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Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood is a series revisiting those classics of the early 1950s which turned a withering gaze on the American film industry. Whether due to the blacklist, the decline of Hollywood's Golden Age, or America's more generalized postwar anxiety, Hollywood's screenwriters and directors were suddenly driven to lift the curtain from the dream factory and take a closer look at what went on behind the silver screen. Be warned: these reviews will contain spoilers.]
And here we reach a turning point in the series. No longer will our films concoct excuses for Hollywood's abuse, no longer will the cynicism be paired with an aw-shucks wonder at the glitz of it all. Yet at the same time, Nicholas Ray's 1950 film
In a Lonely Place exists on the periphery of Hollywood, just as Hollywood itself exists on the periphery of its story. After nearly decking a fellow driver, Humphrey Bogart's Dixon Steele arrives at a nightclub and is confronted by junior autograph hounds. "Know who I am?" he asks, bemused, as the kid shakes his head. Steele is a screenwriter who hasn't had a hit in years, and if being in Hollywood rubs off a little glamor on him (the kid still wants him to sign the book) it also casts a shadow on his existence. Steele's director pal, when confronted with the fact of his hackery, merely shrugs and tells the so-noble-he's-broke screenwriter that he doesn't try to fight it.
In a Lonely Place may not be a film "about" Hollywood, but that only makes it a more stinging film
about Hollywood.
