In a typical case of tone-deafness, studio publicity described the ending of In a Lonely Place when it came out as a “stunning surprise climax.” Only in Hollywood could somebody’s innocence be touted as shock. But if what they meant was that the climax was emotionally devastating, and that emotional devastation was unexpected in a studio film, they had a point. Inner conflict structures every scene in this film. By its end, everything, even the way Humphrey Bogart puts down a telephone receiver to make two black holes in the frame, adds to its heartache.

“Can’t you relax for a second?” Gloria Grahame’s Laurel asks Bogart’s Dixon Steele. He can’t. Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter, exists in the tension between creative work and real life. His fear of being misunderstood and punished for being right plagues him, makes him lash out, and poisons his relationships. We see it happen in wrenching closeups of Laurel’s face as she looks at him. In the film’s last scene, Ray keeps subtly emptying the frame until Dix and Laurel break up and disappear, he through an arch that leads to the street, she behind a door she closes.

It’s not just the end, but the film’s whole last half hour that wrecks you. Ray couples anger to tenderness. Dix beats up a guy, then deliver’s the film’s (maybe any film’s) most romantic lines. He describes a “good love scene” to the woman he loves even as she realizes she has to leave him.