LGM Film Club, Part 447: On Dangerous Ground

I went back to one of my all-time favorites, Nicholas Ray’s 1951 film On Dangerous Ground. It’s not a perfect film by any means. But in the first half-hour, Robert Ryan gives one of the great bad cop performances of all time. The funny thing about Ryan is that he was such a bleeding heart liberal, but he was just so damn good at playing evil men that he kind of got typecast as them. There was a bit of an Edward G. Robinson thing going on here, though Robinson was much more an arty intellectual personally than Ryan. But if you are good at something, you are good at it and in the studio system, you were going to do it again and again.

Well, Ryan is as perfect as any human could be at playing the cop filled with hate and contempt for every human being he meets, with a particular talent for beating the shit out of suspects. It’s 1951 so they can’t show too much of it, but you don’t need to much with that face of rage. The rest of the film shows Ryan’s redemption. He gets sent to the mountains to help on a dead girl case. Ward Bond is pretty good as the dead girl’s father who wants to kill the guy who did it and isn’t interested in what some big city cop has to say about it. Ida Lupino plays the sister of the disturbed murderer. She’s also blind. The melodrama here would be disastrous if Lupino wasn’t herself such an excellent actor. She allows the film to hang together in the last half hour. I always watch it for the first half hour, but the rest is at least worth the viewing.