Dorothy B. Hughes at the Movies

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During a key scene early in Nicholas Ray’s romantic thriller In a Lonely Place (1950), our hero, brilliant but volatile Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), presses a starry-eyed hat check girl—whose strangulation a few hours hence will place Dix under a cloud of suspicion that won’t lift until he’s already sealed his dire fate—into service by having her recount the plot of a novel she’s just finished reading and which he’s been hired to adapt. 

This scene is one of several meta-layers that helps set In a Lonely Place apart from other LA-set noirs, with Dix’s casual disregard for the book he’s tasked to translate to screen mirroring that of director Ray’s. For while In a Lonely Place is an undeniable masterpiece—arguably the greatest of all films noirs—as adaptations go, it’s one of the least faithful ever made.

In fact, when it comes to the original novel, Ray (who rewrote most of the script, officially credited to Edmund North and Andrew Solt, as shooting commenced) may as well have throttled it and left its corpse by the side of the road.

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By the time Dorothy B. Hughes—who passed away 30 years ago this May—penned In a Lonely Place in 1947, she had already published 10 mystery novels prior, and Rays film was not her first spin on the Hollywood carousel. Her work had been brought to the big screen twice by that point, first by way of 1943’s The Fallen Sparrow (adapted from her novel of the same name from one-year prior), and then 1947’s Ride the Pink Horse (ditto).  

Of all three features, The Fallen Sparrow is by far the most faithful to its source. Like the novel, the film, directed by Richard Wallace and written by Warren Duff, sees a former POW of the Spanish Civil War (John Garfield) return to his native New York in order to avenge the murder of his childhood best friend, who he believes was killed because he helped him escape captivity. 

Wallace’s film takes a few liberties with Hughes’s story—the nature of the central McGuffin is altered, a character’s homosexuality is dropped, and many extraneous scenes of investigation and exposition (which do, unfortunately, make the novel something of a slog) are wisely excised—but for the most part, its hues closely to what happens in the book. As a whodunnit and espionage thriller, neither version holds up all that well—especially not when compared to similar examples from around the same era, namely Casablanca, The Third Man, and any number of Hitchcock titles—but they each distinguish themselves through their close and sympathetic depiction of PTSD, still a deeply misunderstood condition at the time. Post-war disillusionment and trauma were amongst of the foundational components in the creation of a film noir as a genre, and for as prevalent as the subject was in most of the films that fall within the category, few dealt with it as clearly as The Fallen Sparrow. One of those that does is Ride the Pink Horse.

Ride the Pink Horse (1947)

The sophomore directorial effort of Robert Montgomery, himself a veteran of WWII who, prior to directing the admirably experimental (but undeniably janky) adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake in 1947, was best known as an actor in screwball comedies, Ride the Pink Horse falls somewhere in between The Fallen Sparrow and In a Lonely Place in terms of fidelity to the original text.

Hughes’s novel traces the journey of Chicago hood Sailor as he travels to Hughes’s adopted home of Santa Fe, New Mexico looking to for his former boss, a retired U.S. Senator who skipped out on him after they colluded to murder his wife. He intends to waltz in and blackmail ‘The Sen’, but finds the town overrun by tourists come in for the annual fiesta. Set adrift in this alien land, beset on one side by the crafty Sen and his goons and on the other by a dogged Chicago cop named Mac who wants him to testify against his old patron, Sailor is forced to rely on the largesse of the natives, even as he holds them in racist contempt. In the film, the draft-dodging Sailor becomes Lucky Gagin (Montgomery), an embittered G.I. looking to cash in on the murder of an old Army buddy by extorting the slimy war profiteer who killed him. This change aside, the narrative hews close to Hughes’s—right up until its climax.

In a short featurette included in the movie’s Criterion Collection home video release, author and film historian Imogen Sara Smith refers to it as an “anti-noir” because of the redemptive note it ends on. In this version, the antihero’s conscience gets the better of him. Justice prevails over greed and vengeance, and Lucky is able to start acting like a human being again. Not so in Hughes: she concludes her novel with a headlong descent into damnation, having Sailor gun down both the Sen and Mac in a fit of sudden desperation, before fleeing madly into the endless desert wasteland. Montgomery’s movie manages to retain much of the novel’s surrealism—particularly for the rococo scenes of fiesta goers burning a local deity in effigy—but in changing its ending so drastically, he reduces what’s come before to a fever dream, as opposed to the never-ending Kafkaesque nightmare that Hughes gives us.

Ironically, Nicholas Ray showed zero compunction retaining the bleakness of Hughes’s vision when he decided to make In a Lonely Place, even as he jettisoned just about everything. (It bears noting that in 1950, the same year Columbia released Ray’s picture, Montgomery produced and starred in a radio play of In a Lonely Place, just as he did for Ride the Pink Horse three years earlier. A few years later, he would oversee yet one more version of Ride, reprising his role from the film [alongside co-star and Oscar nominee Thomas Gomez] for a 60-minute teleplay made for his namesake NBC program, Robert Montgomery Presents. Clearly, something in Hughes’s work spoke deeply to him.)

Hughes’s novel, which, as author Megan Abbott wrote in her afterward for the 2017 NYRB reprint, set the template for “nearly every ‘serial killer’ tale of the last seventy years…both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic ‘mind of the criminal’ perspective,” follows Dix Steele as he finds himself under investigation for murder. Only, whereas in the movie he’s a successful (if down at heel) movie scribe, in the book he’s a (suspiciously) independently wealthy drifter who merely pretends to be a writer (a mystery writer, no less). And though the movie Dix is ultimately cleared of the central crime, in the book it is brutally evident from the start that he’s guilty not only of one slaying, but series of them across both Los Angeles and Germany. 

Ray’s film brings a few supporting characters over from the novel—Dix’s wartime buddy turned cop (this archetype popping up yet again) Brub and his clever, suspicious wife Sylvia (the real hero of the novel, here reduced to a minor role), as well as his smoldering next door neighbor and eventual lover Laurel Gray (expanded into a co-lead and played by Ray’s then-wife, Gloria Graham, in a career best performance), but everything else—including the bitter recriminations against the callous Hollywood class system (reminiscent of a certain other noir released in the same year) has been invented wholesale by Ray and his writers.  

This end result makes for a very different experience: Hughes’s novel is a horripilating study of crime, punishment and madness in the tradition of Dostoevsky; Ray’s film is a moody and heartrending story of star-crossed romance best summed up by it’s most iconic lines: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” 

Yet, for all that, both are haunted by the specter of misogynist violence. For while Bogart’s Dix may not be a chain killer of women, he is an abuser, one who, by the end of the film, is shown capable of that most most heinous of crimes. (The film’s original ending had Dix fatally strangle Laurel, but Ray wisely nixed this in favor of a lower-key ending that is no less devastating or haunting for its anticlimax.) Viewed/read today, it’s hard to say which feels more relevant.

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In that aforementioned featurette on the Criterion Ride the Pink Horse, Smith describes Hughes as “perennially ripe for rediscovery,” on account of her novels falling out of print during the latter half of the last century. Nor did the movies made from them loom large in the public consciousness. In a Lonely Place fared slightly better than its brethren, thanks mostly to the star power of Bogart. But while those in the know will be quick to tout his performance in it as the best he ever gave, the film has never held anything close to the cultural cachet of his better-known noirs (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Nowhere). The last movie to be adapted from Hughes came in 1964 via The Hanged Man remake of Ride the Pink Horse, directed by Don Seigel and starring Robert Culp, that aired on NBC (it has the distinction of being only the second ever made for TV movie). 

But the tide has turned over the last few years. Most of her books have come back into circulation, either in digital formats or handsome new print editions from the NYRB and Penzler, while the film versions of In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse have received new restorations and release via Criterion. Combined with heavy proselytizing from some of the biggest names in modern crime fiction—including Abbott, Sarah Weinman, and Walter Mosley—Hughes can no longer be called an obscure or forgotten writer. 

Now all we need is for filmmakers to breathe some new life into her sizable oeuvre. They needn’t even start from scratch—her best known title is right there, just begging for a more faithful adaptation.

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