Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

JohnHowardReid When John Farrow died, we had just begun work on his biography and, alas, we had not got around to this particular movie. I notice, however, that I gave the movie a bad review as recently as 2005. But looking at the movie last night on Warner's excellent DVD, I'm glad to admit that I was wrong. Very wrong! Although Claude Rains has a great cameo role - and that's really all it is, just the one scene, but how powerful he makes it - the film is really carried by Robert Mitchum and Faith Domergue. They are both so superbly convincing, they actually draw us into the action. In fact, they both come across with such charisma, that we are rooting for them, despite their aggressively nasty (Domergue) and weak-willed (Mitchum) characters. Although Farrow uses more close-ups than usual, they are both necessary and well-placed. They also help to build up the noir atmosphere carried by the astute black-and-white photography and moody, darkly convincing sets. Despite her prominent billing, Farrow's wife, Maureen O'Sullivan, actually has a blink-and-you'll-miss-her role, But it was nice to see her all the same. She looks great! Available on an excellent Warber Bros. DVD, coupled with "Tension".

disinterested_spectator 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.

bob the moo When a young woman comes into the hospital following a suicide attempt, young (and rather foolish) Doctor Jeff Cameron takes an interest in her (perhaps he likes women who feel like they have nothing to live for?) and follows up, seeing her a few times. One evening when Margo is due to travel away with her father, Jeff drunkenly plucks up the courage to go and see her and her dad with a rose and some sweet words. Unfortunately what he finds is that Margo does not live with her father but rather with her older husband. Millionaire Lannington treats Jeff with a playful contempt of a man used to his young, beautiful wife acting out but the meeting goes badly and, although Jeff's drunken state makes memory hazy, it seems a simple scuffle saw Lannington fall and bang his head, killing him. With Margo pulling him all the way, the pair decide to leave the body to be discovered in 4 days and use that time to flee the country together.This film has a central problem and it is one that it never really gets over and this is that it isn't built on very much. Firstly the passion Jeff feels for Margo is never explained and never given but a few seconds to really settle in and convince. As soon as we are expected to believe this relationship, we jump into the characters being on the run from murder in a way that relies on Jeff being drunk and beyond his sense for a very long period of time. The film does make good use of mistakes and assumptions (the cops at the airport for example) to make the characters more desperate than they need to be, but it is still asking a lot to go along with as the characters are not totally convincing. This continues right through to the very end because we are clearly never meant to turn against Jeff (which is why he gets a happy ending) and Margo gives him a spiteful deathbed confession. Her motivations for doing so make sense in one hand but personally I would have preferred her twisted character to have reached from the grave and taken Jeff with her out of spite, specifically by making her last words a clarification that Jeff did the killing and dragged her along for the ride. A dark ending but it would have lifted the film more than the pat thing it ends with, which just seemed like a copout to me.It doesn't help that Robert Mitchum is miscast. Perhaps he was not known as a tough guy at the time, but this is who he is and he cannot convince in a character that is weaker and taken over by Margo, a less imposing presence was required – someone less starry or more able, and this is not him. Of course the material doesn't help him but generally he doesn't sell this character. Domergue is faced with the same material but does a bit better as she is given a better role and she gradually play her hand during the film, starting out glamorous and showing impatience before leading into spite. They do have good moments but their flight doesn't always convince and the various obstacles occasionally feel forced and contrived (arrested for no facial hair!?).Where Danger Lives is decent enough as a story to follow along with, it moves forward with OK pace, but it is built on weakness that it never shakes off and it shows its colors in its final few minutes when, instead of embracing the darkness, it gives its main character an easy way out and provides the viewer with an ending that is as safe as it is disappointing.

jzappa This peculiar excursion is skillfully shot by Nick Musuraca in the dark black and white nature of the genre in its era, and is capably helmed by John Farrow, who fruitfully captures these delirious visions. It's by and large a character study of an accomplished man blinded by lust, whose life disintegrates as it falls behind him. Mitchum is the guiltless man who is entrapped, but doesn't understand he's innocent until quite late. Too late? Only the will to live in spite of being so far out of his comfort zone and his senses can save him from this interesting spin on the framed-for-murder predisposition of the formula.Mitchum, as was his modus operandi, once again put on airs of sleepy-eyed detachment and barrel-chested reserve, but in this case, he is interesting and sympathetic, realistically showing how a smart guy and such an experienced doctor could be in such a weak position. He genuinely and believably connects to the emotional and sensory reality of his bewildered character, whose feelings and senses are constantly in flux. Likewise, director John Farrow effectively taps the outlandish, hallucinatory traits in this customary noir plot: Mitchum spends the last half of the film barreling down the dirt roads of southern California with a concussion, fainting cyclically and awakening enclosed by some of the murkiest landscape the U.S. has to present.Yes, Mitchum is cast against type as a stable professional, but actually, I think Faith Domergue is equally if not more accountable for the lack of artifice in Mitchum's performance than he is. From moment to moment, and this is most definitely a movie that lives in the present, she genuinely affects him. They're not just saying lines at one another, overlapping their words and movements with some programmed, bottled manner. The sultry, manic, hard-bitten, shifty-eyed edge is real. What's more, Claude Rains as always is superb, in a small role but a pretty important one, where his every motion looks to be controlled over a maniacal wrath all set to gush out, best illustrated by his malicious grin while meeting his wife's lover. And the film's a pleasingly bizarre screwball streak further sets it apart as a unique entry in the film noir canon.