AVARICE AND WRATH make up the subject of two of Humphrey Bogart’s finest films (showing Dec. 4–6 at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and In a Lonely Place (1950)—essays on the way of all flesh.
What can one conclude about a man who shot a movie in a replica of his own house—and called that movie In a Lonely Place? The title comes from J.M. Synge, but the sentiment is all Nicholas Ray, cinema’s reigning Mr. Vicissitude, whose furious work mirrored the bipolar disorder that tormented the director. (One incident from a manic-depressive career: Ray won the Grand Gross of Isabella the Catholic from the Spanish government for making the cruciflick King of Kings, which he followed up, not many years later, by making a satirical porn film titled Wet Dreams.)
Bogart showed extraordinary range as screenwriter Dixon Steele, 86’d from the movie studios for his drinking and his terrible temper. Suffering from “rage that only requires a victim” (Ray’s own words), Steele’s last human hope is his neighbor, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), an ex–kept woman trying to retrieve her self-respect. When Steele is accused of a murder, their fragile affair is strained to the breaking point.
During the making of In a Lonely Place, Ray was separating from Grahame, his wife at the time. There’s a theory that the atmosphere of life going haywire is due to the real-life split-up. Ray’s origin in the theater is seen in the inexpensive but compact setting, which was based on the design of his own apartment when he first arrived from New York in lonely California.
The sets are bracketed with a bare minimum of exteriors. Ray’s trick in this transformation was to make violence violent—in other words, to make Steele’s rages not formally introduced with lighting, mood, music and foreshadowing. Instead, they detonate out of nowhere and with very little warning, as sudden, irreparable shocks.
“A hero has to sometimes be shown just as confused or screwed up as you,” Ray wrote in notes for a script (quoted in Bernard Eisenschitz’s massive Nicholas Ray: An American Journey). This statement sums up exactly Ray’s best films from about 1949 to 1960, a series of bold vivid works about repression, in which the characters’ bids for freedom are accompanied by a fury that’s simultaneously justified and unjustifiable.
Whether the antiheroes are artists (In a Lonely Place), teachers (Bigger Than Life, 1956), the police (On Dangerous Ground, 1952) or the young (Rebel Without a Cause, 1955), Ray’s films of that period were all set in the same locale: a closed-in and buttoned-down America—hell with the lid on.
Compared to In a Lonely Place, the co-billed Bogart hit The Treasure of the Sierra Madre exhibits more moral simplicity—it’s been called a fable. Bogart plays a bum called Dobbs stuck in the Mexican port town without a job, panhandling the same American (played by director/writer John Huston) over and over again.
After being ripped off by a contractor, Dobbs meets a fast-talking prospector, Howard (Walter Huston), who has discovered Marx’s Labor Theory of Value on his own. Dobbs, the prospector, and a comrade called Curtin (Tim Holt) head into the Mexican mountains to find a gold claim; up there, they learn about the peculiar poison of that metal.
The villain is one Alfonso Bedoya, as a Gold Hat, a sly rapacious bandit. Bedoya haunted decades’ worth of Latin American studies theses. Alfonso Arau, who did a pretty good imitation of Bedoya’s kind of man in The Wild Bunch (what gringo director, beside Sam Peckinpah, liked Mexico as much as Huston did?), claims that Bedoya came from a village where there were mineral deposits in the water, and that when he got his teeth cleaned, he never worked in Hollywood again.
But to call Gold Hat the villain is to misread the movie; bent by bad luck, Dobbs snaps in a lonely place on the side of a hill. Bogart, in the 1930s often a doomed mug, in the 1940s the smoothest of action men, acted his way through his last decade of life playing some of the most existentialist characters in the movies—homely, very male; moreover, human, all too human.
‘In a Lonely Place’ and ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’
Saturday–Monday
Stanford Theatre, Palo Alto
