This year’s edition of “Noir City: Chicago”—the Music Box Theatre’s annual weeklong festival of classic and obscure film noir titles—started with a bang this past Friday night with a 35-millimeter revival of In a Lonely Place (1950), one of director Nicholas Ray’s greatest achievements. (If you missed the show, the film is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.) Eddie Muller of Turner Classic Movies introduced the screening, shining light on how the film was a personal project not only for Ray, but for star Humphrey Bogart. According to Muller, the actor purchased the rights to Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel because he saw a lot of himself in its antihero, a temperamental, cynical screenwriter with a history of violent behavior. The host went on to assert that, in its critique of Dixon Steele’s tough-guy persona, In a Lonely Place constitutes one of the most significant analyses of male psychopathology in cinema. One might add that several of Ray’s films merit this distinction, as On Dangerous Ground (1951), The Lusty Men (1952), and Bigger Than Life (1956) all look at neurotic male protagonists to consider problematic male behavior in general.
I Live in Fear A 1955 feature by Akira Kurosawa and one of his most underrated, starring Toshiro Mifune as an aging patriarch who, frightened by the prospect of a nuclear war, decides to sell his family business and move to a farm in Brazil. Along with Kurosawa’s sublime Rhapsody in August, which also deals with the atomic bomb, this was probably the most poorly received work of his entire career, but I persist in finding it among the most memorable: eerie, troubling, and haunting. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
