Film Forum

(1950, Nicholas Ray) Humphrey Bogart is a vicious killer? Okay, he’s a hard-drinking, log-sized-chip-on-his shoulder screenwriter with a sardonic cynicism so deep he enlists a hatcheck girl as overnight novel summarizer so he doesn’t actually have to read the trashy book he’s agreed to adapt, stopping to take a poke at an asking-for-it producer’s son-in-law along the way. Even when she winds up dead, and he’s being grilled by old army buddy Frank Lovejoy, it turns into an occasion for girl-across-the-courtyard (an exact reproduction of Ray’s first Hollywood pad) Gloria Grahame to give Bogie an alibi – and to get to know better an “interesting” face. But as their love affair progresses, Bogie breaks his fussbudget longtime agent’s glasses, creeps out Lovejoy and his wife Jeff Donnell with his too-real “imaginative” reenactment of the murder, and is barely prevented from braining a motorist he’d already sideswiped and beaten senseless. An agonizingly inevitable – but still surprising – resolution looms. Ray boasted “I took the gun out of Bogie’s hands” in altering his screen image; while his own marriage with Grahame ended during the filming – they kept it a secret, fearing Ray would be kicked off the production. DCP. Approx. 93 min.