NICK RAY SPEAKS

Above I've posted a short clip of Nicholas Ray describing how the ending of 'In A Lonely Place' developed, going from a nice, neatly tied-up thriller ending (Frank Lovejoy bursts in and arrests Dixon Steele) and instead becoming the ambivalent, unsettlingly unanswered ending that leaves us wondering what will happen to Steele and the Gloria Grahame character after the words 'The End' have disappeared from the screen. Ray says that he had separated from Grahame (then his wife) during the production of the film and that this influenced his wanting to create a more complex ending than the one that was scripted. But he doesn't say why. Nor can the full reason for the separation be found in the recent obit of his eldest son, Anthony Ray, who married Grahame (his one-time step-mother) ten years or so after his father's divorce from her. But in 1950, when 'In A Lonely Place' was shot, Anthony Ray was thirteen years old and freshly arrived in LA to live with his director dad and his new young actress wife. The separation between them occurred, as mentioned by Ray, during the shoot. It had to do with Grahame being caught in bed with another man. And that man was...

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