aspiring to, such as having character and emotion be the driving force, rather than the plot. ... When I first saw In a Lonely Place as a teenager, it frightened me and yet attracted me with an almost hypnotic power. Later, I came to understand why. Occasionally, very rarely, a movie feels so heartfelt, so emotional, so revealing that it seems as though both the actor and the director are standing naked before the audience. When that kind of marriage happens between actor and director, it's breathtaking." In 2009, film critic Roger Ebert added In a Lonely Place to his "great movies" list. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 96% of critics gave the film positive reviews, with an average rating of 8.7/10, based on 49 reviews. The website's critics consensus reads: "Led by extraordinary performances from Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, In a Lonely Place is a gripping noir of uncommon depth and maturity." In popular culture The 1986 song "In a Lonely Place" by the Smithereens, from the album Especially For You, was inspired by the film. Its chorus, "I was born the day I met you, lived a while when you loved me, died a little when we broke apart," is taken directly from the movie's dialogue. Comparisons to novel In a Lonely Place was based on the 1947 novel of the same name by Dorothy B. Hughes. Some controversy exists between admirers of the film and admirers of the novel (who view the film as a watered down adaptation), as Edmund H. North's script takes some elements of the novel but is ultimately a different story. Hughes was not bothered by the changes made by North and praised Grahame's performance as Gray. The strongest difference between the two works lies in the protagonist; the film's Dixon Steele is a screenwriter with an unconventional life and a decent person with fatally poor impulse control, prone to wild overreaction when enraged. The novel's Steele is a limited third-person view from Steele's perspective, reminiscent of the first-person in noir, à la The Killer Inside Me. Steele is a charlatan who pretends to be a novelist while sponging money from his overbearing uncle. While still receiving what he perceives as a small monthly allowance from his uncle, Steele murders a wealthy young man and assumes his identity, in a manner similar to Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. (Hughes' character pre-dates