NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Michael O'Keefe Also known as DARK HIGHWAY, this thriller is directed by Nicholas Ray. A bitter and jaded detective, Jim Wilson(Robert Ryan), has roughed up enough suspects in the hard city streets and his boss sends him upstate to investigate the murder of a young girl in the snow-blanketed countryside. Her father, Walter Brent(Ward Bond), is devastated and tries to lead a heated search for an allusive killer. Wilson informs the local authorities that he is taking over the investigation, but Brent doesn't think a city cop can do the job. The detective, with the girl's father crowding him all the way, follows tracks to the home of a blind woman, Mary Malden(Ida Lupino). She takes care of her mentally challenged brother Danny(Sumner Williams), who is a logical suspect in the murder. Mary tries to convince the hardened Wilson to ease up and spare her brother's life.Miss Lupino is not credited for her hand in helping with the direction of this movie, in which she gives a stellar performance. Rounding out the cast: Ed Begley, Ian Wolfe, Frank Ferguson and Charles Kemper. This RKO Radio Pictures feature was filmed in Colorado and is aided with an atmospheric score by Bernard Herrman.

AaronCapenBanner Nicholas Ray directed this underrated film noir that stars Robert Ryan as tough cop Jim Wilson, who has grown cynical and brutal in his big city dealings with the criminal elements, and gets too rough with one suspect, so is sent upstate in the snowy winter to investigate the murder of a young woman. There he meets an attractive blind woman named Mary Malden(played by Ida Lupino), whom he falls in love with, but as fate would have it, it is her younger brother(played by Sumner Williams) who is the chief suspect. Fine acting, score and direction make this mystery/love story memorable. Ryan in particular is excellent, his no-nonsense character a sort of forerunner of both Popeye Doyle & Dirty Harry.

secondtake On Dangerous Ground (1952)Certainly a classic noir but an odd one. It has the personal introspective digging and bits of romance that director Nicholas Ray is so good at. And it has the struggling urban man with a weight that seems unbearable, at odds with even his best friends. It's filmed really well, by a new talent who later moved to television, George Diskant, and it has a score by none other than Bernard Herrmann. Yes, this movie has all the drippings of a classic. It even daringly mixes up heavy urban society and a raw rural mountain existence in basically two halves to the movie, much like the spectacular "Out of the Past."Nothing goes terribly wrong here, but the story just doesn't quite hold water. At first it's okay that we don't know quite what the main point is, and where our sympathies are meant to lie. But eventually there is a diffusion that gets in the way. This seems like a Ray strategy. Most of his films, the famous ones I've seen, tend to do this in a magical way. They start out with one thing and end up doing another. (The two main ones that are in many top ten lists from this era are "They Live by Night" and "In a Lonely Place.") Robert Ryan is certainly the star, even if Ida Lupino gets first billing--she is only in the second half of the film. Ryan's classic brooding evilness never reaches the sympathetic or pathetic levels we might expect of him, but he's supposed to be a tender guy under it all, waiting for someone or something to turn that on. Lupino plays a blind woman (this becomes apparent right away to the viewer but for some reason not to the characters), and of course we sympathize with here. She is strong and kind and wise. And she needs someone. It seems that Ryan is too caught up in his inner turmoil to quiet make it work, however, and he ends up being just a great cop by the end. There is a clash of cultures that is a slightly corny--the city slicker in the country, and so on. And there is the mingling of the two personalities, which lacks some kind of inner magic. (You might say the same in "In a Lonely Place" but it seems more an intentional ploy there.) There is also the problem of the basic crime aspects of the plot. We aren't meant to care too much about that, but it takes up much of the screen time and we need to make it make sense. It's a little compacted and clumsy for all its inner angst. The blind woman's little brother is mentally disturbed--and there's even an implication she skipped out on surgery for her eyes because of needing to care for him. But things have spun out of control, and she can't do much about it any more.See this? Well, absolutely if you like the actors, the director, or noirs in general. It fits into the pack well, and has aspects that are moving and well done. That it doesn't gel into a masterpiece is aggravating because the material is really terrific at its core--a man is fighting for his emotional survival, and seems to stumble on a solution in the least likely way. Beautiful.

Ilpo Hirvonen 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.