| KNOCKED OUT : John Farrow's 'Where Danger Lives' (1950) [8/10] |
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| Tuesday, 08 November 2005 | |
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Though inexplicably little-known these days, Where Danger Lives is an absolutely cracking little film noir with an appealingly absurd screwball edge. The main credit for which presumably belongs not to director Farrow (father of Mia), but to veteran scripwriter Charles Bennett - whose screenplays for Hitchcock included The 39 Steps, Young and Innocent and Foreign Correspondent, and later wrote Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon. Robert Mitchum may initially seem odd casting as Jeff Cameron, a San Francisco surgeon specialising in paediatrics, and semi-engaged to sweet colleague June (Maureen O'Sullivan, Mia's mother). Odd casting until, that is, Jeff becomes inebriated in a nightclub and is then whacked over the head with a poker. This incident occurs some 25 minutes in, allowing the star to spend the rest of the film in state of heavy-lidded concussion that's really a slight variant on his familiar dog-tired screen persona. Or perhaps we should call it je-m'en-foutisme - this being, after all, a film noir featuring amour fou for a femme fatale who gets her come-uppance in the suitably histrionic denouement. Said 'femme' is Margo Lannington, a mentally unstable but dangerously attractive young woman who leads a smitten Cameron far off the straight and narrow - down the highway to Mexico, to be precise, the pair fleeing after a violent incident involving Margo's much older husband Frederick. While Mitchum comfortably - and almost literally - sleepwalks through his role, Howard Hughes' protege Faith Domergue is a little out of her depth as Margo, who has to be much the more active and dynamic of the duo. Much better is value is provided by Claude Rains as her ill-fated spouse, making more impact in his single scene than many actors manage over the whole careers. He has particular fun with Bennett's waspish dialogue - despite its B-movie brevity, the screenplay is packed full of offbeat scenes and lines that teeter on the brink of self-parody (even in throwaway asides, as when a radio broadcast reveals that a body is discovered thanks to "the piteous mewing of a cat"). Though Farrow mostly plays things with a straight face, an off-highway detour to a one-horse town celebrating 'Whiskers Week' is pitched very much for laughs - and culminates in a very Hitchcockian impromptu wedding. It seems that everyone the harrassed Margo and Jeff encounter is some kind of eccentric or other: even when they reach the Mexican border, they do so in Nogales - here a nightmarish zone of debauchery and excess. A typical entertainment is a ribald all-night (or rather 'all-nite') theatre where we see one Maxine Gates perform a saucy (but strangely inaudible) Mae-West-type act clad entirely in gaudy plaid. By this stage Cameron is almost unconscious and semi-paralysed by the ongoing effects of that first-act concussion - his medical background means he knows exactly what's wrong with him, giving the rather Detour-ish proceedings a pleasingly fatalistic D.O.A. vibe. But he's made of tough fibres indeed, somehow staying on his feet for a climax - and coda - that are as enjoyably daft as everything that's gone before. Neil Young 8th November, 2005 WHERE DANGER LIVES : [8/10] : USA 1950 : John FARROW : 76 mins (timed) seen at Cine Side, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 6th November 2005 - public show |
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