senses that Sylvia can see through him and that makes him hate her. It turns out that he was murdering women even when he was stationed in the UK during the war.
Even though the film is considered to be a film noir classic, I considered the novel to be much richer. Dix in the film is just an irrationally angry man. In the novel, you learn so much more about him.
First of all, unlike the novel, he’s not a successful screenwriter. In fact, he’s mooching off a rich uncle that barely gives him a pittance to live on. He can fool people in LA because he is living in the apartment and wearing the clothes of a very wealthy friend that apparently is out of the country (the book implies but does not say that Dix has murdered him as well). He sees all of the truly rich and successful people and he resents them.
Although he’s had this resentment for many years, his time in the war really sharpened it (the novel was written in 1947). During the war, he was a hero. He was a fighter pilot that led other pilots. His friend, Brub, looks up to him as a result of that shared time. It’s clear that his time in the military, where he was an important person in an officer’s uniform (and in a service where there were no women to scorn), was the highlight of his life. Coming back to the US, where once again he’s nothing but a poor relation with no prospects under the thumb of a rich miser, it’s a hard adjustment that Dix is unwilling to make.
Reading this novel reminded me of the film The Best Years of Our Lives. Made in 1946, right after the end of WWII, it followed the stories of three men as they try to adjust to civilian life. One of the stories involved a war hero that had to understand that, even after all of his acts of leadership and heroics of the war, that all that civilian life was willing to give him was a job as a shop clerk or a soda jerk. Understandably, this was a harsh adjustment for him to make. Dix is in a similar boat, with the difference being that Dix is a homicidal psychopath. This adjustment of having to switch from a position of leadership responsibilities where your decisions and actions could literally mean the difference between life and death to the prosaic life of peacetime civilian life must have been one that many post WWII men could relate to.
The women in the novel were much stronger (not coincidentally, the novel was written by a woman, Dorothy B Hughes). In the film, both women were unremarkable. In the novel, Sylvia and Laurel are strong characters. Even though they don’t like each from the first, they tag up together to bring Dix down.
Although the film was fine, I’m not sure if I’d place it in the list of all time great noir films. The novel, on the other hand, is one of the strongest noir novels that I’ve read in some time.
dorkenstein 