Humphrey Bogart gives the performance of his career in this backstage Hollywood tale of murder and torrid love. Nobody has ever heard of it because it was overshadowed by those Bogie/Bacall films and those film noirs, but I'll take him in this film over any of those. Bogie is often called one of the best actors in Hollywood history, and I sometimes have a hard time believing it. But this film goes a long way toward convincing me.

Bogart plays Dixon "Dix" Steele, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter given to violent outbursts. He's basically finished in Hollywood, until his agent Mel (Art Smith) gets him one last crack at a major film: he's to adapt a best-selling novel into a film, and he's to stick as closely as possible to the book. The book is an epic, in the words of coat-check girl Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart), "real long and has lots of things going on." Since Mildred has read the book, Dix takes her home and has her tell him the story; when he gets tired, he sends her home in a cab. Then he goes to bed.

The problems arise when the police don't believe his story, because Mildred was murdered on the way home, her body dumped from a moving car into a canyon. Dix's war buddy Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), now a police detective, hauls him in for questioning, and everybody is pretty much convinced that Dix did it when he doesn't show any emotion upon finding out that Mildred is dead and he's the main suspect. He finds an alibi in his beautiful neighbor Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), who saw him watching her from his balcony. The two quickly fall in love, which makes the police suspect that she's lying for him. She's not, but she begins to wonder if he might actually be a murderer when his increasingly erratic and violent behavior affects her.

We start the film siding with him: obviously he didn't do it, because we saw him send her home. But later, he seems to know a little too much about the murder, and it begins to seem really odd that he doesn't worry more about being a suspect. His erratic behavior makes us wonder if perhaps he's losing it. Maybe he's an unreliable narrator, and we didn't see him commit the murder for stylistic reasons. While the question of whether he did it is one focus of the film, it's not the most interesting one.

The film goes beyond your usual "did he really do it" thriller by asking an additional question: even if he didn't do it, do I really want to be around this guy? Most classic Hollywood thrillers have two options: he didn't do it, and we fade out to an image of the happy couple embracing; or he did do it, and we fade out to him being dragged away as the cops comfort the distraught woman. Here, there are more options, and I won't spoil things by telling you which one the film picks.

Bogart is just wonderful as the classical abusive husband archetype. He's a moody alcoholic whose love for Laurel borders on psychotic: he is violently jealous, and he uses her as the focal point for all of his emotions, good or bad. He is desperately in love with her, and he lavishes gifts on her when he's in a good mood, but she's the first person to feel his anger when things go wrong. He's not a monster; he's amazingly real. Gloria Grahame is also superb. She's not usually listed as one of the great actresses of classic Hollywood, but she made indelible impressions in mostly supporting roles in films such as Crossfire, The Bad and the Beautiful, and The Big Heat. She has a tough demeanor tempered by vulnerability; she never seems to believe that she's as strong as she wants you to believe. Incidentally, she was married to director Nicholas Ray from 1948 to 1952; she later married his son from another marriage, which is just a little bit strange.

Nicholas Ray was the favorite director of the French New Wave critics and filmmakers of the 1960s. He made films about tormented loners like James Dean and Jesus Christ, and his favorite character type is nowhere as compelling as it is here, played by Bogie. Dix's "lonely place" is his own mind, which chafes at having to write garbage for an industry that will forget him if he ever writes a flop. He's an oversensitive and talented guy who is too smart for most of the hacks he is forced to work for, but instead of accepting it, he acts out, often violently.