Dir: Nicolas Ray | Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame | US Film Noir 94’
Humphrey Bogart teamed with Nicholas Ray to make this sardonic view of Hollywood – with elements of both ‘Bete Humaine’ and ‘Sunset Boulevard’ – playing a morose and cynical screenwriter with likely psychopathic tendencies and a hair-trigger temper who becomes prime suspect in a murder, probably based on the recent case of the Black Dahlia.
Bogart is fortunate to have the love of bad woman played by sloe-eyed blonde Gloria Grahame. Shot in glacial black & white by Oscar-winning cameraman Burnett Guffey; with its fatalistic mood it manages to do for Hollywood what myriad film noirs had long done for New York. @RichardChatten
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