On Dangerous Ground
Our film noir tonight is RKO’s On Dangerous Ground, from 1951, directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino. It’s the story of an unstable big-city cop who gets assigned to a small-town murder where he’s able to find out what his real priorities are. This movie has a truly impressive credit-list. Director Nicholas Ray is one of the most intense and original Hollywood filmmakers of the 40s and 50s. Once again in On Dangerous Ground there’s the slashing, brutal treatment of action scenes and the huge luminous closeups, the powerful subjectivization of dramatic moments and the general sense of an almost neurotic energy. The movie’s producer is John Houseman, also one of the outstanding figures of the period, whose credits include Citizen Kane and a host of other fine movies, including a previous collaboration with Ray which we’ve already seen in this series—They Live By Night. The screenplay is by A.I. Bezzerides, not a household name at any time, but again an extremely interesting minor talent of the period, and the author of the amazing script for Kiss Me Deadly, one of the best and most lurid of all noir films. The music is by Bernard Herrmann, and he’s simply the best film music composer ever. His score for On Dangerous Ground was reputedly his favorite, and in any case is a masterpiece, featuring turbulent aggression and menace mixed with a wonderful sad dark yearning. His music adds an entire dimension of depth to this movie, just as much as it does in his more famous scores for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho. In the chase scenes here, for example, the growling and whooping horns and crashing percussion have an almost frightening excitement that just lifts these sequences out of the ordinary.
The cast too is outstanding. I don’t know if Robert Ryan ever did anything better. He was an actor often typecast as a psychotic heavy—a role we’ve seen him in already in Crossfire—and he was memorably effective in these roles. But behind the mask of bitterness and sneering anger on his face there was deep pain and a suggestion—beautifully brought out in this movie—of where this bitterness came from, from impossible hopes and damaged tenderness. His acting partner here is Ida Lupino, a fine, an intense and affecting performer maybe best remembered for her role in the powerful 1941 gangster movie High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart. Here she plays a blind woman living with her younger brother in an isolated house. Her isolation is shattered by the violent arrival of Ryan and the outraged father of the murder victim—played, again very strongly, by Ward Bond—who are hot on the trail of her brother. Her real role in the film, however, is to act as a catalyst in the transformation of the cop played by Ryana, man teetering at the edge of a moral abyss.
But, even with all of these outstanding elements working in its favor, On Dangerous Ground is an odd movie, some would say a failure. The director was never happy with it, and tended to say critical things about it in interviews, and it’s never had a generally high reputation. Certainly it’s strangely constructed. The first half-hour takes place entirely in the city, and everything that happens there serves only to illustrate Robert Ryan’s spiritual condition and has no other relevance to the rest of the film. Then the story shifts abruptly to the countryside and stays there until the end. The Ida Lupino character, in other words, doesn’t show up at all until the movie is more than a third over, and nobody from the first half-hour puts in an appearance after that except the hero. The total running time is only 84 minutes, so the movie is in danger of never really having the chance to settle. And then the ending is very abrupt, and when the end-title comes up it’s liable to take you by surprise. On top of all this there’s the terrible risk of sentimentality in the presence of a blind woman as the centre of goodness in the film.
But I love this movie anyway. The city and the country sections of the film may have nothing to do with each other in plot terms, but they make perfect sense in the terms of the hero’s inner life. And the characterization of the two places is striking and powerful. The early scenes take place in true, fundamental noir territory—in the city at night, with a bounteous array of dives and tenement rooms, black sedans and rain-slicked streets, all of them inhabited by hard cops, two-bit criminals and a host of minor characters whose lives are ugly in one way or another. This whole first half-hour seems to me virtually perfect—a pure picture of American city hell, circa 1951. The violence isn’t spectacular, but you get the powerful sense that it runs deep and infects everything. And it’s clear that that violence springs from personal despair, a despair so deep it’s like damnation. Ryan is lonely in his solitary tenement room, lonely on the streets, lonely in the squad car and lonely when beating up punks and crooks. His violence springs from his loneliness and alienation—and his alienation is the actual subject of the movie. It’s an existential subject, and it’s an existential movie.
That stark symbolic quality is emphasized not only in the frightening one-note depiction of the city, but also in the surprising treatment of the rural scenes where the last two-thirds of the movie take place. I mean, after the hellish city, and in the fact that Ryan’s moral regeneration is going to take place in the countryside, you’re really set up for a warm and enlivening depiction of nature. The old dichotomy of the sinful city and the health and purity of the country is all ready to drop into place. But in fact the rural scenes are almost as hellish as the city scenes, although in a totally contrasting way. It’s winter, and everything is covered with snow and ice. The roads, the fields, the rocky hills—instead of representing an image of life-giving nature, they’re cold and hostile and dangerous. It’s especially poignant here to see how much out of place Ryan’s fedora and overcoat and street shoes are traversing these slippery and treacherous fields and hills. The “dangerous ground” of the title is this ground. In the film’s powerful symbolic pattern of images neither the black city nor the white countryside are safe or healthy—all that’s human or friendly is the firelight in Ida Lupino’s cabin, a warm light that signifies the warmth and safety of a shelter from the cruel world. And of course that warm light is also the light of Lupino’s compassion and understanding, the movie’s moral beacon.
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This is the second movie in this series of noir films where the central character is a violent cop—a cop who takes his personal, psychological frustrations out on suspects and in fact any and all denizens of the criminal milieu. The other one, of course, was Where the Sidewalk Ends, where Dana Andrews as the cop in question may not have been quite so clearly full of psychotic rage, but was equally anguished. “Nobody likes a copon either side of the law,” says Jim Wilson in this movie, and he’s right, and you completely understand why. They rough up people, throw their weight around indiscriminately, they treat everybody as if they were guilty whether they are or not. In fact both these movies could have served as advertisements for the necessity of Miranda rights in the days before Miranda rights existed. The interesting thing to note is how completely American society has turned around on this issue. Police brutality as such is only an issue to blacks in the inner cities and their liberal sympathisers. Cop heroes in movies now are far more likely to resemble Dirty Harry. And when he’s warned off by his superiors and told to cool down and take a vacation—as both Robert Ryan and Dana Andrews are in these movieswell, it’s only because superiors and lawyers and judges are moral cowards. When Harry says “I get results,” the audience says “right on!” But when Ryan and Andrews say the same thing—and do actually get results too—the audience just shakes its head right along with the police captain who’s handing out the warning. In On Dangerous Ground there’s just no doubt that, results or no results, Jim Wilson is a sick man, a guy who’s eaten by demons and is ready to crack up. But back in 1951, it was considered to be a problem if a cop was behaving, as the chief says, “like a gangster with a badge.” Nowadays that seems to be the effect you’re looking for.
I said earlier that it was a dangerously sentimental move to make a blind girl into the centre of goodness and compassion in the movie. There’s this long tradition dating back to Victorian times of the good, sweet, beautiful blind girl, the very idea of whom is enough to send people into a state of almost religious shock. So young and beautiful, so vulnerable and helpless, so good and kind, so blind yet trying so hard—it’s a potent emotional cocktail, it’s enough to break your heart. To see this formula in something like its original state in movies you can go back to silent films like Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm or Chaplin’s City Lights. Those movies actually are a good place to look, because you can see more clearly there how this figure of the helpless, beautiful, innocent female is tied up with these films’ own sexual gaze at them. These blind women are beautiful, and arouse sexual interest—but that sexual interest has to be disavowed and unrecognized. This woman’s blindness represents her innocence, and specifically her innocence of sexuality. Note how in On Dangerous Ground Robert Ryan’s feelings of attraction towards the compassionate and innocent Ida Lupino are contrasted with his feelings of disgust at the sexual interest shown in him by three separate women in the city section of the film. Really the problem here isn’t the sexuality of these women, it’s Ryan’s own sexuality—and that of the male viewpoint of the movie. Because frankly there’s something obscene about a guy who’s disgusted by openly expressed female sexuality but is aroused by a passive, helpless, pure-spirited blind girl. How would he, and the movie, feel about her if she were blind and pure but also physically plain or unattractive? Oops, suddenly she’s not such a moving and transforming influence in a man’s life, such a redemptive contrast to all those other brazen dames.
And I’d have to say that On Dangerous Ground is sentimental, and even sickly sentimental, in its blind-girl-saves-lost-tough-guy scenario. On the other hand I don’t really care, because the sentimentality is just another broad symbolic stroke in a movie that’s full of broad symbolic strokes. What elevates the whole movie to a special plane is the intensity and the forceful articulation of everything. On this level, it’s the vividness of the images and the staging, the acutely focused performances, the sheer powerful simplification of events and story, that make the film workor at least that make it worth twice as much as a more carefully and conventionally structured movie.