Film Chronicle

Abstract

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray (streaming on Amazon) Sunset Blvd, directed by Billy Wilder (streaming on Amazon) White Hunter, Black Heart, directed by Clint Eastwood (streaming on Amazon and YouTube) Barton Fink, directed by Joel Coen (streaming on Apple TV and Amazon) Trumbo, directed by Peter Askin (streaming on Kanopy) Dreams on Spec, directed by Daniel Snyder (streaming on Amazon) Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze (streaming on Apple TV and Amazon) Mank, directed by David Fincher (streaming on Netflix). In the Hollywood of old a well-defined hierarchy of power and prestige extended from studio moguls at the top down through unit managers and producers to directors and established stars, then to ordinary actors, and below them, finally, to screenwriters, the necessary but otherwise unimportant wordsmiths who crafted lines for stars to speak and studio moguls to sneer at. From the 1930s through the 1940s a lot of wordsmiths, among them highly regarded reporters, playwrights, and novelists like Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Herman Mankiewicz, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and Scott Fitzgerald, headed west to make easy money by writing scripts, only to find that film-industry money came with a price, namely the incomprehension, disdain, or outright hostility of picture people. In the last sad year of his life Fitzgerald distilled his unhappy scenario-writing experiences into a dozen or so stories about an old alcoholic hack, Pat Hobby, still trying to scratch out a living in Hollywood. One of the stories, “Mightier Than the Sword,” sees Pat and another scrivener yelled at by a big-shot producer: Goddam writers! . . . What do we pay you for? Millions—and you write a lot of tripe I can’t photograph and get sore if we don’t read your lousy stuff! How can a man make pictures when they give me two bastards like you and Hudson. How? How do you think—you old whiskey bum? The producer promptly throws them out of his office and off the lot. So much for the might of the pen as compared with that of the sword. Interestingly, old Hollywood liked to depict fictional screenwriters in movies, low-positioned as they might be in the studio pecking order. After all, comedy or melodrama might be wrung out of their eccentricities [End Page 459] or disillusionments. Unquestionably, melodrama is wrung out of the experiences of the fictional screenwriter Duke Steele in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, from 1950. Humphrey Bogart plays Steele in what is generally regarded as one of the finest performances of his career; Gloria Grahame is no less impressive as Laurel Gray, the young actress-wannabe who falls hard for him. There are really three storylines here. First and least interesting, a murder mystery: did Steele seduce and then strangle a naïve hat-check girl? Certain clues point in his direction, but it is scarcely giving anything away to reveal that he is innocent, and finally proven innocent by a deus-ex-machina confession from someone else. Second comes the story of Steele’s uncontrollable anger. His outbursts may have to do with his drinking or being suspected by the police, but fundamentally they derive from built-up resentment at the whole Hollywood scene. Even when not enraged, Steele can be controlling, at times boorish, so that one sometimes wonders how Laurel can be drawn to him. Eventually she becomes terrified by him, his sudden fury at an innocent beach party, his lashings-out at another driver on the highway (could this be the first instance of road rage ever screened?). The third and by far most compelling story focuses on Steele as screenwriter. We watch him lost in concentrated thought, scribbling away, piling up pages of dialogue for Laurel to type. Many movies involving screenwriters feature getting-it-down-on-paper processes like this, often via montage sequences. In a Lonely Place, unusually, shows the mental work which precedes getting it down on paper. A genuinely startling moment from early in the film presents Duke imagining how the murder of the hat-check girl might have taken place, detail by lurid detail (note the melodramatic light Ray casts on...