On Dangerous Ground / In a Lonely Place
Contemporary neo-noirs usually feature butter-soft young actors (John Cusack, Drew Barrymore) posing their way through film-school exercises in lighting and color, mouthing disillusionment. Real men and women, sinewy and with some mileage on them, played in the genuine article of the 1940s and 1950s; their scars were come by honestly, not by makeup. Two of the best films noir play at the Stanford this weekend, both of them directed by Nicholas Ray, a director with an affinity for life's walking wounded. One of the cinema's great actors, Robert Ryan, excels as an LAPD veteran, seething with barely suppressed rage, in On Dangerous Ground, while In a Lonely Place peels away Humphrey Bogart's wisecracking persona to reveal violence beneath. Yet Ray is not a fatalist, and his protagonists aren't doomed; both men are offered ways out of purgatory in the persons of alert, intelligent women, portrayed by Ida Lupino and Gloria Grahame respectively as being far more alert and self-aware than in most of today's feminist cinema. One man succeeds, one fails, yet even the tortured protagonist who misses his chance does not kill the heroine when every plot point demands that resolution. A more quietly desolating ending was improvised instead. When is a noir not a noir? When it evolves into a spiritual journey and psychic depth-probe, as in these two films by Nick Ray. With fine supporting casts of cops, drunks, punks, and vigilantes; moody B&W cinematography by Burnett Guffey (Place) and George Diskant (Ground), and very fine scores by George Antheil (Place) and the more celebrated Bernard Herrmann (Ground).
-- Gregg Rickman
On Dangerous Ground screens at 5:55 and 9:15 p.m. and In a Lonely Place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, Feb. 20-23, at the Stanford Theater, 221 University (at Emerson) in Palo Alto. Tickets are $6; call 324-3700.
