On Dangerous Ground

Production: RKO. Director Nicholas Ray; Producer John Houseman; Screenplay A.I. Bezzerides; Camera George E. Diskant; Editor Roland Gross; Music Bernard Herrmann; Art Director Albert S. D'Agostino, Ralph Berger
Crew: (B&W) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1951. Running time: 82 MIN.
With: Ida Lupino Robert Ryan Ward Bond Charles Kemper Anthony Ross Sumner Williams

Lack of definition in characters is chief flaw in writing, with Nicholas Ray, who also directed, and A.I. Bezzerides sharing the blame for their adaptation of the Gerald Butler novel, Mad with Much Heart. There's not much Robert Ryan can do with the character of a cop made tough by the types with whom he is brought into contact, nor does Ida Lupino have much opportunity as a blind girl who presumably softens Ryan's character.

Lack of definition in characters is chief flaw in writing, with Nicholas Ray, who also directed, and A.I. Bezzerides sharing the blame for their adaptation of the Gerald Butler novel, Mad with Much Heart. There’s not much Robert Ryan can do with the character of a cop made tough by the types with whom he is brought into contact, nor does Ida Lupino have much opportunity as a blind girl who presumably softens Ryan’s character.

First half of the footage is given over to Ryan’s mental travail as a city prowl car cop who favors plenty of roughness for those he arrests. In fact, this ready use of fists eventually gets him assigned out of town to aid a county sheriff hunt down a madman who has killed a little girl. Trail leads to a lonely farmhouse where Ryan and Ward Bond, playing the father of the murder victim, encounter Lupino. The killer is her mentally deficient kid brother (Sumner Williams) whom she has hidden out.

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Ray manages to inject an occasional bit of excitement into the yarn, and had the psychotic touches been elimated in the script, film could have qualified as okay, even if grim, melodrama.

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