kudos. Bosley Crowther lauded the film, especially Bogart's performance and the screenplay, writing, Everybody should be happy this morning. Humphrey Bogart is in top form in his latest independently made production, In a Lonely Place, and the picture itself is a superior cut of melodrama. Playing a violent, quick-tempered Hollywood movie writer suspected of murder, Mr. Bogart looms large on the screen of the Paramount Theatre and he moves flawlessly through a script which is almost as flinty as the actor himself. Andrew Solt, who fashioned the screenplay from a story by Dorothy B. Hughes and an adaptation by Edmund H. North, has had the good sense to resolve the story logically. Thus Dixon Steele remains as much of an enigma, an explosive, contradictory force at loose ends when the film ends as when it starts. Not unlike Ray's debut They Live by Night (1948), it was advertised as a straight thriller although the film does not fit easily into one genre, as the marketing shows. Ray's films had a brief revival in the 1970s and Bogart's anti-hero stance gained a following in the 1960s, and the French Cahiers du cinéma critics during the 1950s praised Ray's unique film making. Time magazine, which gave the film a negative review upon its initial release, called it one of the 100 best films of all time in their 2005 list. Critic Ed Gonzalez wrote in 2001, "Not unlike Albert Camus' The Stranger, Nicholas Ray's remarkable In a Lonely Place represents the purest of existentialist primers ... Gray and Dixon may love each other but it's evident that they're both entirely too victimized by their own selves to sustain this kind of happiness. In the end, their love resembles a rehearsal for the next and hopefully less complicated romance. This is the existential endgame of one of Ray's smartest and most devastating masterpieces." Curtis Hanson is featured on the retrospective documentary of the DVD release showing his admiration for the film, notably Ray's direction, the dark depiction of Hollywood and Bogart's performance. This was one of the films which he showed to actors Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce in preparation for filming L.A. Confidential. He said, "I wanted them to see the reality of that period and to see that emotion. This movie, and I'm not saying it's the greatest movie ever made, but it represents many things that I think are worth