COOL FLICKS: On Dangerous Ground (1952)

Here's my contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blogathon hosted by Tony at Cinema Viewfinder. It began on September 5 and typically I got my post up on the last day - today, September 8. For other posts on Nicholas Ray's movies go here. When at Tony's blog you can also check out numerous reviews of his own on Ray's work and reviews by guest writerss that have received a spotlight page.

On Dangerous Ground takes a modern look at the lonely life of a cop who has been so disgusted and deadened by dealing with the seedy underworld of criminals that he nearly destroys himself and his career. It's based on a British novel Mad with Much Heart by Gerald Butler. While the movie retains the name of the lead character and his relationship with a blind woman who is the sister of a murder suspect he is pursuing that is about all that the book has in common with the movie. The setting is changed to the US and the entire first half of the move set in a noir world of petty criminals, prostitutes, con men and oversexed and drugged out molls is entirely the creation of Ray and screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides who makes a cameo as a corrupt bar owner.

For a second viewing of this excellent movie I have to say I didn't recall much. It was like watching it for the first time. After the second viewing, I watched a third time and - yes - a fourth time. Each viewing revealed a new layer to me, something new and exciting, something touchingly poignant, something subtly devious, something subversive that slipped by the censors. Each time I marveled at how this movie made over fifty years ago still has power and resonance today.

The opening credits are accompanied by one of Bernard Herrmann's magnificent scores. Blaring french horns and clanging bells dominate the music that suggests the call of hunters of horseback as we watch a car - presumably a police car - patrolling the city streets lit only by streetlights and the occasional neon sign. Then, the first image: a gun in a holster. In quick succession we meet three policemen all on their way to their night shift jobs. Two men are married - one with a wife who hates to be alone and quite obviously a sensual loving wife, the second married with a silent wife and a brood of seven kids with whom he watches western shows on TV. Last is Robert Ryan, playing Jim Wilson, who lives alone in a cramped studio apartment. No one helps him into his coat or shoulder holster, no one hugs him tightly as he tries to make his way out the door. He looks over his shoulder to an empty table before he leaves his home.

The we see what kind of people Wilson has to deal with every night. He's hit on by a bar girl clearly underage ("How old are you?" he asks her. "Old enough," she kittenishly replies.) He has to shirk off the whining addictions of an alcoholic informer named Lucky. Later from another informer he receives a tip that might be able to help his team locate a gangster on the run. It's the gangster's girlfriend Myrna (played with sleazy relish by Cleo Moore) and she's quite a number. She comes to the door, bleary eyed, slurring speech and immediately tries to come on to Wilson. She teases him and invites his advances. In the presence of his partner he refuses, then notices some battle scars from being tossed around by someone. He asks the partner to go outside. Myrna tries another ploy with Wilson. She suggests he give her similar attention and he leers at her. The scene fades out and we're unsure what kind of attention Wilson will give the girl, but we know it's probably not going to be sex.

Wilson succeeds in getting one more name from the woman and the cops make their way to a second flophouse where Wilson is in rare form. He beats another suspect but his partner interrupts him and the entire floor of residents rushes to the still open doorway of the apartment. The gangster jeers at Wilson, "Go ahead and hit me" hoping he will in the presence of witnesses, but Wilson knows better. He once again sends his partner outside to get the residents back in their rooms and asks him to close the door. And then we see Wilson completely fly off the handle. Screaming and raging at the poor sap: "I'll give you something. I always get what I want. Why do you make me do this to you? Why? Why?" The scene fades out but even in the squad car on the way to the much needed hospital Wilson cannot restrain himself. His partner has to prevent a second beating as the gangster is escorted in the hospital where it is later discovered he has a ruptured bladder among other serious injuries.

Wilson is one sorry soul. A solitary existence with no friends ("A cop has no friends," he tells his commanding officer), no wife, no one in whom he can confide and his hatred for the degradation he must face everyday has eaten away at his psyche. His verbal lashing out and his uncontrolled violence are signs of a man in serious trouble. He hates himself but he can't stop himself. The numerous lectures he receives from his cop partners and the captain never seem to sink in.

"You sure don't care about people do you?" says one cop after he gets the dope from Myrna, the floozy. Wilson must know, his partner reminds him, when her gangster boyfriend finds out she ratted on him she'll most likely be killed. Wilson has no response, only a slight sneer.

"Why do you make me do it? Why? WHY!"

Another of his fellow cops tells him, "To get something out this life you have to put something into it. From the heart." This is the most telling piece of advice Wilson will receive and it will come back to him later in the movie.

Out of control and fearing he will not only hurt more people but hurt the entire force and ruin their good standing the captain takes Wilson off duty in the city. He's sent to Siberia - upstate New York, that is - to help in the capture of a child killer. When he arrives he meets Walter Brent, the father of the murdered girl and Wilson might as well be looking in a mirror. Brent (Ward Bond) who, by the way, is never seen without a rifle in his hand, is bent on revenge. He wants only one thing - the blood of the man who killed his daughter. Just as Wilson has his fists, Brent has his rifle. "None of your city stuff -- no fancy trials, no sob sisters. I'm just gonna empty this shotgun in his belly. Anyone who tries to stop will get the same thing." One of many chases ensues. They set off on foot and follow footprints in the snow, then have to pursue him by car when the suspect knocks down a man and steals a car. Brent and Wilson commandeer a car from a woman gathering wood.

Wilson, in the face of the brutish and brash Brent, immediately takes the opposite tack. He adopts a more sensible and quiet persona. At the home of the blind sister Mary (Ida Lupino) loneliness is talked about repeatedly. Mary says "A city can be lonely, too. Sometimes I think people who are never alone are the loneliest. Most lonely people try to figure it out -- about loneliness." She senses almost supernaturally, as only blind people in the movies can do, that Wilson is a good man with a good soul. She tries to link the two of them together in their solitary lives. But she's picking up cues that we know mean something completely different. She says, "There's no pity in your voice. You didn't take the tray from my hands like most people." She thinks he's been around a blind person before, but he really doesn't care what she does. He watches her. He's sort of fascinated by her. Perhaps in this woman he has a chance to change his ways.


Robert Ryan as Jim Wilson & Ida Lupino as Mary Malden

The first scene between Mary and Wilson is really something to marvel. Mary tries all sorts of persuasion methods in trying to win Wilson to her side. Wilson is amazed that anyone can think of him as a savior, as a person to whom she can entrust her misunderstood brother. We know that if Wilson had run into her brother in the city he'd beat him senselessly and see him as a freak. But to a man who has never been accountable to anyone other than himself he sees this as a chance to prove himself. Mary provides him with a chance to change. If he can find the boy and save him from the vengeful hands of Brent he might be redeemed form his hateful brutish self. he might be able to exorcise the demon inside him. He doesn't want to become Brent.

The movie then becomes a war between Brent and Wilson. Who will get to Mary's brother Danny first? Will he be killed vigilante stye or will he be resecued from execution? Wilson is determined to prove that he can settle a case without violence. The first thing he does is to disarm Brent while he's asleep. He never raises a fist while in the country. Outside of the city it seems he has a chance. Free from the sleaze and corruption, without a bar in sight and not one temptress trying put the make on him Wilson is sure he can escape the trapped world of cruelty and brutality he himself created.

The climax of the movie is heart racing. With Herrmann's music underscoring a chase to a rocky cliff it is hard not to draw comparisons with North by Northwest. Close-ups of feet slipping on the snowy rocks, Brent after Danny, Wilson after Brent and Danny so desperate to escape and not looking where he should be looking. It's the most thrilling set piece in the movie.

Some take exception to the almost too neat way in which Wilson is redeemed. I've read other reviews of this movie calling his transformation unbelievable. I couldn't disagree more. The story is perfectly structured. All the signs of his self-loathing are there. We know he wants to change and Mary is his last chance. Everything in the movie serves this ultimate goal. Not only the technical aspects of camera angles, editing and lighting, but every line of dialog, every prop, even the costuming choices and bit characters all have a genuine purpose to the overall story. On Dangerous Ground is truly a modern movie - a movie with a noir heart that is longing for desperate change.

The Great Yant Mystery - A. B. Cunningham

In my second reading of A. B. Cunningham I am discovering that his detective novels are more than just mysteries. The Great Yant Mystery (1943) is the seventh book in this rural American series of detective novels featuring Sheriff Jess Roden. It has hardly a trace of the Southern Gothic that overtook in my first reading in Cunningham’s work yet still in supply are the neat backwoods detective touches that were on display in that other book. This time I felt that Cunningham with six books under his belt was trying for something on a deeper level than a mere puzzling whodunit. This book does have its share of baffling incidents attached to the mysterious death of an invalid, but what makes the book notable is Cunningham’s commentary on how wartime has affected rural Kentucky as well as complexities in Roden’s personal life. It may be one of the earliest attempts in American detective fiction to establish a series detective as a character who grows and is enhanced from book to book – similar to the modern series detectives we now have.

The plot is deceptively simple here. Who would want to murder a terminally ill woman? Isa Yant was on her deathbed with only a few days of life remaining and yet someone felt it necessary to poison her. The poison was not self administered as she was not able to eat or drink without assistance and Roden is sure that it was given to her in food or as medicine by someone she trusted. Almost immediately this causes a furor among the majority of the characters as sensitivities are riled, Roden is accused of slander, of being a meddler, and judging people. When he gives the information to a newspaper reporter eager for a juicy scoop the news is published with the headline ISA YANT MURDERED BY INTIMATE! and all hell breaks loose. Roden is now accused of libel and is challenged by Isa’s husband Clark, her sister May, May’s husband, the family nurse and a local physician. About the only one who does not come down hard on Roden is Isa’s father-in-law, old man Caleb, a crotchety old coot who firmly believes that Isa’s illness was “nothin’ but fakery.”

Roden is also adept at the kind of detective work only a country man could master. When he finds a horse tied up to a sapling with a slip knot and the area showed no signs of any other horse ever being tied there he is convinced that the rider of the horse is a woman in a hurry. He reasons that no man would ever tie up a horse to a weak and young tree like a sapling and never would a man tie a horse to anything using a slip knot. He goes one step further and figures that the woman in a hurry was also acting surreptitiously since the sapling where she chose to leave her horse was in an area far off the main road, a bit into the woods, out of view of anyone who might be passing by.

Similar to Holmes’ “dog that did nothing” there is an animal clue that proves to be the damning piece of evidence that will cement Roden’s case and help point to the identity of the murderer. But unlike the dog that did nothing in the nighttime in a nice bit of countrified evidence Roden has a bullfrog that did do something. A witness who was near Isa’s house the night of the murder tells Roden that she heard a bullfrog make a funny noise followed shortly thereafter by a splash. Roden takes this to be a signifier of a bullfrog that was startled by someone near the river and that it jumped into the water. He will elaborate on just how and why the person scared the frog in the final sentence of the book.

That is not to say that Roden does not cheat a bit at being a detective. For all his cleverness about the horse, the sapling and the slip knot, for all the insight into the behavior of bullfrogs at nighttime he still is not reluctant to spy on his neighbors. There are scenes where Roden creeps about underneath window sills eavesdropping and snooping into people’s home who happen to leave their front doors unlocked. He may show signs of ingenuity with the animal world but when it comes to spying and snooping on people he is lacking in subtlety and often gets caught.

There is also a polemical section in the book where Roden mulls over the motives that differentiate male and female murderers. He posits that men and women each have three basic “drives” that will impel them to commit murder. Women he says will kill for love, display or ease. Men he says have women, freedom and power as their main drives for murder.

Love, ease, display. If a woman commits murder, it is for one of these. Without them life would be worthless; for them, no chance is too great. She wants the exhilaration of knowing that a man finds her irresistible, she wants to queen it around, and she wants to be the lady of leisure, stretching like a cat in the sun. If a woman killed Isa Yant, it was a woman who would thereby gain the love of a man or the riches of Clark Yant; riches that would enable her to...take up again the old life of display... 

I’ve never heard murderous motives described in such sexist, narrow minded terms. I take issue -- as I am sure anyone would -- with most of what he says as being typically female. Even for 1943 it seems incredibly ignorant. He talks of men desiring women, that their drives are purely biological. Women can't have these drives? He also says that women are not seeking after power. And most insulting of all: "Woman doesn't hunger for freedom. She is docile." Whoa! Is Roden is acting as the voice of Cunningham here? If so -- woe to him. I wonder if Cunningham ever married. Roden, on the other hand, is a confirmed bachelor with an affection deeper for his band of hunting dogs than for women. Yet strangely in this book he has the first inklings of being genuinely attracted to a woman - one of the suspects by the name of Mary Bird. The reader hopes he will score big with her, but his awkwardness in never having taken the time to understand a woman's feelings and his stubbornness in conducting the investigation interfere. Based on his thoughts outlined above it should not come as too much of a surprise that he does not win the girl.

In other places the book is rather surprisingly timeless, ironically making it pointedly modern despite the sexism on display. A chapter devoted to the thoughts of the curmudgeon Caleb Yant discusses in great detail how some of the older generation Kentuckians have grown tired of the encroaching modern ways of city folk and post-war American lifestyle. Hard work and thrift were Caleb's guiding principles and to see the Age of Plenty intrude into his simple and satisfying world galls him. He talks with derision of "conspicuous waste and instalment buying and young striplings frittering their money on nickelodeons and smart Alecs sporting ox-blood shoes and women having their water piped into the kitchen and everybody running around in unpaid-for cars."  He wants nothing to do with convenience and easy living. He even blames Roosevelt for wrecking the country after the New Deal when "sows were slaughtered to make the country rich and checks were handed out for not working the land and the shiftless waxed fat and fished the summer away." Seems that some things in America never change

I enjoyed this book immensely as a wonderful example of how a detective novel can also be a novel about American life. It perfectly captures the shift in an old-fashioned backwoods America and post-war life. Already in 1943 the farms were dying thanks to government assistance and incentives, the quiet of the country was disturbed by fast talking young men in their fast and noisy automobiles, and modern advances in medicine were changing the way a country doctor could treat his patients. All three of these signs of the times will prove to help Roden in solving the murder and unmasking a rather vicious and nasty killer.