ON DANGEROUS GROUND
I’d never heard of On Dangerous Ground until I started researching my father’s life for my memoir/bio Ray by Ray. I got a hold of a video copy and watched it at home on my television. I fell in love with the movie the minute it started.
On Dangerous Ground stars Robert Ryan as Jim, a big city cop with a violent streak. The streets he patrols are rampant with crime, their neighborhoods dark and disillusioned. He is a loner so wound the criminals he encounters fear his wrath. There’s not much stopping him from killing one of them with his bare hands. As a warning-slash-punishment he’s sent to a small mountain town to assist the local police in solving a murder. He falls in love with the prime suspect’s blind aunt, played by Ida Lupino, and his rage dissipates.
The movie was produced, somewhat begrudgingly, by John Houseman, who couldn’t find the connection between the murder story and the love story.
“I saw what drew him to the story but not how he proposed to turn it into a viable movie,” Houseman said.
RKO’s story department shared Houseman’s reservations. An inter-office memo stated that the book, Mad With Much Heart, in which it was to be based, was a powerful story that “is likely to emerge as an ‘art’ production which may receive critical acclaim but no sizeable box office returns,” and voted no on adapting it for the screen.
Houseman sought the opinion of his friend, Raymond Chandler, whom he had worked with at Paramount on The Blue Dahlia. Chandler thought the story was humorless. “The cop is ridiculous. The blind girl is obviously an idiot. And there’s hardly a line of dialogue which would not be pure slop on the screen.”
Houseman owed RKO one more movie before leaving for MGM and decided to go ahead with On Dangerous Ground in spite of himself.
“We had two pictures. We had the business of the good cop given to violence and then we had the perfectly ridiculous plot about the blind girl and the boy, and all that. I always rather disliked it,” Houseman said.
Critics weren’t too kind when the movie was released two years later. Manny Farber, who Nick had known during his years with the Workers Progress Administration, described it as “a treadmill of stumbling, fumbling, smooching, hurtling movement, and as a story told with the camera which is often late to the scene and not sure of what is about to happen.”
The New York Times review said, “For all of Nick Ray’s sincere and shrewd direction and the striking outdoor photography this RKO melodrama fails to traverse its chosen ground.”
The Hollywood Reporter wrote that it was “a good, sound story weakened by a switch from action to character unfoldment. To Ryan goes top credit for enacting a difficult role in a manner that makes his performance acceptable even if sudden change in characterization is not.”
Nick considered On Dangerous Ground a failure. To which the critic Mike Wilmington replied, “But it is the kind of failure only a great director can make. For most of its length On Dangerous Ground functions effectively on three different levels: as an exciting genre thriller, as a ‘heightened’ but basically serious study of the police, and as an intense symbolic drama of the conflict between love and violence.”
Jeanine Basinger called it a masterpiece. I became familiar with her when I was doing research at the UCLA film collection where Columbia and 20th Century Fox house their archives. A former student of hers was doing research on the actress Claire Trevor and noticed that I was researching Nicholas Ray. She told me I should talk to Basinger. I introduced myself to her when she was doing a book signing for Silent Stars at the Museum of Modern Art. As usual I was nervous, half expecting her to shoo me away like a pesty fly. I was thrilled when she told me she had Nick come talk to her classes in the mid to late 1970s and that she would be delighted to answer my questions.
One of the first things that struck me about On Dangerous Ground was how Nick brings the darkness of city life into the light and purity of country living. You see it before Robert Ryan’s character has even met Mary, the blind woman played by Ida Lupino. She is who brings light into his life. I wanted to know at what point Nick does this and how.
“What happens in On Dangerous Ground,” Basinger said, “is you start out with the dark, dark city. The traditional world of film noir. The first shot is a close up of a gun in a holster on a bed. Then you see three cops and you see their different lives and in the leading character Robert Ryan’s life you see the incredibly intelligent layering. You learn from plot and dialogue how he is. He talks about garbage. You learn in visual and in symbiotic meaning how he is. He’s alone. He eats with his gun on while studying mugshots. But you also learn in formal terms. In forward tracking shots that take you into an urban world of neon and darkness, seeing his hand in the foreground of the frame struggling to keep from beating up on someone. Seeing him always in isolated frame away from other more normal people. Then finally what you see is the change of landscape and in one of the best sequences in any movie Robert Ryan drives out of the city into the country and you see him leaving behind the dark urban setting. It moves incredibly economically. You see a sign that says something like County Sherrif’s Office and then you’re there. It’s incredible economy but then what happens is he brings the noir ugliness out into the white landscape. He comes out into a world of white and light and purity and allegedly small town or country values but he brings the ugliness with him. What happens is you have a flow of movement out of the darkness into the light and in the light he finds a woman who’s actually blind. She’s living in total darkness but her home is more decorated than his. Her life is more human, warmer, than his. You have this incredibly wonderful contrast and you move forward in time and space through these short dissolves and so he comes out there and has to accept light and whiteness and some kind of purity into his own life. He loses ugliness there. He learns to be human.”
Nick knew he wasn’t like other people. He was isolated even in a crowd. He was always asking himself what it meant to be human. Searching for answers that might bring him peace.
On Dangerous Ground ends on a more hopeful note than In a Lonely Place. Robert Ryan can’t go back into that urban landscape where he’s destined for a life of brutality and loneliness. Love saves Robert Ryan’s Jim from himself in a way that Humphrey Bogart’s Dix Steele would never experience. Nick was stuck between the two characters. Homeless within himself.
Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground
Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place
Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground
Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place
