In A Lonely Place - Comparisons To Novel

Comparisons To Novel

In a Lonely Place was based on Dorothy B. Hughes' 1947 novel of the same title. Some controversy exists between fans of the film and fans of the novel (who view the film as a watered down adaptation), as Edmund H. North's script takes some elements of the novel, but is ultimately an entirely different story.

The strongest difference between the two works lies in the primary character: the film's Dixon Steele is a screenwriter with an offbeat lifestyle, and a decent person with fatally poor impulse control and prone to wild overreaction when enraged. The novel's Steele is a limited third-person view from Dix's perspective, reminiscent of the first-person in noir, à la The Killer Inside Me. Steele is a charlatan who pretends to be a novelist while sponging money from his overbearing uncle. When this well dries up, he murders a wealthy young man and assumes his identity, in a manner similar to Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. (It should be noted that Hughes' novel predates Highsmith's and may have influenced it.) The film follows the question of whether Dix finally went too far in his anger and committed the murder under investigation to a tragic end: even though he's proven innocent, his rage at the cloud of suspicion has driven the woman he loves away for good. No question of Dix's innocence exists in the novel, which follows the investigation of a murder Dix plainly committed and his self-insertion into that investigation for his own ends.

Curtis Hanson, in the DVD featurette 'In A Lonely Place Revisited', further analyses the parallels and differences between the novel and the film. He notes that there is a parallel in the film between Dix's adaptation of a novel for film with the adaptation of In a Lonely Place for film, he also notes a key difference between Dix in the film and Dix in the novel is their respective treatment of women. In the novel Dix pursues women, the first chapter details his pursuit of a woman. In the film, Dix is pursued by women.

Hughes' novel, out of print for decades, was re-released by The Feminist Press at CUNY in 2003, which edition is still in print as of April 2007. Penguin Books also published a paperback edition in the UK in 2010 as part of their Modern Classics imprint. The novel has been hailed lately as a stellar example of mid-twentieth hardboiled/noir fiction, both as a rare example of women's writing in that genre and for its quality and contributions to that genre.