The bruised authenticity of "In a Lonely Place"
Thursday, April 9, 2020 at 12:19PM 
There's something deeply unsettling about finding yourself scared of someone you love. Part of it is the admittance of personal failure to oneself for the frightened person is the one that let themselves become vulnerable. To love is to let defenses fall and lay splayed at the mercy of another, believing our beloved will never abuse the gift of openness they have been given. We hope against hope that this trust is well-founded but sometimes it isn't. To realize you're scared may lead you to accept loneliness as a companion or else learn to live with fear. Like a toxic cocktail of arsenic and vinegar, that second option is a difficult thing to swallow and can be deadly. It often is.
Such nightmares of heartbreak and panic have rarely been better captured in celluloid than in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place…
