Flight From Damnation

     In Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, Robert Ryan plays a bitter policeman so fed up with the human race he routinely beats suspects, his humanity leaking through as disappointment in the criminal wretches he goes after, asking, in effect, "Why do you have to be such scum?"
     He pursues a suspect into the mountains, has an encounter with a blind woman who lives alone in a cabin surrounded by snowfields.  The film becomes a sort of fairy tale, wherein the woman, played by Ida Lupino, restores Ryan's humanity as he comes to care for her.  The blind cures the blinded heart.  I thought it was corny when I saw it many years ago, the film's romantic second half too stark a shift from the noir opening scenes; some of the finest and most hardboiled in the genre.  That such a brutal story, made in 1951, the heyday of film noir, should turn into a love story set in the mountains struck me as odd.  I've seen the film just the one time, but now, for a reason I don't know and also don't question, it comes to my mind.
     The hard grayness of the streets of a large city; cops, hoods, brutality, handcuffs, guns, fast-moving black police cars, sirens, jail cells, early 1950s McCarthy era fog over men's minds, inert compassion.  Later, whiteness, cold landscapes, clear skies, someone who can't see amid all the bright light.  Did Nicholas Ray want his viewers to think about, to feel the city's darkness giving way to the cold pure air of the mountainous world above?  Why are mountains seen as sanctuary?
     Ida Lupino, in 1941, played a woman helping Humphrey Bogart's career criminal character in High Sierra.  In that film, the same movement from city to mountains occurs.  Getting unfindable in wilderness is Bogart's reason for going up, just as the man pursued by Ryan does the same.  If it's Hollywood, there must be a woman as motivator, so Ida Lupino serves the role of concerned distressed lady in both films.
     In the 1940s and 1950s the filmed image of plainclothes cops show us overcoats and guns, no Miranda warnings spoken, beatings of suspects acceptable.  Real cops of today have military haircuts, couldn't blend with a normal crowd if they tried.  Their postures, clipped speech, bearing, suspicious natures, betray them.  In uniform, their equipment looks like some busy video gamer's idea of what to send into a battle zone.  They carry mild chemical weapons, guns, zip ties, electricity weapons, clubs, and communications that link them to national databases.  More and more carry cameras aimed from their chests.  The American cop today looks and sounds like a machine.
     I've seen bumper stickers on cop cars that read, "Know Us Before You Need Us."  The idea seems to be about citizens accessing web information published by the police department, letting the populace know what they do, particularly and generally.  Imagine, in 1951's spirit of police stories as shown in On Dangerous Ground, a police department launching a citizens outreach program like what actually now exists in my city.  What do we, the police of 1951, do?  We rough people up; our jail conditions are horrible; we arrest the wrong man six out of ten times; we'll run over a small boy retrieving a ball for the sake of catching a suspect speeding away; one of our detectives has a collection of teeth he's knocked out during interrogations.
     In their case, I guess, the slogan would read, "Know Us Before You Want Us."
     Still, that's Hollywood's vision from several decades ago.  Even so, police brutality, as shown so vividly in Ray's On Dangerous Ground--I still remember, with unsettling awe, Robert Ryan, at six-four, looming over the suspect he's beating senseless in the film's first part--has continued to exist in real life, in real cities, in decades other than the fifties.
     Police corruption, racism, mistreatment of suspects, mishandling of evidence, all upset the mythical notion that these public servants always serve the public.  Investigations of police departments in Ferguson, Missouri, Chicago, Illinois, Baltimore, Maryland, have abraded the upper dermis of a few places prominently featured in the news media in recent years.  Doing a nationwide corruption probe of police departments would yield everything the human condition has to offer, bad and good.
     Maybe that's what Nicholas Ray was getting at when he brought salvation, in the form of the blind woman, into his film.  Only someone who can't see the moral stain covering Robert Ryan's cynical cop character is able to approach him and jolt his heart, without the use of a Taser.

                                                                             Vic Neptune