HERE COMES TROUBLE
“Gloria was like a teenager playing going out. She had taken the bright white bulb out of the lamp by the bed and replaced it with a soft red one. The drapes had been pulled closed. She was sitting cross legged on the bed with a drink in her hand.”
Nick and Gloria Grahame met on the set of A Woman’s Secret, a dud of a film that could be classified as the first of what I call Nick’s paycheck films (Born to be Bad, Hot Blood, The True Story of Jesse James are others). No director on the RKO lot would touch the Herman Mankewicz script written as a star vehicle for Margaret O’Hara. But when Dore Schary, then the head of production, asked Nick, Nick couldn’t say no. After all, Schary had said yes to Nick directing They Live by Night. Nick called A Woman’s Secret the most expensive film he ever made because it’s where he met Grahame. At the time of filming she was still married to her first husband, a former child star who had succumbed to drinking, gambling and beating his beautiful wife. One morning Gloria Grahame came on set with a black eye. Nick wrapped his arms around her and told her not to worry. According to Grahame’s sister, Joy, Nick was the fatherly figure Gloria was looking for. An affair quickly ensued and Gloria became pregnant with Nick’s child. She got a quickie divorce and on June 1, 1948 Nick and Gloria were married in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Tim is Nick’s son with his second wife, the actress Gloria Grahame. If you’re a film buff you may recognize her as Ginny Tremaine in Crossfire, Violet Bick in It’s a Wonderful Life, or as Rosemary Bartlow in The Bad and the Beautiful. If you aren’t a film buff but are big on Hollywood scandals of the 1950s you’ve probably heard about Gloria Grahame marrying Nick’s first son, Tony, eight years after she divorced Nick. And if you haven’t heard, I am here to tell you.
Excerpt from Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray © All Rights Reserved
In a Lonely Place was the first Nicholas Ray film I saw. That is, if you count watching the opening credits a complete viewing. Seeing the words “Directed by Nicholas Ray” on the television screen was all I was looking for—his name like a wave hello. Over the years the mere mention of In a Lonely Place made me think about Nick, Tony, and Gloria. Gloria wasn’t anything real. That’s what I told the writer David Thomson when he asked me if I’d known her. I said, “Someone as beautiful as she was who was married to my father and my brother? There’s just something unreal.”
Excerpt from Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray © All Rights Reserved
“I don’t know how this film was developed but I do know that somehow Nicholas Ray and Humphrey Bogart found themselves consumed by it. Ray found himself in the character. I know it because I can feel it.”
—Curtis Hanson for “Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray © All Rights Reserved
IN A LONELY PLACE
It was Nick’s mastery at building the emotional life of the story with his use of the camera that got him the attention of Humphrey Bogart. He hired Nick to direct Knock on Any Door, the first of three features for Bogart’s Santana Productions, named after the 55-foot mahogany boat he bought for $50,000 from the actor, Dick Powell.
The biographer, Bernard Eisenschitz, writes in Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, how “what Bogart had in mind can be seen a little more clearly in his choice of director: a desire to get as far away as possible from the studio formulas which most Warner stars found terribly stale and constricting. His decision to use a director noted for his work with young actors, on a film where the juveniles were quite likely to steal his thunder, was not without courage.”
At first, Nick’s style of directing caught Bogart off guard. Nick was part of the new wave of directors who came out of the New York City theater. They brought with them a style of acting that used improvisation to get to the underlying truth of a scene, introduced terms like sense memory, and asked their actors questions like, What’s your motivation?
Knock on Any Door was based on Willard Motley’s bestselling novel of the same name, about a young man from the wrong side of the tracks who has been accused of murder and the lawyer who tries to save him from his criminal lifestyle.
Knock on Any Door did so well at the box office Bogart hired Nick to direct In a Lonely Place, the third film for Bogart’s Santana Productions. In the film, Humphrey Bogart plays Dix Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter who’s having a difficult time conforming to Hollywood’s tastes. He doesn’t want to make “popcorn” movies. His confrontational attitude puts people on edge. When the coat check girl from the local Hollywood hangout goes missing, Bogart becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance and murder.
Coming to Dix Steele’s defense is his neighbor, Laurel Grey (Gloria Grahame), who vouches for his whereabouts at the time of the murder. A love affair blooms amid the growing suspicions against him.
Bogart took a big risk playing such a dark character. Audiences weren’t used to seeing him like this. Curtis Hanson, the director whose film, L.A. Confidential, won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay Adaptation, made the point how in In a Lonely Place “one feels that they are seeing the real Bogart. And you haven’t seen him like this before. And you don’t know if this is his true character or not, but you have a feeling it is. It was a very brave role for a movie star like him to take on. Especially looking at how things are done today. Where everybody is so career motivated.”
At the time In a Lonely Place was released Motion Picture Daily wrote, “Bogart is perverse and unmanageable and lacks sympathy unless audiences determine to line up in his corner in an understanding of his never clarified mental road blocks. Unquestionably, however, he sinks his teeth into the part and does very well with it as unsavory as the characterization is. By underplaying, Miss Grahame strikes conviction. Others in the small cast do well under Nicholas Ray’s direction which is tight and competent.”
Like most of Nick’s best films, In a Lonely Place was a critical rather than a financial success. He followed it up with the box office hit, Flying Leathernecks starring John Wayne.
In comparing In a Lonely Place to the contemporary blockbuster, Curtis Hanson said, “Everything in them [the blockbuster] serves the plot, and that means it tends to serve the leading man who is moving along the line of the plot. What is different about this movie and really striking about it is that it is really about character and emotion. It’s not about who killed the girl, not really. It’s about how the situation creates the emotion that acts on Bogart’s character.”
Between The Flying Leathernecks and In a Lonely Place it is the latter that stands the test of time. In 2007, the Librarian of Congress announced its list of National Film Registry Selections of which In a Lonely Place is among the 25.
“When Gloria was on screen I saw my half-brother, Tim’s face in hers.”
Sources:All Curtis Hanson quotes are from the interview conducted by myself and Stacey AsipMotion Picture Daily review courtesy The Margaret Herrick LibraryBernard Eisenschitz quote from "Nicholas Ray: An American Journey," Faber and Faber, 1990
Find out more about the likeness between Nick and Dix Steele’s character AND about Nick’s marriage to Gloria Grahame and her affair and marriage to Nick’s son, Tony.
