femme fatale

spoilers ahead.

I was wowed by Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place. The film, it seemed to me, was ahead of its time in its powerful portrayal of domestic abuse. On the surface, the film explores whether the hero, Dix (Humphrey Bogart), murdered an innocent woman. His girlfriend, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), begins their relationship in romantic euphoria.

But, as in Suspicion, Laurel begins to suspect he might have done it.

The did-he, didn’t-he soon becomes a “Don’t worry which, Lady. Run.” After all, Dix likes to act out murder scenarios and then mimics the same movements when smoking with Laurel. He won’t allow her to receive a phone call or prescription he doesn’t monitor. He keeps her economically dependent on him. He justifies beating people up and actually considers bashing heads in with rocks.

And just in case she has any doubts about how this is all going to end for her, his former girlfriend reported Dix for breaking her bones.

The story is cast from Laurel’s (Gloria Grahame’s) point of view, and haunts the viewer because Dix can be charming, can be loving, can be apologetic. He does come back with “armloads of gifts” after his scary behavior, not just for her, but for victims of his violence. He is sweet to an alcoholic ex-actor, shows more compassion for him than anyone else. The film sympathizes rather than judges Laurel for staying, reminding audiences that an abuser can be contrite and thus leave the woman who loves him off-balance, uncertain whether to trust he’s changed. And though Laurel’s friend cautions her against him, his friends urge her to stay, to understand, to give him a chance. Meanwhile, we get glimpses of his mind: he can only see unquestioning faith in him–which would be difficult, given his actions–as acceptable. After a near-homicide, he coins a line for a screenplay describing his love for Laurel: “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”

Personally, I found this line chilling. Yet the director, Nicholas Ray–who was experiencing stresses in his marriage to Grahame at the time–gives a romantic packaging to not just that line, but to the final scenes of the film. He seems to imply–even after Dix strangles Laurel and nearly kills her–that this all would have turned out well had there not been that whole did-he-murder-the-woman doubts. And more disturbing yet, both current and contemporary reviewers frequently characterize this toxic relationship movie as a “tragic love story,” and certainly many scenes in the movie would seem to back up that assumption.

I turned to the source material to understand the confusion in tone, and was in for a shocker. Dorothy Hughes wrote In a Lonely Place as a kind of The Killer Inside Me of its time; we know from day 1 that Dix hates women, that he kills them regularly, that he thinks he’s justified because after he came back from the war, women saw through his hustling ways; they didn’t fall all over him, as they had when he was in uniform. His former Air Force friend is now a cop and has married a woman, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell), whom Dix distrusts and (we soon learn) underestimates.

She quickly sees through Dix’s veneer of humanity.

Dix hates her for it in the novel, and plots her death. Think of Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives, if on encountering his wife’s disappointment in him, he decided to go on a murderous vendetta against anyone who shared her gender.

The best scenes in Ray’s film are moments that capture the stark feminism in the book, in which only the women see Dix for who he is, and only they can succeed in stopping him. In a sharply rendered scene in the film, Laurel and Sylvia are honest with one another: Laurel in her doubts about Dix’s character, Sylvia, in confirming (reluctantly) that Laurel should have them.

In the book, Dix’s demeaning treatment of women–especially Laurel–is accompanied by a conviction that Laurel is taunting him, trying to make him jealous, when she’s simply putting the brakes on a relationship that he’s taken too seriously, too quickly. As writer Megan Abbott so brilliantly put it: “After reading In a Lonely Place, you find yourself looking, with a newly gimlet eye, at every purported femme fatale, every claim of female malignancy and the burning need of noir heroes to snuff that malignancy out.”

In Dix’s eyes in the book and film, Laurel is a femme fatale. She gave her love, then she took it away–all because she didn’t trust him enough. But in our eyes, she’s just fallen for the wrong guy; calling a man you love a “madman” doesn’t usually suggest a relationship is headed for sunshine and rainbows. Whether Dix killed a woman or not, Laurel isn’t wrong to ask, “There is something strange about Dix, isn’t there?” after he bloodies a fellow driver to a pulp or “What can I say to him–I love you but I’m afraid of you?” when he looks at her in the scary fashion Bogart had mastered since The Petrified Forest.

At some point you gotta ask, Is any guy you’re relieved and surprised didn’t kill someone worth sticking around for?

I admire both the book and film because they make me look back at so many of the noir novels and movies I’ve admired, and ask that question Abbott challenges me to consider: Was this woman a femme fatale? Or was she just an independent woman who didn’t say yes?

This is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Femme/Homme Fatales of Film Noir blogathon. Check out so many great entries here.