In a Lonely Place (1950) by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, always turns up pretty high in those lists of classic film noirs.
This probably has more to do with its adoption by the French New Wave than it does with true noir credentials, and the fact that it is one of Hollywood’s periodic flashes of its own underbelly.
But Bogart is slick, wise-ass and selfish and so is the movie, which doesn't offer up a hero but instead presents a bitter and depressed cynic anti-hero incapable of heroism.
It's a comment on the 1950s, when screenwriters were accused of communism and their friends often turned against them, and Humphrey Bogart plays it dark, often amoral, insisting that a girl find her own cab, refusing to show empathy for a murdered woman, remorseless when shown photos of a crime scene and sexually aroused when given the chance to re-enact a violent murder.
