Police detective Jim Wilson is known for beating information out of suspects and witnesses alike. After Wilson ignores his chief's warnings, he is relegated to a case up-state to cool off. He joins a manhunt pursuing the murderer of a young girl and teams up with Walter Brent, the father of the victim. After they spot a man and chase him through the snow, Wilson and Brent get separated from the rest of the manhunt.
They track the suspect to a remote house where they find a blind woman, Mary Malden, by herself in the house. She tells Wilson and Brent that she lives with her younger brother, Danny. Wilson learns that Danny is the killer and that he is mentally disadvantaged. Mary asks Wilson to protect her brother, and he agrees to capture him peacefully. Wilson and Brent spend the night at the house.
At dawn Mary slips out and goes to the storm cellar where Danny is hiding. She tells him that Wilson is a friend and will take him away to be helped. On her way back in Wilson confronts her. While she explains to him that her brother is frightened, Danny slips out of the cellar and runs away.
Wilson trails Danny to a secluded shack. Danny brandishes a knife, but Wilson is patient and they talk. He learns that Mary could have had eye surgery, but she refused to leave Danny. Danny says he did not mean to hurt the girl, he just wanted to make her smile. Wilson slowly advances, preparing to take the knife from him, but Brent bursts in, shotgun raised, and the two men brutally struggle. Brent's gun goes off, and Danny escapes. Wilson hurls the gun into the snow.
The two men chase Danny up a rugged, snow-covered stone peak. The boy loses his footing and falls to his death in front of them. They climb back down to where the body lies, face down in the snow. Wilson turns him over and Brent says in an awed voice, “Just a kid, that's all he is…He's just a kid.” Brent gently pushes Wilson aside, takes the boy into his arms and carries him to the nearest house. Mary arrives, having heard the gunshot. Later, in the bedroom with her brother's body, she prays that God will grant Danny forgiveness and peace.
Wilson walks back to her home with her. He tells her he almost had Danny safe. He asks if she will now have the surgery she postponed for Danny's sake. She confesses she is afraid. He wants to help her. but she wants no pity and sends him away.
Wilson drives all the way back to the city, through the night, remembering what people have said to him. Dissolve to the sunlit house and cut to Mary, on the stairs. A windchime rings as Wilson comes in the door. They walk towards each other, right arms outstretched, then clasp hands and draw each other into a passionate embrace.
Contemporary New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was highly critical, writing, "the story is a shallow, uneven affair, as written by A. I. Bezzerides from Gerald Butler's Mad With Much Heart. The cause of the cop's sadism is only superficially explained, and certainly his happy redemption is easily and romantically achieved. And while a most galling performance of the farmer is given by Ward Bond, Ida Lupino is mawkishly stagey as the blind girl who melts the cop's heart. For all the sincere and shrewd direction and the striking outdoor photography, this R. K. O. melodrama fails to traverse its chosen ground."[3]
The film holds an 89% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 19 critics.[4]
In 2005 critic Dennis Schwartz liked the film and acting in the drama: "Robert Ryan's fierce performance is superb, as he's able to convincingly assure us he has a real spiritual awakening; while Lupino's gentle character acts to humanize the crime fighter, who has walked on the "dangerous ground" of the city and has never realized before that there could be any other kind of turf until meeting someone as profound and tolerant as Mary."[5]
In 2006 Fernando F. Croce, film critic for Slant magazine, admired the film and wrote: "Perched between late-'40s noir and mid-'50s crime drama, this is one of the great, forgotten works of the genre... Easily mushy, the material achieves a nearly transcendental beauty in the hands of Ray, a poet of anguished expression: The urban harshness of the city is contrasted with the austere snowy countryside for some of the most disconcertingly moving effects in all film noir. Despite the violence and the steady intensity, a remarkably pure film."[6]
Music
The film score was composed by Bernard Herrmann. His work is strongly evocative of his later, better-known score to Alfred Hitchcock's famed 1959 thriller North by Northwest. He also later reused a sequence that became the opening theme of the 1957 television series Have Gun Will Travel, as well as other fragments of incidental music later adapted for use in the TV show.
Herrmann used an obscure baroque violin-like instrument, the 6 or 7 stringed viola d'amore, which uses extra strings that vibrate with sympathetic resonance to reinforce played notes, to symbolize Mary Malden's isolation and loneliness. The sound of the instrument can be heard much of the time she is on-screen.[7] It was performed by Virginia Majewski, who received a screen credit for her contribution.
References
↑ "Symphony and Concert -- Records". The Boston Globe. December 16, 1951.
↑ Schwartz, Dennis (January 30, 2005). "On Dangerous Ground". Ozus' World Movie Reviews. Archived from the original on June 9, 2008. Retrieved January 30, 2008.
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