“One of Hollywood's most intelligent self-analytical efforts is Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place. This somber and too-often realistic feature revolves around a brief and bittersweet love affair between a neurotic screenwriter (Humphrey Bogart) and his attractive neighbor (Gloria Grahame). Woven around the love theme is the depiction of the general emptiness of life in the film world - a way of life that has its main interest in profit, not art nor feeling....
“Manny Farber, in the introduction to his book ‘Negative Space' (1971), states that this film ‘...is a Hollywood scene at its most lackluster, toned down, limpid, with (director) Ray's keynote strangeness: a sprawling, unbent composition with somewhat dwarfed characters, each going his own way.'” --Parish & Pitts, “Hollywood on Hollywood”