On Dangerous Ground

Three cops are preparing for night-shift work in a big city.  The first cop is homely and middle-aged.  he looks weary.  We see his wife lovingly strap his service revolver to his torso.  Cut to the second cop -- this guy is older, close to retirement age, and he is watching cowboys and Indians battling on a tiny TV with a screen shaped like an ibuprofen tablet.  The old cop is surrounded by disheveled, raggedy-looking kids.  Wearily, he rises, turns from the TV set, and his haggard-looking wife hands him his gun.  The third cop is alone in a small, Spartan apartment and his gun is already secured against his belly.  He is eating a meager meal.  When he is finished, this cop, played by Robert Ryan, scrapes the leftovers into a little garbage bucket by his desk.  Later, Ryan's character, a detective, Jim Wilson cries out that being a police officer is like working as a garbage-man.  This is the start of Nicholas Ray's film noir "On Dangerous Ground" (1951), an introductory sequence that illustrates that the director works at a brisk pace, crams as much information as possible into every scene (and, indeed, every frame) and that subtlety is not one of his strong points.  A cop-killer is at large in a nightmarish city, a place visualized as one interminable avenue, a greasy black road wild with reflections in puddles and beset at intersections with lurid signs for juke-joints and pawn-shops.  The city is squalid, without tall buildings, the roadway lined by squat tenements and taverns.  Jim Wilson is a specialist in torture.  Other cops look the other way when he beats information out of the grotesque villains that he encounters.  In a dirty apartment, a gun-moll licks her lips lasciviously, looking forward to torture at the hands of the hero.  He raises his hand to strike her and, then,  Ray cuts to the night-town avenue, the dirty alleyways, Bernard Hermann's score screaming at the audience, all throbbing tom-toms, shrieking violins, blatting trombones and French horns.  (The score is pure expressionistic hysteria -- a howl of urgent despair, very similar to Hermann's work on "Taxi Driver" twenty-five years later.)  Another bad-guy is cornered in his apartment.  His face is avid and his eyes glitter with lurid desire as he invites Wilson to torture him -- "Why?  Why do you make me do it?" the cop bellows as he approaches the cowering criminal.  Wilson is clearly on the edge of a nervous break-down and his boss, the police chief, says that he has become nothing more than a "gangster with a badge."  The other cops seem afraid of his violence and counsel Wilson that he should consider getting into another line of work.  After the female informant is killed in reprisal for her talking to Wilson, the rogue cop is sent into the country with instructions to work on a murder case in a little village high in the mountains.  Ray's scenario exchanges one hell for another.  The village in the mountains sits on Tibetan plateau covered with grey snow and ice and ringed by huge spectral summits.  The town is a shabby collection of shacks with mud streets, a place that seems almost completely uninhabitable.  It's always snowing and, at higher elevations, there are forests filled with more snow, drifts blocking roads and paths -- this is one of the coldest-looking movies ever made.  A killer is at large in this wilderness, a retarded boy who has murdered a little girl.  Ryan is drawn into the manhunt with the child's father, an enraged and vengeful Ward Bond, the man toting a huge shotgun and promising to shoot the teenage killer in the belly and leave him to bleed to death.  There are some chases through the icy mud and snow and, after climbing through a frigid forest, Wilson and the father find themselves at a huge square manor house, the kind of place where the young Citizen Kane once played with his sled Rosebud.  (The movie was shot in the Colorado Rockies at high elevation near Leadville.)  A blind woman played by Ida Lupino lives in the big house, seemingly all alone, although quickly enough we discover that she is sheltering the murderer, her mentally ill little brother.  Wilson sympathizes with feisty and kind blind woman's plight and promises to protect her brother from vigilante violence.  But there are more chases and the boy scales a peculiar heap of fractured rock in an attempt to escape, slips on the ice and falls to his death.  Ward Bond is suddenly grief-stricken when he sees that the killer is "just a kid" and he carries the boy's corpse across the frozen meadows to the blind woman's house.  Everything is tense as a coiled spring and the 88 minute films is crammed with savage incidents.  Ray seems to want to put as much as possible into every scene.  Sometimes this strategy works -- he piles up bits of acting business, strange panoramas of black and white desolation, unsettling reaction shots, and cryptic dialogue, a bebop Jackson Pollock frieze of emotion and imagery that seems almost too much to comprehend.  (One scene demonstrates Ray's crazy profligacy:  Wilson is getting dressed-down by his tough boss, the police chief.. This is a standard film noir and genre scene, something you find in every cop movie.  But Ray stages the scene not in the police chief's office but in a big downtown restaurant with stained glass windows, something like the old Berghof in Chicago, and the boss shouts at Wilson while simultaneously eating his way through vast amounts of food, ordering waiters around, and making non sequitur comments about how delicious the vegetables are -- between barking threats and insults at Wilson, the police chief, like a good Jewish mother, keeps begging the copper to share a plate with him.  The whole thing is utterly bizarre -- too much "too much", a surfeit of activity for a sequence that really has little or nothing to do with the plot:  it's merely a way to get Wilson out of hell-city and up to hell-plateau.)   The movie doesn't have much of a story, just a set of parallels between the big city and remote mountain wilderness -- both places involve murders, questionable police tactics, and Ida Lupino even suggests, albeit indirectly, that Wilson might consider "roughing her up" to get the data that he needs -- like the other two victims of Wilson's gestapo tactics she says something to the effect of "I'm sure you'll get it out of me."  Of course, the kind and brave blind girl turns out to be the rogue cop's salvation and the movie's last ten minutes are moistly sentimental -- huge close-ups, images of the couple wandering through obviously rear-projected woods, the ring of mountains shot day-for-night and hovering above the plateau like huge ghosts.  It's kitsch but fairly effective.  The film is frantic in all respects and a good demonstration of Ray's scurrilous, energetic style, technique that transforms garbage into something approaching art.