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To me, this movie is perfection.

Sadly Over-hyped

Best movie ever!

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Down to earth, real life visit to the side of life less traveled also known as film noir. What happens in the world of film noir everyone can relate to. Its raw, exciting, real life and has you asking how to get out of a predicament just like it had you wanting to get into it. Excellent movie that starts out slow but for a reason so relax and don't be impatient! The beginning becomes clear in the end. Excellent acting and story-line that when it kicks into gear keeps you there and won't let go. I like movies that have you asking yourself "what would you have done" and then play itself out letting you see the choice the writers made. There is a scene where Robert Mitchum starts to figure things out but at a cost. Listen closely as he has dialog that makes the whole story make sense down the line. You also get to see another good cliché at work and acted out to perfection in this film: "be careful what you ask for cause you may just get it" as well as the principal of wanting and needing a second chance. Nice little goody-gem of a flick. Imagine back then how people would go catch a movie with a date or friends, popcorn and coke and get treated to a couple of features of this quality. That's a nice night out. I like to eat while watching and this is a good sandwich movie with a tasty drink plus a snack of choice especially when the action kicks in. To me, Robert Mitchum could do no acting wrong. I read his biography and he was a yahoo anything goes anti-establishment type of guy. He never got the rebel under control but he managed to make it make a living for him. I thought he went too far in his book but it is his life to do with as he pleases. He most certainly did! The title of his book said it all: Baby I Don't Care

In some movies, the protagonist will commit some minor offense that will result in his being punished way in excess of what he would seem to deserve.This movie begins in a hospital, which we typically think of as serving the public good. Jeff is a doctor at that hospital, and Julie, his fiancée, is a nurse. We know that their relationship is wholesome, because he regularly gives her a white rose. He is dedicated to his profession, and so much so that a nurse reprimands him for working too hard. To underscore what a good man Jeff is, his patients are children, with whom he has a terrific bedside manner. He tells a story to a girl in an iron lung to help her go to sleep, and then chats with a little boy, promising that they will have more baseball discussions in the future.But it is when he is talking to the boy that we discover Jeff's sin. When the boy mentions that he knows Jeff will be going away, the nurse says, in an apologetic tone, that she told him that Jeff will be going into private practice. Private practice? Oh no! That means he values money more than people.Now, it might be thought that I must be some kind of socialist to condemn a doctor for wanting to go into private practice. On the contrary, I am enough of a capitalist to want to see doctors make a lot of money, either in a hospital or in private practice. And good doctors go into private practice all the time. But the people who made this movie put in the remark about private practice for a reason. Remove that one brief scene with the boy, and the rest of the movie could have been exactly the same, without anyone thinking there was something missing. We would simply believe that Jeff was being punished for being unfaithful to Julie. Because the writers put that line in the movie, we can only conclude that it was supposed to tell us something about Jeff's character, that he was guilty of forgoing his public service for the sake of private greed.It's an old story. Once a man gives in to one sin, he soon gives in to another. Just as he is about to leave the hospital, he is delayed by an emergency attempted suicide. The woman is Margo, and when she wakes up, she sees Julie's rose and thinks it is for her, saying she likes red roses instead. When Margo grabs Jeff's hand to thank him for pulling her through, Julie senses something, raising her eyebrows, and she exchanges glances with Jeff.As it turns out, Julie's doubts and suspicions are justified. Jeff begins dating Margo, bringing her a red rose on a regular basis, red being an obvious symbol for lust, the new sin added to the previous one of avarice. And it turns out that her marriage is based on an exchange of one sin for the other, money in exchange for sex. Jeff only finds out about this later, because Margo has lied to him about her marriage, claiming her husband is her father. This lie leads to a confrontation between the two men, leading to blows, and ultimately to the husband's death. Jeff believes he accidentally killed him.Suffering from a concussion, Jeff cannot think straight, and he lets Margo talk him into fleeing with her. From that point on, everyone they come into contact with wants money from them. By the time they get to the border, they are broke. But then Margo reveals that for years she has been squirreling her husband's money away in a Mexican bank in her maiden name. Jeff further realizes that it was Margo who murdered her husband, smothering him with a pillow. She then tries to smother Jeff, and later shoots him. Then the police shoot her.Her dying confession exonerates Jeff, who awakes in a hospital. It is clear that he and Julie are going to get back together, white rose and all. While nothing is said one way or the other, we suspect that once he recovers and is no longer a patient in this hospital, he will return to the other hospital where he will continue working as a resident. He has presumably learned his lesson about wanting to go into private practice.

I'm graciously giving this a five, only because of Robert Mitchum and what he added to the film. After the interesting opening, where you see him as a caring doctor, and loving fiancé, followed by a visit to the female suicide attempt he is treating, things start to fall apart in a hurry. A follow-up on the suicidal woman, who unexpectedly leaves the hospital early, is naturally done by Mitchum (read above) the ultimate nice guy.Tracking her down to a mansion, she explains strangely about "her father" basically running her life-demanding Mitchum to leave, only to say she will need him later. After the later meeting, following her home, one surprise leads to about five over the top circumstances. The last hour of the movie you are just waiting for the obvious conclusion to arrive, and it does. Mitchum, doing as much as he can with not much to work with.

Legendary actor Robert Mitchum (1917-1997) is perhaps best known for his work in the film noir genre, including classics like Out of the Past (1947) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). The 1950 road movie Where Danger Lives, directed by John Farrow, is not bad either, even though it does not fully reach the atmosphere and tension of the very best noirs out there.The plot follows the traditional noir pattern (a man reluctantly facing increasing adversities and paranoia under a woman's influence) rather faithfully. A well-liked but not very well-off doctor named Jeff Cameron (Mitchum) helps to save the life of a beautiful female patient named Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue) after her suicide attempt. She invites him to her home to thank him and the two quickly fall in love, but she appears to have many secrets, starting with the man she introduces as her father (the great Claude Rains). After an unfortunate accident, Jeff finds himself and Margo heading towards Mexico while on the run from the law and a crippling head injury slowly eating away his ability to think and act clearly.The plot itself provides no major surprises; instead, the special touch of the movie comes from the effect of Cameron's concussion which causes him to perceive everything more or less hazily. Mitchum always had a certain "sleepy" look to his face in the first place, but this extra twist makes him come across as a borderline sleepwalker, a style that I am not sure I like even though it is justified in the context of the story. The performance of Domergue as the femme fatale Margo is pretty good though; she shows decent range growing from worried to controlling and ultimately desperate, even though the big revelation regarding her past doesn't feel highly convincing. Many of the supporting actors do good jobs as well, such as Tol Avery as a shady car salesman "Honest Hal" and Philip Van Zandt as a touring cabaret show manager and human trafficker Milo DeLong.What I think is the biggest flaw in an otherwise adequate movie is the lack of tightening tension and paranoid atmosphere, the staples of film noir. Jeff and Margo encounter numerous cops who inadvertently cause great stress especially to him, but somehow the uneasy atmosphere is not conveyed to the audience as powerfully as in many other films – probably due to the alienation caused by Jeff's head injury that Mitchum portrays so relentlessly. The dramatic finale is the only scene where the suspense becomes truly concrete, although many earlier parts are entertaining in a different way, for example the "Wild West Whiskers Week" festival in a small Arizona town.Notwithstanding my complaints above, in the end I liked Where Danger Lives alright. The creeping sickness approach brings an interesting aspect to the storytelling, even if it also hurts the mood at points. The camera work and the black and white visuals are fine too, so noir fans have few reasons to not check the movie out. At only 82 minutes it is perfectly watchable for more casual film buffs as well.