The film thus implies that while Dix’s volatility may have predated the war-his agent describes it as elemental to his personality- his service has somehow intensified it and prevented him from resuming the heights of his prewar career.
When the police review his arrest record, they uncover a history of violence dating from 1946. We discover that he was a good officer in the Air Corps, but his agent explains that he “hasn’t had a hit since the war” because of an inability to concentrate on his work. In the film, Steele is wrongly suspected of killing a cloakroom attendant who works at the restaurant he frequents, but he is under suspicion because of his manifest propensity for violence.
Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place, published in 1947 and adapted, with considerable alterations, into a 1950 movie starring Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood screenwriter and Gloria Grahame as his lover, who can’t quite rid herself of the suspicion that he’s a murderer. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place and the cultural perception of a link between returned veterans and criminal behavior.Īmong the most disturbing “upside-down” cases of postwar noir is Dixon Steele, the serial-killer protagonist of Dorothy B. In the following passage, she examines Dorothy B. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life.
In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D.