Spousal abuse is so demonized these days that not a single redeeming characteristic is allowed to remain in our violent men of drama. Gone are the magnetic brutes like Stanley Kowalski, gone any concept of an abusive artis like Dix Steele in IN A LONELY PLACE. It's not surprising then that we're unprepared for how hard it is to adapt to these characters and their sudden brutal displays.
But Bogart is Bogart, and since he's playing a famous Hollywood screenwriter, his tantrums and white hot rage black-outs go unchecked, save for police intervention which his studio then works to keep out of the papers. This is the kind of guy you should just get away from stat, but can't, since he's famous and witty and charming in a bleak sort of way. Thus a brute is allowed to stay brutish: "I've had hundreds of fights," he says to Gloria Grahame's neighbor love, as if that's some sort of mark of the martyr, instead of the bully. Most men go through their whole adult life without getting into a fight, especially these days, but certain kinds of men make up the difference, they attract one another like magnets, yet they never start it, they just feel obliged to continue it.
While Bogart looms like an electric golem, gone to gray suits, Grahame flexes her beautiful face into a Hollywood glamor death mask as she tosses and turns in bed, worrying that she's sleeping with a potential murderer, a raging egotist who could snap at any moment, over the slightest thing she does wrong; this keeps her awake and she starts taking pills to sleep. He might not like that, so she worries more: "This one's not going to let you go that easy," snaps her masseuse, who it is implied has given her more than one happy ending over their tenure together. Grahame's sad eyes show this the last non-loser she's likely to run into before her happiness clock expires, but he's worse than a loser.
But Bogart doesn't pull back on being Bogart, even as he lets himself get creepy, and his dark self-effacing wit seems strained; the Bogie we know is too sharp not to know when those around him are turned off, but Dix has no clue. Bogart is brave enough to show the angles by which his actorly charisma is exposed as vain antipathy. Dix's "A simple yes or no will do very well" proposal of marriage comes off like a threat. He sees marriage as providing any lady her luckiest break (or fracture) like signing a deal with a confused white tiger, or an arm-rending chimp. His abusive Stockholm-Syndrome-afflicted agent exclaims in the least coded of gay double entendres: "He's Dix Steel, and if you want him you've got to take it all" This kind of lackey is dangerous for a guy this fucked: "People like him can afford to be temperamental" is just the agent's way of saying "you should see how tender he is when it's just us!"
PS - any respecting woman would have left Dix the moment he snapped on the beach, just as Krasner should have left Pollock when he made his first embarrassing scene at the dinner table. But such are those few unlucky moths blind enough that they can only see the most brilliant light, the light of charismatic madness, that they wind up stuck on the bulb of an ego that has swollen mercilessly with the pumping eternal handshake current of exploding pockets and the bloody war-like business of making pictures.
I'll admit the first few times watching IN A LONELY PLACE I got a headache, partially from the unpleasant frisson of seeing Bogart so messed up, but mainly from all those ringing phones! The road to Hollywood heaven must be paved with nonstop telephone calls. I guess in L.A. they are like music. The best phone calls I ever had were from a girl in L.A. They went on for hours, for days! It's the very breathing of the biz, and you can tell Dix's never stops ringing. Ding Dong, indeed, the dead witches are in the making.
Electric Bogartstein, bra, the only way to see this film is on a triple bill with THE RETURN OF DR. X and BIGGER THAN LIFE, and to realize Bogart and Nicholas Ray both were making horror movies the whole time, even when they were making mysteries or romantic dramas.
Ray loved his insane abusive geniuses, and the link between Dixon and James Mason's tyrannical father is clear: Hollywood is (or was) the place where white rage fights, shooting, drugs and casual sex are wantonly indulged in, thought about, and depicted for the enjoyment of the world. Certainly Ray indulged in these things, but his love makes him different than the poseurs of violence and despair. His forgiveness of his fucked up protags is his way, perhaps, of trying to forgive his own trespasses. Like Sal Mineo's tortured puppy killer in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, or Mason's most unsexy madness in BIGGER THAN LIFE, Bogart's illness has a groovy poetry. Both BIGGER and IN A LONELY PLACE show a man who thinks you are watching a different movie, and that you are swooning at his brilliance and fearless spending, and if you remind him what movie he's really in, you better do it from outside swinging distance or you'll get a black eye at best.
Perhaps only natural bullies can make it in Hollywood's chain of intimidation. (think of the "This is the girl" harassment from the mob in MULHOLLAND DR.). Or maybe all these are just excuses, and I've got Stockholm syndrome too. Of course it would be damn nerve-wracking living with someone so violent, but we love him because Bogart was always a little menacing anyway, that's what gave his heroes their flavor, the sudden eruptions, the "that means one of you is gonna get a beating for nothing!" climax of TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, or that cruel mirth in his eyes when he knocks out Joel Cairo in MALTESE FALCON. His sadistic relish enables him to do his job more efficiently.
Bogart seen after IN A LONELY PLACE is a monster. He's a Universal horror monster figure who escaped to Warner's to be a gangster and then fought his way up to stardom and romantic protagonists. He and his first wife were known as "The Battling Bogarts", this was never a man to fuck with. So we worshipped him, and still do, Stockholm-style, but also as the pinnacle of righteous intensity. But Ray is able to locate the monster underneath all that 'good' anger and violence. Once the war is over and there's no one left to legally kill, the monster in the Bogart persona starts to crack through the detective/war hero/romantic lead mask, right along the crow's feet, and the Frankenstein monster starts trying to reach out to crush someone.
The fourth time through PLACE, gone was my headache over the phones, and to the floor was my jaw as the sheer intense brilliance of Bogart's slow burns and sudden lashings. When something doesn't go his way, the anger begins, and then every attempt to quiet him is regarded through progressively more paranoid eyes. This man should clearly be medicated, but he's allowed to roam free. In the end the murder mystery is solved and yet Dix has almost started a whole new one. Dix's ego is such that he shouldn't be allowed to be in a movie. Thank God Nicholas Ray gave him one anyway. Ray never gives up on any character, even when they're so foul we recoil in shock that we're seeing them at all, let alone played by leading men, as protagonists..His love for dangerous maniacs is contagious; their lives are his downfall, and our redemption.
"Bogart is fascinating because he's a monster. He's a Universal horror monster figure who escaped to Warner's to be a gangster and then fought his way up to stardom and protagonists."
ReplyDeleteHoly shit, man, that's beautiful.