BIG HOUSE FILM REVIEWS ~ Roger Westcombe
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WHERE DANGER LIVES (1950)
Starring Robert Mitchum, Faith Domergue, Claude Rains; dir: John Farrow
The contrast that Mexico provides to California obviously exerts a strange fascination for Angelenos. Noir was a major subscriber to this difference. Mexico is virtually a character itself in Ride the Pink Horse (1947) and the Tijuana border crossing is the enabling metaphor of both Touch of Evil (1958) and the forgotten Anglo-American masterpiece Across the Bridge (1957). Borderline (1950) and Border Incident (1949) made it eponymous.
But as sub-genres go, it’s important to distinguish Mex-noir from desert-noir, a more esoteric strand, often conflated with A-bomb testing (Split Second [1953] and The Most Dangerous Man Alive [1961] ). Mexican settings unleashed different forces – more elemental and primal but also grimier, more removed from ‘civilisation’, and thus scarier. (‘Tijuana’ itself became a loaded signifier for Americans, with ‘Tijuana Bibles’ the name for Depression-era pornographic pulp comic books and a ‘Tijuana Taxi’ being a junker auto of the last resort.)
These sweatier, more feral tendencies are strongly on display in Where Danger Lives, but only in its second half when it heads south and corkscrews off in an entirely different direction from the absurdly OTT melodrama of its first half. (In this, its structure is reminiscent of the Robert Ryan/Ida Lupino On Dangerous Ground (1951), whose first half is a brilliant study of urban psychosis, which changes abruptly to a less focused wilderness idyll in its second half.)
The craziness of Faith Domergue’s off-centre behavior in the first half of Where Danger Lives finds a warped reflection in the recurrent rip-offs she and Mitchum endure in its second half from sleazy elements recognizing they’re in a jam. But director Australian John Farrow (yes, Mia’s dad) is no Nicholas Ray, and by then it’s virtually too late for this leaden and improbable farrago.
Claude Rains’ air of detachment lends class to the operatic goings-on of the first half but he’s not around long enough to rescue it. There’s probably too much Domergue here for sanity’s sake and, not surprisingly, the end result is pretty crazy. (Her opening shot, in this her debut, is so Jane Russell it’s a dead giveaway to the agenda of Howard Hughes, who was then trying to replace Russell with a new screen siren.)
On the plus side, the marriage ‘bluff’ scene is so out there it does boost the Mex half into something surreal, and Nick Musuraca’s cinematography is consistently beautiful, but ultimately Where Danger Lives is a noir melodrama that collapses under the weight of its own insanity.
Roger Westcombe's own website is at: http://www.bighousefilm.com/
For additional material on Fritz Lang and 'Where Danger Lives' you might want to look at:
Dennis Schwartz, 'Mitchum Saves the Day', at:
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