A few films from the days when films were noir and femmes were fatale (full disclosure: I copied this last sentence from the DVD sleeve) came recently my way. Among them was Where Danger Lives.
Where Danger Lives was the 35th feature film directed by the eclectic and prolific John Farrow, who directed, produced and/or wrote just under 80 films in just over 30 years (1927 to 1959, churning out 6 films in 1939 alone! Ah for those days…). Farrow, besides being the father of Mia Farrow, was a very talented director, noted for elaborate long takes, which were at the time rarer and technically much more difficult to accomplish than today (Where Danger Lives features a 7 minute one). Other than this film, I only recall seeing, some 20 years ago, his swashbuckler Two Years Before the Mast (1946) and l remember its strikingly dynamic camera work. Farrow was until recently unfairly underrated, and The MacMahonian hereby presents its humble contribution to give the director due credit.
Where Danger Lives, in case you're wondering, is in the temptation of wanton and deranged seductresses and their potential consequences in the emotional balance and social standing of respectable citizens. Dr. Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum, uncharacteristically passive and gullible) rescues from attempted suicide and subsequently falls in love with trophy wife (initially presenting herself as daughter…) Margo Lannington (Howard Hughes protégé and sort of Jane Russell lookalike Faith Domergue, in her screen debut) with nefarious consequences involving the manslaughter (or so it seems) of Margo's husband Frederick (Claude Rains, in a brief and typical role that's half the film's fun) and a subsequent attempted escape toward Mexico in which unfortunate and unlikely mishaps pile up, including dealings with second-hand car dealer “Honest Hal” (Tol Avery, another half) and a stopover in a small town where Jeff and Margo are arrested because Jeff is not wearing a beard, mandatory in town during "Wild West Whiskers Week", while all along the radio is broadcasting news about the death of Frederick and the escape of his suspected killers and Jeff has recurrent dizzy spells resulting from a head injury he suffered in the struggle with Frederick which resulted in the latter's death. It all ends well (sort of) in the most preposterously contrived happy end in memory bar Luis Buñuel's Susana's (1951), when Jeff is reunited with his legit and prissy fiancée Julie (Maureen O´Sullivan, retired from her long tenure as resident Jane opposite Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan).
Where Danger Lives is a noir semi-uncharacteristically morphing into road movie halfway and, typically for the genre and the period, its superficially conservative morality is belied by the near psychedelic treatment of the spiralling events visiting Jeff and Margo. Scholarship has given credit to the films impact mainly to veteran screenwriter Charles Bennett [who inter alia scripted 6 Hitchcock films, including most of the most famous British ones plus Foreign Correspondent (1941), as well as a few late Jacques Tourneurs] and to the sharply contrasted cinematography (to which the pic illustrating this entry doesn’t begin to do justice) of Nicolas Murusaca, who arguably did more singlehandedly to define the style of classic horror and noir than anyone else, having notably photographed Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past (1947). But this view doesn’t do John Farrow justice: Murusaca's photography is definitely more than the third half of the fun of Where Danger Lives, but the script piles up so much cliché upon unlikelihood upon incongruity that one is surprised it ever got produced out of Poverty Row, or before the 1980s, when they started doing this kind stuff on purpose in the name of camp.
Pending further evidence, The MacMahonian's money is on John Farrow, who here, in the most gallant Tinseltown tradition, elevates pulp to pathos matchlessly (only Fritz Lang and Raoul Walsh come to mind as contenders). The reappraisal of his opus will continue in these pages in due course.