Watch On Dangerous Ground For Free

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Nicholas Ray with an assist from Ida Lupino directed this offbeat noir where halfway in the story moves from the form's comfort zone of the metropolis to the great outdoors. The darkness that drives it remains however. Detective Joe Wilson (Robert Ryan) is experiencing burn out at an alarming rate. He gets results but brutalizes suspects in the process forcing his chief to farm him out to work on an ugly homicide case in the boondocks. There he encounters the rage filled mirror image (Ward Bond) of a grieving father while having to adopt different methodology in questioning a suspect's blind sister (Ida Lupino).On Dangerous Ground offers up the quintessional Ray protagonist in the alienated Wilson played with disturbing menace by Ryan. His chilling attempt to stay in check before exploding reeks with unglued intimidation. Bond and Lupino hold their own with Ryan in what is basically a three character film while director Ray maintains a steady pace that is powerfully informed by Bernard Hermann's re-lentless score.

Detective Jim Wilson is a good cop mired in a bad world of hustlers and pimps and crooks. He has a black and white sense of right and wrong, but he's trapped in infinite shades of gray — a garbage handler, as he self-identifies, who spends his days and nights thankfully cleaning up the trash on the mean streets. He's got pencil-pushing bureaucrats breathing down his neck, and every dame who crosses his path has angle. But he gets things done, he rights wrongs, usually by beating bad guys into submission. In other words, he is an archetype for every bad man on a good mission and this movie is a blue print for every renegade copy movie ever made thereafter.And as is this case in almost every one of those cop movies thereafter, the world is quickly changing around him and in the new world, you can't solve all your problems with your fists — or, as in more modern movies, with a gun. (Side note: apparently things don't change too quickly much because this story line is still alive and well.) After a particularly brutal scene in which the sympathetic, sadistic cop beats a confession out of a craven, seemingly masochistic criminal, he draws the ire of his commanding officer who sends him upstate to a rural area gripped in an icy winter. A girl has been murdered and the locals, especially the father, aim to settle the score. Everything in his gritty, urban background has readied him to dole out some sympathetic justice, but there's just one problem — in the course of the investigation, he meets a dame without an angle: the beautiful, and blind, Mary Malden (played by Ida Lupino).Her mentally challenged brother is a suspect and Jim and the victim's father are forced wait out the night at Mary's house. For a man who has seen too much and trusts no one, he can't help but fall for the lovely Mary who has can't see anything and is forced to, as she admits, trust everyone.More modern sensibilities are used to (numbed by?) a direct visual treatment of passion, but the muted approach in this movie heightens the impact. When their hands touch, we are treated to a moment of romantic discovery that surpasses all the heat and energy of the currently more popular bra and pantie clad tussling between love interests.The movie is shot in a jumpy, jerky way (mumblenoir?) with crackling dialog, adds to the tension, sense of foreboding and drama. And the car chase — sliding along icy roads — was well-executed. For such a short movie (82 minutes), it covers a lot of territory — from the heart of the city to the emptiness of the wilderness, and from cynical resignation and brutality to hope and redemption.-- www.cowboyandvampire.com --

Film-noir was a common genre for Nicholas Ray and he had directed several of them, one of which is Humphrey Bogart's career's highlights, In a Lonely Place (1950). Ray is best known for the James Dean classic Rebel without a Cause and the ones familiar with his early film-noirs can see the continuity of noir in it. There's a lot of same kind of sentimentality in On Dangerous Ground that was in 'In a Lonely Place'. It's a film with heart and a non-traditional noir. A hard city cop Jim Wilson isn't afraid of using his fists when the flow of information runs slow. After getting many remarks from his boss, he gets sent to a small town village 70 miles up north. This gives the audience a chance to follow an exciting film-noir story in a different milieu. There in snowy roads and mountains Wilson has to help the local police to solve a murder of a teenage girl. Wilson starts the chase with an aggressive man, who is the father of the murdered girl. As they get going Wilson becomes acquainted with a blind woman, who seems to be having her fingers in the case.Private eyes, desperate men and dangerous women were the common clichés of film-noir. The character of Jim Wilson is played by the film-noir tough guy Robert Ryan, and he is far from a conventional film-noir character. He's a hard-boiled cop, who has been working for the police for 11 years. In his job he sees all kinds of dirty stuff; murder, betrayal, ruthlessness and disregard. All this has made him very cynic, which prepares this character for a good old film-noir. Because just as ruthlessness and moral complexity so is cynicism a hallmark of film-noir. When Jim Wilson gets sent to the small town, he sees himself in the raging father of the murdered girl. For the first time he starts thinking about himself. The woman he later on becomes acquainted with Mary Malden (Ida Lupino "High Sierra") manages to make him think about the bottom loneliness in himself, which he hadn't been thinking that much before. "The people who are around people are sometimes the loneliest." On Dangerous Ground isn't an intelligent study of loneliness, but it does build a fine character. And the sentimentality it exudes offers a nice change from other films of the genre.On Dangerous Ground is a traditional film-noir in an unlikely milieu. It's part of the post-noir 'movement' in the 1950's, filled with disillusions and Cold War paranoia, of which this isn't the best example but for the ones interested in it I'd recommend Kiss Me Deadly (1956). The score of On Dangerous Ground was composed by Bernard Herrman, who is best known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock but he also composed scores for films by Francois Truffaut, Robert Wise and Orson Welles. His music is one of the reasons, which tops the ranking of this film. Herrman has an incredibly talented understanding for musical score and the way he uses stringed instruments to build up tension is marvelous. On Dangerous Ground is a film-noir set in snowy conditions. It holds the interest of its viewer till the last minute and in the end it builds a mature picture of a lonely man, who learns that cynicism won't carry you far.

"On Dangerous Ground" is a powerful psychological drama about the loneliness and despair experienced by a police detective. The causes of his emotional state, the damaging effect it has on how he does his job and also the means by which his feelings of isolation and anguish are gradually eased, are all depicted with great skill and intensity and produce a very human story which illustrates the immense value of achieving a successful work/life balance.Whilst involved in a hunt for the killers of another police officer, detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) beats up a contact of the suspects and successfully elicits information which leads to the arrests of the culprits. Later, however, he's told by Captain Brawley (Ed Begley) that the lawyer who represents the man who he beat up is considering legal action over the level of brutality which his client suffered. Brawley advises Jim about the need to use a more proportionate amount of force in future but very soon after this warning another incident occurs where Jim again uses excessive violence. He is then told by Brawley that he's becoming a liability to the Department and as a consequence he gets assigned to assist in a murder case being investigated in an upstate rural community.When Jim arrives at his snow covered destination, the local Sheriff briefs him on the details of the case (which involve the murder of a young girl) and very soon they receive information which leads to both of them and the victim's father Walter Brent (Ward Bond) chasing the main suspect on foot. Later, when the fugitive steals a car, Jim and Walter continue their pursuit in another vehicle but their journey ends suddenly when they veer off the road and run into a ditch close to the suspect's car which had just crashed into a tree. They then follow his footprints which lead to a remote cabin where they meet Mary Malden (Ida Lupino). Mary is the blind sister of the mentally retarded murderer. She has a generous and gentle disposition and quickly recognises Jim's loneliness. Her main concern is the care of her brother and she conscripts Jim's assistance in trying to ensure that he's caught unharmed so that he can be given the kind of professional help that he so obviously needs. Meeting Mary eventually leads to the murderer being caught but also, more unexpectedly to Jim's life and temperament being profoundly affected in a way that he could never have imagined was possible.A striking feature of the film is the sharp contrast which is made between the two environments in which the action takes place. The city is presented as dark and threatening whereas the snowy countryside is depicted as more open, calm and almost pristine in appearance. These impressions are consistent with Jim's experiences, as working in the city had brought him into contact with every type of criminal imaginable and brutalised him in the process. The result was that this tough, honest and efficient cop had actually transformed into someone who was sadistic, bitter and on the verge of a breakdown. In the rural environment he became more even tempered so that when the volatile Walter Brent expressed his determination to personally kill the murderer, Jim found himself acting as a restraining force and an advocate of balance and reason.Jim's loneliness and the negative effects that his work had on him were exacerbated by his lack of personal relationships, an inability to socialise successfully and a failure to separate work from his personal life. His colleagues were family men with hobbies who could leave the strains of the job behind them whilst Jim, by contrast, found that the anguish of dealing with human garbage was something which he carried around with him all the time. When he met Mary, he responded to her warmth and kindness and achieved a level of contentment which he previously would've considered to be impossible.The work of Nicholas Ray (a director known for his sensitivity and compassion for his characters) and strong performances from Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino ultimately produced a movie which was unpretentious, memorable and sometimes also rather disturbing.