On Dangerous Ground (1951)

Film: On Dangerous Ground (1951)
Stars: Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond
Director: Nicholas Ray
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with the work of Ida Lupino this week with On Dangerous Ground, considerably later in her film career than last week.  By the early 1950's, Lupino's career from the outside looked like it was on the wane.  Her contract with Jack Warner had expired in 1947, and as an actress she was largely doing freelance work in forgettable noirs and dramas at pretty much every other studio about-town.  However, personally it feels like Lupino was at the peak of her powers in Hollywood, as she was enjoying the fruits of her many suspensions of Warner Brothers, where she learned about the behind-the-scenes work of directors and writers, and had begun to direct films herself, including Outrage with Mala Powers and The Hitch-Hiker with Edmond O'Brien.  While our focus this month is on an actress's career on the big screen, rather than in the director's chair, we'll be focusing next week on one of the few films that Lupino made where she actually starred, so we'll have the great joy of seeing Lupino in front-of-and-behind-the-camera in a movie where she became the first female star of any renown to actually direct herself.  First, though, let's take a look at one of the movies she decided worthy of her starring in that took her away from her groundbreaking behind-the-scenes roles, and perhaps the one that looks most interesting on-paper considering it's directed by someone as celebrated as Nicholas Ray: On Dangerous Ground.

(Spoilers Ahead) In the film, Jim Wilson (Ryan) plays a cop-in-the-city who has clear anger problems.  He gets results, but does so through violence and intimidation of his witnesses and suspects.  He's assigned a crime in the country to investigate the death of a young girl whose father Walter Brent (Bond) basically threatens to beat Jim to "enacting justice" on the man who killed his daughter (he's going to kill the murderer himself).  While they are investigating, they eventually realize that the man who killed Brent's daughter A) likely has some sort of mental disability and B) is the brother of a beautiful blind woman named Mary (Lupino) who lives alone except for her brother, and is cautious but protective of him.  She makes a deal with Jim that she'll convince her brother to give himself up for the law in exchange for his protection from Brent, and that trust eventually gives Jim something of a change-of-heart about his "city ways."  Despite that, her brother still dies in an accident during the chase, and Mary is left alone...until in the film's final moments Jim decides to go back to her, as he's clearly fallen in love.

The movie's noted for a few reasons.  For starters, it's hard to pinpoint the genre of what this picture actually is.  The film obviously has the tenets of a noir, with the central death of a young woman driving so much of the plot, but it feels more like an intimate character study.  Though it clocks in at only 82 minutes, the plot is short for a noir (a genre noted for throwing in a number of curveballs and misdirections), as we know who the killer is almost from the onset, and thus it's really the interactions between Jim, Brent, and Mary that drive the catalyst of the story.  Lupino is quite good as Mary, finding aspects of the character that aren't in the script, like her rigidity both in her principles & simply in the way she walks.  This is the sort of role that had won Jane Wyman an Oscar three years earlier, and while I doubt Lupino would have had such illusions for On Dangerous Ground (it's hardly the big-studio showcase that Johnny Belinda was), she gives more subtlety than Wyman did in the biggest moment of her career.

The movie's most marked characteristic, though, is its score.  For anyone who has ever seen, say, Citizen Kane or Psycho or Taxi Driver, you're familiar with the work of Bernard Herrmann.  This film is composed by Herrmann, and was considered one of his favorites.  The movie is the original source of the famed Have Gun Will Travel theme, and has a gorgeous recurring theme surrounding Lupino's Mary featuring the viola d'amore, a set of the music that Herrmann was so smitten with he gave the musician who played the instrument, Virginia Majewski, credit on his own title card.  Combined with a plot that's interesting enough to keep you guessing (even if you know the ending a mile away) and the always consistent actorly sensibilities of Lupino & Ryan, Herrmann's score is another way for me to recommend this picture-it's genuinely lush, the sort of gemlike work that you don't expect to find in a seemingly throwaway B-movie of the 1950's.