There's a scene in Nicholas Ray's grim and glorious In a Lonely Place (about 30 minutes in) that cuts to the heart of the thrill of storytelling and, by extension, Hollywood filmmaking. Screenwriter Dixon Steel, played by Humphrey Bogart with fearless intensity, goes to the home of his friend, a police detective (Frank Lovejoy), and his new bride. They are having dinner when it is suggested that Dixon imagine and verbally explain a murder -- the same murder of a coat-check girl that Mr. Steel is implicated in. As he directs the couple, the detective begins to become overwhelmed by Dixon's storytelling, so much so that he begins to actually strangle his wife.

In a Lonely Place, shot in lush black-and-white by Burnett Guffey, is the first indisputable masterpiece directed by Nicholas Ray. He had been directing for four years when the film was released in 1950, coming from a background in radio. They Live by Night, his first film, would serve as scaffolding for Bonnie & Clyde, Badlands, and a dozen or so other "love on the run" parables. Decades later, his ensuing oeuvre would make indelible impressions on the likes of Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and Wim Wenders. Jarmusch served as his assistant for a few years while attending NYU while Wenders would cast him in his '70s neo-noir The American Friend.

A whole other sort of atmospheric noir, Lonely Place opens with Dixon on the road, but it's just a matter of time until he's at the bar. Lazy and unmotivated, he takes a coat-check girl home to dictate a novel he must adapt at the insisting of his agent (Art Smith, merciless and magnificent). A few hours after she leaves, she's dead, and the cops, personified by Lovejoy and stage actor Carl Benton Reid, have it narrowed down to two guys: Dixon and the date the girl stood up for him. Enter Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), Steel's neighbor who falsely attests to his innocence and falls for the smoldering screenwriter. But as the cops get itchier and Dixon's dark side becomes more evident, she begins to wonder if she may have fallen for a murderer.

Sardonic as it is, Ray's film has a far more human element to it than the current trend of meta-cynical films about the business of making movies. In its self-reflexive treatment of the shadowy world of Hollywood deal-making, In a Lonely Place seems the unacknowledged forefather to Spike Jonze's Adaptation. But where Jonze swells and builds to blaring crescendo, Ray's apogee is suspenseful and disparate. Dixon nearly becomes the portrait of the man the police wanted him to be but relinquishes and recedes back to his loneliness in the final scene, leaving Laurel uttering those tragic few lines he once wrote for her. Grahame, who was married to Ray at the time, is a boiling plate of faithless indecision, but Bogart, after years of playing the brooding private dick, finally gets to portray the nervy, vulnerable creator of the pulpy characters he had played in Hollywood his entire life.