Say hello to melodrama as Humphry Bogart plays an angry, struggling screenwriter who is pinned for the murder of a hatcheck girl. The only person who can give him an alibi is his damaged neighbor Gloria Grahame… but is he truly innocent? A heart-wrenching and suspenseful look at hope in the face of angst, this is Bogart and Grahame at their best. (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1950, U.S, 93 min.)
“In a Lonely Place truly embodies a unique but nonetheless existential purpose that supreme happiness is inextricably bound to the absurd.” – Slant Magazine
David Weir: Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he taught literature, linguistics, and cinema. He has published books on Jean Vigo, James Joyce, William Blake, orientalism, and anarchism, as well as three books on decadence. Those books have had a major role in the development of decadence as an academic field of study, beginning with Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995), Decadent Culture in the United States (2009), and, most recently, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (2018). His latest is a book on Ernst Lubitch’s Trouble in Paradise for BFI’s Film Classics series.
Imogen Sara Smith: Imogen Sara Smith is the author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. Her writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Cineaste, Reverse Shot, and other publications. She is also the Director of Archiving and Preservation for Dance/USA,
