The Warner Archive is known for pleasant surprises, but this one is a real thrill — one of the very best RKO films noir, reissued in a much-needed beautiful restoration. A movie that’s always been marginal in quality now looks and sounds picture-perfect.
On Dangerous Ground is just one of many productions battered about by RKO’s wildcat mogul Howard Hughes. It languished on the shelf for almost two years, was partly re-shot and was certainly changed from Nicholas Ray’s original continuity, with an entirely different ending. Yet the result is an exceedingly memorable picture that shifts tone from the darkest noir to a reaffirmation of romantic values.
The film’s high quality can be directly attributed to a confluence of powerful talents: the noted John Houseman produced. Director Nicholas Ray is in top form, as are actors Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan, whose best film this just might be. The picture is also galvanized by Bernard Herrmann’s impressive music. His score veers from frantic action to deeply sentimental love themes that would probably sound great against a silent picture.
The ‘rogue cop’ subgenre was just getting underway in 1950. On Dangerous Ground is about a good policeman trapped in a vicious cycle of brutality, the source of which is a deep personal frustration. Honest cop Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) has a serious problem with rage. It results in frequent beatings of suspects, and gets him in hot water with Captain Brawley (Ed Begley). Bitter that society doesn’t respect police work, Jim almost beats a murder suspect to death and callously allows a woman (Cleo Moore) to face the revenge of the suspect’s partners. To cool Wilson off, Brawley sends him to handle a sex murder in a remote mountain village. The idea is that Wilson will unwind, but that’s not what happens. Jim joins a posse led by the manic Walter Brent (Ward Bond), the father of the murdered child. Tracking the killer in deep snow, Jim realizes that things have reversed. He is the representative of law and sanity, who must somehow stop Brent from going berserk. Wilson and Brent meet Mary Malden (Ida Lupino), a blind woman who says she lives alone. The men find evidence that Mary is hiding somebody… the killer, perhaps.
It’s lucky that Nicholas Ray’s film wasn’t completely ruined by Howard Hughes. By the time On Dangerous Ground was finally finished, William Wyler’s similarly themed Detective Story had come out, making the RKO picture seem like a copycat.
Hughes’ changes cleaned up the original script’s vague acknowledgement of police brutality, adding a new scene in which Ed Begley’s authority figure condemns Jim Wilson’s violent tactics. But the re-cut also streamlined what seems to have been a lumpy and somewhat depressing story. A big posse subplot was dropped from the snow sequences, and the director’s ending was lopped off in favor of a highly sentimental romantic finish. Many noir adepts deplore this finish, as did Nicholas Ray. Yet it has to be admitted that with it On Dangerous Ground becomes a highly satisfying drama about isolation and alienation. Jim Wilson is sort of a Travis Bickle character, but one who is fortunate enough to be able to withdraw from the brink of doom at the last minute. Despair and disillusion aren’t unavoidable. The brutal Jim Wilson learns that kindness, love and redemption are there if he seeks them out.
A claustrophobic urban opening enmeshes us in Jim Wilson’s world of vice and venality. Jim doesn’t feel a kinship with anyone. He deals only with snitches and sneering bar owners who attempt to bribe him, like Gatos, played by screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides. Even the attractive soda clerk (Joan Taylor) laughs at the idea of dating a cop, and Jim must spin around to hide his humiliation and anger. Jim’s partners just think he should change his attitude. They prescribe marriage and a home life but Jim is far too hostile to meet any woman on a fair basis. The great Robert Ryan internalizes all of these feelings, not by gnashing his teeth, but through subtle signs, like the way he sets his jaw, or just stares.
The interesting thing is that Jim is an idealist, yet he expresses his disgust by becoming an unfeeling monster. He delights in pummeling uncooperative thugs and must be restrained from attacking a man on the street. He’s manipulative and callous when dealing with the obviously disturbed Myrna (Cleo Moore). Jim leads Myrna on with a cheap tease to get her to reveal key information — knowing that it may well put her life in jeopardy.
About a half hour in, the movie undergoes a startling gear-change that likely confused the critics and audiences of 1952, the ones that expect no surprises in form or storytelling style. A few point-of-view shots through an auto windshield take us to the high mountains and open spaces, the ‘dangerous ground’ where suspicious, violent locals hate outsiders. He’s partnered with a bloodthirsty farmer waving a literal loose cannon in his face, a shotgun. Jim’s urban tricks don’t work with this hick, and he finds it impossible to stay in control. When they find a lead on the suspect, Nicholas Ray plays games with an ecological theme: the mad sex killer has become kind of a wild and instinctual animal. I’ve read a classic treatise of On Dangerous Ground that links the film to Henry David Thoreau because the killer’s name is Walden, as in Walden Pond. Well, even Sight and Sound mistook the name as Walden, but in the movie it’s said twice, and it’s Malden, the same as the book. That doesn’t quash the Thoreau association, however. [Video availability has really changed film criticism. Misread a picture or get an important detail wrong, and one’s critical goose is cooked.]
The tone change out in the country brings in a deliberate, cautious romanticism that recalls silent movie melodramas. Ida Lupino’s blind Mary Malden stops Jim Wilson in his tracks, as if vulnerable and spiritually minded women simply didn’t exist in the city. She’s definitely hiding something, and at first Jim maneuvers to coax the truth from her using the same seductive tactics that worked on Myrna. But it’s Jim who ends up being seduced, when he realizes that he’s found somebody worthwhile, somebody he can care about more than he does his job or his personal bitterness. Mary Malden literally redeems Wilson’s spirit, something that rarely happens with any conviction in dramas of any stripe. The notion of redemption might seem contrary to the hardboiled ethos of film noir… but any artist knows that the best way to bring attention to a contradiction is to use extreme contrasts. Although it appears that Nicholas Ray didn’t intend this to be the film’s ending, On Dangerous Ground finishes by transcending noir values. And who better to see spiritually transformed than Robert Ryan, the patron saint of internal suffering and external hostility?
Filmed in Los Angeles and on location in Colorado, Nicholas Ray’s movie is also an impressive technical achievement. A couple of scenes in the city make fine use of a hand-held camera, while the sequences on the icy roads and in the deep snow achieve a convincing realism. There are no fake snowscapes — we feel like we’re in a blizzard, plain and simple. A few matte paintings are the only optical effects. When the filmmakers do go for tricks, they’re almost imperceptible. Ward Bond enters a house on a sound stage set. He is first seen through a window running to the front door. The window view is a rear projection plate filmed weeks or months earlier, a thousand miles away.
Despite its shaky production history, the film has a superb sense of mood, of contrast between city chaos and a natural, but equally treacherous countryside. The Bernard Herrmann score binds the episodes together as if they were movements in a symphony. The continuity becomes choppy at the end, with Lupino and Ryan walking in front of some shaky back projection, a shoehorned-in prayer scene, and rather jarring dissolves from the country to the city and back again. Herrmann’s score holds it all together in an unbroken emotional progression. Robert Ryan doesn’t have to express Wilson’s epiphany with exaggerated mannerisms — his transformed face and Herrmann’s music do much more than dialogue could.
Why Howard Hughes backed the Roosevelt WPA veteran Nick Ray is still a mystery. Ray was never blacklisted nor forced to prove his loyalty, although he did somehow dodge taking Hughes’ ‘litmus test’ anti-Commie movie, The Woman on Pier 13 (I Married a Communist), a movie that actor Robert Ryan couldn’t avoid. Nor do we understand what the unsubtle Hughes liked in a director who favored delicate screen relationships over macho posing. Ray’s direction of actors and camera in On Dangerous Ground is uniformly excellent, even if he lost control of the film in Howard Hughes’ screwy post-production process. We’re told that the film played off quickly and then dropped out of sight. Only later did it become a late-night television staple. Along with Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin, On Dangerous Ground is an ideal film to interest people in old B&W thriller fare.
