On Dangerous Ground

Detective Jim Wilson is a good cop mired in a bad world of hustlers and pimps and crooks. He has a black and white sense of right and wrong, but he's trapped in infinite shades of gray — a garbage handler, as he self-identifies, who spends his days and nights thankfully cleaning up the trash on the mean streets. He's got pencil-pushing bureaucrats breathing down his neck, and every dame who crosses his path has angle. But he gets things done, he rights wrongs, usually by beating bad guys into submission. In other words, he is an archetype for every bad man on a good mission and this movie is a blue print for every renegade copy movie ever made thereafter.

And as is this case in almost every one of those cop movies thereafter, the world is quickly changing around him and in the new world, you can't solve all your problems with your fists — or, as in more modern movies, with a gun. (Side note: apparently things don't change too quickly much because this story line is still alive and well.) After a particularly brutal scene in which the sympathetic, sadistic cop beats a confession out of a craven, seemingly masochistic criminal, he draws the ire of his commanding officer who sends him upstate to a rural area gripped in an icy winter. A girl has been murdered and the locals, especially the father, aim to settle the score. Everything in his gritty, urban background has readied him to dole out some sympathetic justice, but there's just one problem — in the course of the investigation, he meets a dame without an angle: the beautiful, and blind, Mary Malden (played by Ida Lupino).

Her mentally challenged brother is a suspect and Jim and the victim's father are forced wait out the night at Mary's house. For a man who has seen too much and trusts no one, he can't help but fall for the lovely Mary who has can't see anything and is forced to, as she admits, trust everyone.

More modern sensibilities are used to (numbed by?) a direct visual treatment of passion, but the muted approach in this movie heightens the impact. When their hands touch, we are treated to a moment of romantic discovery that surpasses all the heat and energy of the currently more popular bra and pantie clad tussling between love interests.

The movie is shot in a jumpy, jerky way (mumblenoir?) with crackling dialog, adds to the tension, sense of foreboding and drama. And the car chase — sliding along icy roads — was well-executed. For such a short movie (82 minutes), it covers a lot of territory — from the heart of the city to the emptiness of the wilderness, and from cynical resignation and brutality to hope and redemption.

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Lovely is not a word I would normally use when describing a film noir, yet here I am, labeling On Dangerous Ground as a lovely piece of work. It is perhaps Nicholas Ray's most upbeat movie, beginning as a hard- hitting cop story and ending on a heartwarming note, with renewal and hopefulness at its beck and call. It is the only tender film noir I've seen. Genre turnarounds can be hurtful to the tone of a film, as no one wants to go to the theaters for a Will Ferrell vehicle only to find it sinking into tragedy rather than an uproariously funny closer. But by tying the pessimistic atmosphere of the first act into the neuroses of the title character, the shift in On Dangerous Ground is largely flattering, a difficult feat that Ray pulls off with unwavering certainty. He believes in the story, and, as a result, so do we.

Robert Ryan portrays Jim Wilson, a worn-out detective who is growing increasingly intolerant towards the disreputable scum he deals with on a regular basis. In past film noirs, cops as violent as Wilson would eventually go as far as murdering someone, spending the rest of the movie trying to make their wrongs into rights. But in On Dangerous Ground, it immediately becomes evident that Wilson is capable of saintly good nature but has been pushed over the edge by the constant surrounding sleaze.

After beating up a number of suspects during arrest, his precinct grows concerned and sends him away to the outskirts of town to investigate the murder of a young woman. Upon arrival, he finds a reflection of himself in the hateful family of the victim, and, during the investigation, falls for Mary Malden (Ida Lupino), the blind sister of the prime suspect who serves as a ray of light in his jet-black life. In theory, On Dangerous Ground should be clunky and awkward; yet, it is kind of brilliant. It looks and feels like a film noir, but that's only a disguise for the more touching instances of psychological study. Everything is presented in such a nonchalant, nearly conventional manner that the power it eventually bears is unexpectedly poignant. Only Ray could direct this sort of material; most do not have the same curious capacity to switch from the hard-boiled to the humane.

The contrast between the slick city streets and the snowy grounds of the more evangelical countryside are competently histrionic. As Wilson enters the fresh, cool landscape, a tidal wave of reversal falls upon us. In the first few minutes of the film, as we watch Wilson fight crime with boorish tenacity, the streets so usually enthralling in film noir turn into something uncomfortably grimy and greasy. Crime is like a horde of ants crawling up and down our arms. The countryside, though still the setting of a murder, has a comforting tranquility. Without people scattered in every nook and cranny, there is a chance to breathe. The entrance of Lupino is reminiscent to that of an angel falling out the sky; with no eyesight, she is unable to see the vile underpinnings of the world. Her kindness is a gift.

As Wilson's life converts from direly violent to one of prospect, there is something stirring that occurs that softened me more than I ever would have thought possible. In film noir, we're used to endless acerbity; it is rare that a character, a policeman who seems so destined to head down a dark path, is given a second chance. Throughout his career, Ryan was mostly typecast as a villain with a booming voice, but in On Dangerous Ground he is given a chance to be expressive and sensitive. It is a surprisingly wistful performance, connecting with ease towards the delicate, soul-baring Lupino.

On Dangerous Ground has been pushed aside as a minor work from the illustrious Nicholas Ray (The Big Heat, Rebel Without a Cause), but it's nevertheless shimmering all these years later. Its audacious attempts to subvert the norms of such a specific genre are absorbingly moving.

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On Dangerous Ground is directed by Nicholas Ray and stars Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan & Ward Bond. It's loosely adapted by Ray and A. I. Bezzerides from Gerald Butler's novel Mad With Much Heart. Cinematography is by George E. Diskant & the music is provided by Bernard Herrmann & Paul Sawtell. The story concerns Ryan's weary, lonely and psychologically bothered cop, Jim Wilson. Who after finally snapping the patience of his superiors is sent to Westham in the rural north to aid a murder case there. The idea is to get him off the streets he's so bitter about and to stop him finally going over the violence tinged edge. It's here, amongst the wintry landscapes, that he is brought into contact with Mary Malden (Lupino). A practically blind woman, Mary holds all the keys to the mystery and to the door at the end of Wilson's journey.

Right from the outset we are in no doubt that Nicholas Ray is about to take us on a noir journey. Herrmann's pulse like score accompanies its nighttime opening, Diskant's photography immediately painting a harsh city where life on the streets is tough. A place where loneliness can eat away at the soul and bleakness pours down off of the bars and the cheaply built apartments. It is in short, firmly encapsulating of Jim Wilson's bitterness and frame of mind. Wilson, once a prime athlete, is mired in solitude, his only telling contribution to society is his work, but that is ebbing away by the day. His mood is not helped by his partners, Pop & Pete, who can easily switch off once their shift has finished - but they have family to go home to, Wilson does not. Wilson's only source of joy comes courtesy of the paperboy he briefly plays football with out on the street (a rare ray of light in the film's moody atmospheric first half).

Then the film shifts for its second act, a shift that has made On Dangerous Ground a most divisive picture in discussions over the years. Sent north to effectively cool down by Captain Brawley (Ed Begley), we find Wilson leaving behind the dank city and entering the snowbound countryside in the north. Dark has become light as it were. The whole style and pace of the film has changed, yet this is still a place tainted by badness. A girl has been murdered and Wilson is still here to locate potential evil. An evil that the murdered girls father (Ward Bond as Walter Brent) wants to snuff out with his own vengeful fury. As the two men track down the killer, Wilson sees much of himself in Brent's anger, but once the guys arrive at Mary Malden's isolated cabin, things shift just a little more.

Said to be a favourite of Martin Scorsese, and an influence for Taxi Driver, On Dangerous Ground has often been called Nicholas Ray's best film by some of his fans (I'd say In A Lonely Place personally). Odd then that Ray himself wasn't happy with the film, calling it a failure and not the finished product he had envisaged. Ray had wanted a three structured movie, not the two part one it is; with the final third being far bleaker and more noirish than the one we actually get. However, and the ending is a bit scratchy for the genre it sits in, it's still a fabulous film that is more about the journey of its protagonist than the diversity caused by its finale. Ryan is terrific, a real powerhouse and believable performance, while Lupino beautifully realises Mary's serene impact on Wilson and the counter opposite to the darkness within the picture. It's a given really, but Herrmann's score is potent, listen out for the opening, the crossover section from city to countryside and the rock face pursuit. While Ray directs with his customary knack of blending the grim with the almost poetic. 8/10

The lonely and tough Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is an efficient detective that frequently uses excessive violence to resolve his cases and even his partners do not approve his behavior. While chasing two cop killers, he blows the bladder of another suspect during the interrogation to get the information to catch the assassins. He is warned by his chief Captain Brawley (Ed Begley) to cool off, and when he beats another suspect on the street, Brawley sends him "upstate to Siberia" in the cold Westham to calm down and help the locals in a murder case of a girl. When he arrives, he visits the family of the victim, whose father Walter Brent (Ward Bond) is decided to kill the murderer. They chase the man through the snow, and after a car accident, they reach the isolated house of Mary Malden (Ida Lupino), a blind woman that lives alone in the middle of nowhere with her brother Danny (Sumner Williams) that has mental problem. Brent and Jim are lodged by Mary to spend the night, and Jim is affected by Mary in a process of humanization and redemption.

"On Dangerous Ground"is a simple movie with a tale of loneliness, trust and redemption developed through two totally different characters that have only loneliness in common. Jim Wilson lives in the big city, is brutal, trusts nobody and is in the edge in his career, acting like a gangster wearing a badge. Mary Malden lives in the countryside, is gentle, has to trust everybody and sacrificed her chance to see again to take care of her mentally unstable brother. The process of humanization of Jim Wilson is depicted through his relationship with Mary and is very touching. Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan have great performances under the direction of Nicholas Ray in this credible story. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Cinzas Que Queimam" ("Ashes that Burn")

Note: On 14 January 2017, I saw this film again.

Director Nicholas Ray really knew how to give film noir a unique edge. 'In a Lonely Place (1950),' which starred Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, was a brooding study of trust and paranoia, thematically similar in some ways to Billy Wilder's 'Sunset Blvd. (1950),' though more overt in its exploration of Hollywood's failings. Likewise, 'On Dangerous Ground (1952)' presented such an curious interpretation of noir that RKO wasn't sure what to do with it, and the film collected dust on a shelf for two years. Indeed, thematically, the film might even be considered a separate progression from the film noir style, a form of cinematic purification that serves to cleanse a decade of seedy, cynical decadence in the American film industry. The hard-edged squalor of inner-city crime gives way to a liberating expanse of trees and snow, revealing an incidence of crime, certainly, but also, and more importantly, a fresh and cathartic sense of nobility that is not to be found in the urban back-streets.

Robert Ryan is terrific as Jim Wilson, a city cop who's been on the Force for eleven years, after which he has become bitter, lonely and completely disillusioned. Whereas his colleagues, having found stability in their families, are able to leave their work behind at the end of every shift, Jim returns home each night seething with the rottenness of city life. In his futile efforts to scourge the streets of scum, he has become those whom he despises, and has a tendency to unexpectedly explode with violence. Nicholas Ray, who would later give a resounding voice to teenage angst in 'Rebel Without a Cause (1955),' here captures perfectly the pressure and frustration of Jim Wilson's occupation, and the horror when he suddenly realises what he has driven to become: "Why do you make me do it? You know you're gonna talk! I always make you punks talk!" This seedy urban nightmare has the grittiness equal to any film noir of the era, and Bernard Hermann's pounding score lends a fierce intensity.

Then – against all expectations – 'On Dangerous Ground' takes a dramatic narrative turn. Jim, in order to cool off, is assigned to a murder case in the snow-strewn countryside upstate. A young girl has been killed, and her father (Ward Bond) has pledged to murder the man responsible. Almost immediately, the pair strike out in pursuit of the accused perpetrator, and their frantic chase ends at the home of a lonely blind woman, Mary Malden (Ida Lupino, who also directed a few scenes after Ray fell ill). Jim's interactions with Mary inevitably lead him towards some sort of redemption, but I was struck most profoundly by their earlier conversations, particularly when Mary thanks Jim for his compassion in not showing any pity towards her. This moment illustrated so poignantly, I think, how far from humanity Jim has allowed himself to drift: his reaction to Mary's condition was not borne from any compassion or kindness, but rather from his lack of it; he long ago abandoned the ability to feel pity for another person.

Though 82 minutes to perhaps too brief a running time to present such a drastic character turn-around, the mid-film tonal shift is otherwise handled very well. George E. Diskant's claustrophobic camera-work, which made dynamic use of hand-held photography, becomes slower and more contemplative, and Herrmann's score similarly tones down into the mournful melody of Virginia Majewski's viola da gamba. Jim's tentative partnership with the murder victim's mutinous father allows him to acknowledge his duty as a police detective, providing an avenue through which he can evade his violent compulsions. The trust and kindness demonstrated by the blind Mary also permits him to recognise the overwhelming goodness of human beings, and even a certain element of sympathy to be found in the acts of a criminal. Though Nicholas Ray originally wished to end the film on more of a downbeat note, the studio enforced an optimistic ending. Nevertheless, I liked that 'On Dangerous Ground' acts as a counterpoint to the inescapable doom in most film-noirs; that a soul as disillusioned as Jim Wilson can ultimately uncover salvation is a reassuring thought in today's crazy world.