The big heat in a lonely place
Aug. 2nd, 2006 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersI did something last night that I've never done before: I watched the new Region 1 DVD of Nicholas Ray's 1952 film noir, On Dangerous Ground, and then I immediately watched the whole thing again with the commentary by Glenn Erickson (a.k.a. DVD Savant). All right, all right, of course I've never done it with this particular DVD before, but I've never done it with any DVD before. It helped that the movie is only 82 minutes long, but still, it was a butt-crushing three-hour marathon.
It's not a great movie, but it is a complex and fascinating one. Robert Ryan plays a violent cop who is sent up-country to solve a murder and to cool his heels, and there he meets a blind woman played by Ida Lupino, who is the sister of the prime suspect. The first half is a tough, dark urban crime film, and the second half, in an enormous and sudden shift, is a desperate, twisty chase across a frozen rural landscape, with melodramatic rest stops in the fire-warmed darkness of the house where Lupino lives by herself. It is about isolation and loneliness (and alienation and violence) in both the city and the country, about coping with loneliness, and -- very un-noir-like -- about transformation through love. The combination of crime thriller and romantic melodrama isn't always a good fit, but the characters and plot twists (and the soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann) are so interesting that it held my attention tightly. (Erickson's commentary is also full of interesting details about how the movie was recut and restructured over the course of a year and a half after it was shot in 1950 -- which may be the reason the film feels a bit ramshackle at times.)
But my random observation in all this is that Robert Ryan should have played the cop in Fritz Lang's 1953 noir, The Big Heat. I've never bought Glenn Ford as the vengeful cop who tears into the underbelly of the underworld when his wife is murdered. He just doesn't have that dangerous, violent edge to him. Robert Ryan has it in spades; there is something genuinely threatening about him (which is why he played villains so often), and yet he can also play it tender. His performance in On Dangerous Ground is riveting. Or at least I don't think it's all Herrmann's aching, moody score!
It's not a great movie, but it is a complex and fascinating one. Robert Ryan plays a violent cop who is sent up-country to solve a murder and to cool his heels, and there he meets a blind woman played by Ida Lupino, who is the sister of the prime suspect. The first half is a tough, dark urban crime film, and the second half, in an enormous and sudden shift, is a desperate, twisty chase across a frozen rural landscape, with melodramatic rest stops in the fire-warmed darkness of the house where Lupino lives by herself. It is about isolation and loneliness (and alienation and violence) in both the city and the country, about coping with loneliness, and -- very un-noir-like -- about transformation through love. The combination of crime thriller and romantic melodrama isn't always a good fit, but the characters and plot twists (and the soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann) are so interesting that it held my attention tightly. (Erickson's commentary is also full of interesting details about how the movie was recut and restructured over the course of a year and a half after it was shot in 1950 -- which may be the reason the film feels a bit ramshackle at times.)
But my random observation in all this is that Robert Ryan should have played the cop in Fritz Lang's 1953 noir, The Big Heat. I've never bought Glenn Ford as the vengeful cop who tears into the underbelly of the underworld when his wife is murdered. He just doesn't have that dangerous, violent edge to him. Robert Ryan has it in spades; there is something genuinely threatening about him (which is why he played villains so often), and yet he can also play it tender. His performance in On Dangerous Ground is riveting. Or at least I don't think it's all Herrmann's aching, moody score!
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Date: 2006-08-02 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 08:55 pm (UTC)I need to watch The Set-Up again, now that I've become a Ryan fan.