ON CIVILIZED BARBARIANS: In a Lonely Place and Son of Saul
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In July, the Cinemasophy section invites you to explore two films about terrifying masculine natures that shatter female idealism — films captivating in their disheveled monochrome allure. One is In a Lonely Place (1950), starring the great Humphrey Bogart. The other is Son of Saul (2015), a harrowing portrayal of a young Hungarian from the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, who strives not so much to preserve his life as to uphold human dignity in the midst of absolute hell.
Both films are about civilized barbarians. The ordinary life of Western society — in the early 20th century as well as today — appeared dull and uneventful, but when the barbaric nature awoke in August 1914, it culminated by the 1940s in the monstrous brutality of a new, even more horrific war. Both films are examples of cult cinema. That is, cinema is defined only subjectively. Usually one for all — and different for each.
A unique style and unmistakable authorial vision take such films beyond any specific genre. This cinema doesn’t age — it leaves a mark so deep that it cannot be ignored. In essence, it reverses time. Cult films entertain, but they also disturb. With each viewing, they don’t just reveal what was previously overlooked — they offer something fundamentally new. This cinema is larger than itself. The screen cannot contain it. You don’t watch it — it watches you, drawing you into the realm of light and shadow.
IN A LONELY PLACE (USA, 1950)
Director: Nicholas Ray
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame
I
n the novels of the great writer Patricia Highsmith — the mind behind, among others, the series on the young adventurer Tom Ripley — even the most innocent characters behave as though they have something to hide. Nicholas Ray’s film is of the same blood type, even though it’s formally based on a different literary source — Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel In a Lonely Place.
Here, nothing is quite what it seems at first glance. The hard-drinking, hot-tempered screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart) is accused of the brutal murder of a young hat-check girl, but his neighbor Laurel Gray (Grahame) is willing to give him an alibi. A dangerous romance flares up between them, promising lasting happiness — only to collapse soon after. Laurel is horrified by Dix’s violence and begins to doubt his innocence.
In Hughes’ novel, Dix truly is the killer. But the film turns out to be far more frightening, thanks to a darker subtext: the point is not that Humphrey Bogart’s character is innocent, but that he could have killed the girl. Just a little more — and this psychological drama about a man’s untamable nature would fully slip into noir territory.
It’s not just the monochrome cinematography and the twilight atmosphere. The film’s rhythm alone pushes us into detective space: he drives up, parks the car, walks to the house, she stands by the window, comes downstairs, opens the door, they talk about nothing with heavy significance. In a Lonely Place deceives the viewer with ominous music and throwaway lines about two hundred literary murders. It convinces you that you’re watching a crime thriller in which the main suspect falls in love with the witness.
This is the most unusual noir film, the most unexpected story of doomed love, and one of the greatest films about Hollywood’s underbelly — directed by one of the most unconventional auteurs of the 20th century. Nicholas Ray, a recluse of a director, is the only one in history who literally filmed his own death . And that eccentric act seems like the logical finale of a creative journey where nearly every film, with its brazen beauty and almost pathological disbelief in tender feelings, breaks out of the mold of 1950s American cinema.
Ray also directed the most offbeat Western in Hollywood — about a gunslinger turned musician (Johnny Guitar, 1954); and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), a supposed teen drama that’s actually an existential tragedy about the unbearable nature of life, which turned 24-year-old James Dean into a myth. Pedro Almodóvar cites Ray as a constant influence, proclaiming his love for the American master in nearly every film. Ray was also a secret communist who retained his job in Hollywood by informing on fellow party members.
A drug addict and bisexual, Nicholas Ray spent his life filming tragic stories about displaced, rootless souls with anxious eyes who never find a home. That’s exactly who Humphrey Bogart plays here. Famous for his roles as tough gangsters and private detectives, he is astonishing in the role of a wounded man on the edge of life, unable to tame his demons.
His Dix is a pessimistic version of Rick from Casablanca — a man who has lost not only his personal happiness, but also his professional purpose. This drama of terrifying masculinity, which crushes the fragile hopes of female idealism, is enriched by Ray with haunting images and near-surreal lines: «I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me».
The noir nature of In a Lonely Place is unmistakable. It was brought to Hollywood by German directors fleeing Nazism, who in the 1920s, sensing the coming of Hitler and war, made films about vampires and artificial women. No one realized they were prophets. And when Nazism did arrive and they fled to the New World, they began making films about gangsters, murderers, and femme fatales — but in truth, they were still making films about Nazis. And again, no one realized.
But the connection between cinema and history here is both obvious and astonishing. It’s especially visible in The Enforcer (1951), also starring Humphrey Bogart, where film noir seemingly gains a historical dimension: one of its most chilling scenes directly alludes to Auschwitz and the Nazi death factories — a vast collection of shoes arranged in a forensic lab.
These mismatched shoes (heels, boots, pumps), pulled by police from a swamp-turned-graveyard where gangsters buried their victims, feel like a tunnel leading straight to hell. The hell of the Holocaust.
SON OF SAUL (SAUL FIA, HUNGARY, 2015)
Director: László Nemes
Starring: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn
Son of Saul is, in a sense, also a detective story — but without private investigators, police officers, or femme fatales. There’s no room for metaphor here. It’s a stark quasi-documentary about a member of the Sonderkommando at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp who, at the very end of the war in 1944, tries not so much to survive in inhuman conditions as to secretly recover and bury the body of a teenage boy he believes to be his illegitimate son from a pre-war affair with a Jewish woman.
The other members of the unit have already prepared a detailed escape plan. But Saul (played by non-professional actor Géza Röhrig) is concerned only with one thing — how to retrieve the body and find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s prayer.
In his debut, László Nemes literally leads the viewer through the back corridors of hell, suffering, and dehumanization. Yet he does not revel in horror — it remains in the background, out of focus. Instead, he concentrates tightly on his protagonist’s face, observing it with intensity and tenderness, showing how desperately Saul clings to what remains of his humanity, how fiercely he tries to preserve himself amid utterly bestial circumstances. His actions, defiant and radiant, become acts of fragile beauty.
Since Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary Shoah (1985), this is perhaps the first film to depict the horrors of the Holocaust from the inside, from the perspective of those who lived through it. It’s no surprise that first the Cannes Film Festival jury, and later the Academy Awards — the same institution that once showered Schindler’s List with gold — honored this young Hungarian auteur’s masterpiece. Son of Saul demands maximum attention and patience, and gives back a soul-shattering experience.
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