Life on the set was obviously fraught with emotional hazards. Ray had modeled the movie’s apartment complex on an apartment he once occupied at Villa Primavera in West Hollywood. When he moved out on Grahame, I learn from critic J. Hoberman, Ray actually moved onto the set and started sleeping there. The relationship between Dixon and Laurel mirrored aspects of Bogart’s own with the younger, strong-willed, nurturing Lauren Bacall. Yet perhaps they all sensed that they were doing the best work of their careers—a film could be based on those three people and that experience.
In a Lonely Place is a superb example of the mature Hollywood studio system at the top of its form. Photographed with masterful economy by Burnett Guffey (Knock on Any Door, Bonnie and Clyde), it understands space and uses the apartments across the courtyard to visualize the emotional relationship between Dixon and Laurel. Visible to each other, dependent on each other, they never officially move in together but remain enclosed and, no matter what they say, apart. Notice the way Guffey focuses light on Bogart’s eyes during a frightening speech when he imagines how Mildred was murdered.
“You know, Miss Gray,” he says, “you’re one up on me. You can see into my apartment but I can’t see into yours.”
“I promise you, I won’t take advantage of it.”
“I would, if it were the other way around.”
Bogart is so good at playing vulnerable men. It’s strange he has an enduring image as a tough guy. It would be more accurate to say he was tempered by experience. A decade before this film, in Casablanca, he was already the man drinking alone late at night, afraid of hearing an old song.
About Grahame’s characters there was often a doomed quality. She and Lee Marvin had an iconic scene in The Big Heat (1953) when he threw a pot of boiling coffee in her face. In It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), she plays the grown-up Violet, who in the nightmare sequence, becomes a prostitute. She won an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), playing an actress who hates the producer who betrayed her. And she gained the unfortunate nickname “the Can’t Say No Girl” after performing that song in Oklahoma! (1955).
If there is one key element of film noir, it is the flawed hero. That, usually joined with a distinctive visual style and tone, defines the genre. The hero is sympathetic but weak, often haunted by mistakes in the past or fatally tempted by greed or lust. He is likely to discover himself capable of evil he had never dreamed of, and is consumed by guilt and fear.
Bogart embodies this noir quality flawlessly in In a Lonely Place. He plays a good man with a hot temper who can fly into a rage when he drinks. This gives Dixon a Jekyll and Hyde quality that Laurel awakens to, leading to later scenes of terror. The monster inhabiting him is an acting-out of self-loathing, which infects his success and dooms his happiness. He foresees his fate when he quotes to her a line just written in his new screenplay: “I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me.”
L.A. Confidential
R, 138 m., 1997
Kevin Spacey (Jack Vincennes), Russell Crowe (Wendell “Bud” White), Guy Pearce (Edmund J. Exley), Danny DeVito (Sid Hudgens), David Strathairn (Pierce Morehouse Patchett), James Cromwell (Captain Dudley Smith), Kim Basinger (Lynn Bracken). Directed by Curtis Hanson and produced by Hanson and Arnon Milchan. Screenplay by Hanson and Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by James Ellroy.
The opening scenes of L.A. Confidential are devoted to establishing the three central characters, all cops. We may be excused for expecting that they will be antagonists; indeed, they think so themselves. But the film has other plans, and much of its fascination comes from the way it puts the three cops on the same side and never really declares anyone the antagonist until near the end. Potential villains are all over the screen, but they remain potential right up to the closing scenes. What the three cops are fighting, most of the time, is a pervasive corruption that saturates the worlds in which they move.
The movie also documents a specific time when the world of police work edged into show business. These days, when we can watch video recordings of cops actually busting suspects, when celebrity trials are shown on live TV, when gossip is the prime ingredient of many news outlets, it is hard to imagine a time when crime and vice lived hidden in the shadows. But they did, and the tipping point when that era ended must have been in the early 1950s, with the rise of instant celebrities and scandalous tabloid magazines such as Confidential, the partnership formed between Hollywood and law enforcement agencies, and the media’s reticence about seamy subject matter ended. L.A. Confidential (1997) shows the current era of sensationalism being born.
The first voice heard from the screen comes from the confiding, insinuating publisher of Hush-Hush magazine, Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito). He sets the tone: “Insiders” know the score and are getting away with murder. His most valued contact is Detective Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), the technical adviser on Badge of Honor, a Dragnet-style TV show. Jack also stars in some of Hudgens’s scoops. They set up celebrities or politicians in compromising situations, Vincennes breaks in to bust them, and Hush-Hush gets the story.
Vincennes will be one of the film’s protagonists. The other two cops are Officer Bud White (Russell Crowe), who believes in bending the law to enforce it, and Detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a straight-arrow type whose self-righteous morality gets on the department’s nerves. These three cops, so different from one another, all possess some essential quality of honor that draws them together in untangling the film’s web of corruption.
For much of its running time, L.A. Confidential seems episodic—one sensational event after another, with no apparent connection. Mickey Cohen, the head of organized crime in L.A., has just been sent to prison, and now hit squads are rubbing out his top lieutenants. A millionaire named Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn) has sidelines in slick porn and high-priced call girls, and specializes in prostitutes who have had plastic surgery to make them resemble movie stars. A bunch of drunken cops beat up Mexican suspects and get their photos on the front page. Exley and Vincennes, for quite different reasons, testify against their fellow officers, breaking the department’s code of silence. There’s a massacre at the downtown Nite Owl Cafe, and a cop is one of the victims. Calling sternly for justice to be done in all of these cases is ramrod-stiff Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), who presides at morning roll call.
The plot, based on the novel by James Ellroy, can only be described as labyrinthine. For long periods, we’re not even sure that it is a plot, and one of the film’s pleasures is the way director Curtis Hanson and writer Brian Helgeland put all the pieces into place before we fully realize they’re pieces. How could these people and events possibly be related? We don’t much mind, so long as the pieces themselves are so intriguing.