Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for In a Lonely Place (1950) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Art Smith, Jeff Donnell DIRECTOR: Nicholas Ray CINEMATOGRAPHY: Burnett Guffey MUSIC: George Antheil PRODUCTION: Santana Pictures Corporation, Columbia Pictures

Box Office Performance

Theatrical box office data is not publicly available for In a Lonely Place (1950). This may indicate a limited release, direct-to-streaming, or a release predating modern box office tracking.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: 3 wins total

CRITICAL RECEPTION

At the time of its original release, the reviews were generally positive (in particular many critics praised Bogart and Grahame's performances), but many questioned the marketability given the bleak ending. The staff at Variety magazine in May 1950 gave the film a good review and wrote,

In In a Lonely Place Humphrey Bogart has a sympathetic role though cast as one always ready to mix it with his dukes. He favors the underdog; in one instance he virtually has a veteran, brandy-soaking character actor (out of work) on his very limited payroll ... Director Nicholas Ray maintains nice suspense. Bogart is excellent. Gloria Grahame, as his romance, also rates 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.