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Posted: |
Sep 29, 2004 - 1:06 AM
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By: |
David in NY
(Member)
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Amazing.
I taped On Dangerous Ground a few months ago and just watched it tonight for the very first time. And I have been blown away. I mean this is one of those films that pulls you in despite yourself and it's the score, the SCORE that does it. You think of this and then look back at The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Vertigo, and maybe even Twilight Zone's The Lonely and it finally hits you: Herrmann's music made you care for people that otherwise you might not; a brutal cop, a bland cop, a ghost, a robot and the connections made between them and the opposite sex. And that's his genius. Oh, and something else hits: you wonder what these films may have been in lesser-talented hands. And shudder.
Hello HowardL. I know NOTHING of this film. Never heard of it before, but, just from the way you describe the music in the film's context, I think I'll look it up at Netflix. I'll let you know in a few.....
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Possibly some spoilers below
On Dangerous Ground was on TCM a week or two ago and I took the time to watch it. The first part of the film was shot at night in a city and I loved how it looked. The music that Herrmann provided for Jim Wilson's rather short apartment scenes here certainly did a great job setting up the lonely theme that would be used later in the picture.
The first thing that took me by surprise, though, was that the music started blasting during the RKO logo instead of having that telegraph beeping sound that I've usually seen accompany it. Also interesting was to see Herrmann share his title card with Virginia Majewski, even though I had learned about this from the FSM liner notes or Smith's Herrmann biography (or maybe both.)
The main problem I had with the film is that I didn't buy the love thing at all. This was all very underwritten (or not written at all?) Herrmann obviously tried his best to convey it by writing some very beautiful music ("Blindness," Finale", etc), but I thought that wasn't quite enough. It was almost like they didn't know how to end the film and simply tacked on that implausible ending.
Not only did Herrmann compose some great romantic music for this film, his action writing is brilliant as well (no surprise!) Unfortunately one of the main action cues, "Hunt Scherzo" is heavily edited in the film. Edited or not, the music did a good job of heightening the suspense of the chase sequences involved.
I thought On Dangerous Ground was a pretty good film, though I'll have to watch it again to form a better opinion of it and fill in some of the stuff I might have missed. One thing I do know is that the score is first rate and the FSM album is very highly recommended.
"It's an entirely different kinda scene here, in fact."
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Posted: |
Sep 29, 2004 - 6:31 PM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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Oh hell, here’s the book:
"'On Dangerous Ground' was an absolute failure, but I'm still fond of it in some ways," [director Nicholas] Ray later said. To its producer, John Houseman, the film was “peculiar and strange...sort of a mess but awfully good."
As in much of Ray’s work, the film's conflict was largely psychological, couched in accessible thriller terms. Robert Ryan starred as Jim Wilson, an alienated city cop whose pent-up anger finds release in the beating of suspects. Transferred upstate to investigate a molestation killing, Wilson meets Mary Warden (Ida Lupino), a young blind woman, whose brother Danny, Wilson learns, is the hunted man. Mary's humanity helps Wilson rediscover his own, but he is unable to save her brother: the boys falls to his death after a chase across the mountains. In Mary, however, Wilson has found salvation: his hands, once instruments of pain, are now filled with gentleness as they hold Mary's at the fade out.
On Dangerous Ground fell short of realizing its themes of personal redemption and the connection between social alienation and violence; yet its erratic brilliance makes it more compelling than many a commercial "success." The film's first darkest half is its best, a tour of Boston's alleys as seen through Wilson’s anguished eyes. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, a later Herrmann film, Wilson is an urban casualty, filled with longings he cannot articulate.
For the composer, the film's mix of emotional black and whites, of tragedy and optimism, had considerable power. "It's a very good film," he said in 1971. "It's still occasionally shown and I'm always very partial to it." Herrmann strove to give the film an emotional continuity by polarizing its two halves, and he largely succeeded. His score divides good and evil into clearly separate entities--the former represented by a single, expressive instrument (the resonant viola d'amore) the latter by a violent scherzo (the "Death Hunt") that is one of the most exhilarating pieces of film music ever written.
Frequently Herrmann allows images and dialogue to carry themselves. Wilson's mental breakdown in the film's first third is conveyed visually, not musically: Ray's city scenes are strong enough without scoring. After a scherzolike prelude for horns and orchestra (an allusion to the film's climax), Herrmann reserves commentary for Wilson's beating of a suspect, in the film's most violent scene: "Why do you make me do it?" Wilson cries, his fists punching his offscreen victim (at the camera’s eye) as Herrmann's metallic brass strike with equal brutality.
A cool pastel of woodwinds signals the beginning of Wilson’s journey to the country (and self); yet even this cue brings menace, in a churning triplet device for low strings (which become a key motive of danger in Herrmann's North by Northwest score nine years later). Soon Wilson's quarry is spotted and the death hunt begins, the unsteadiness of Ray's sometimes handheld visuals mirrored in a spiraling string device that anticipates Psycho's famous rainstorm escape. (Both sequences take their cue from the beating rhythm of car windshield wipers and the emotional frenzy of the drivers--here, Wilson and the dead girl's father, Brent [Ward Bond].)
What Bezzerides' screenplay lacks in giving Mary’s character dimension is compensated for in Lupino's touching performance and Herrmann's compassionate scoring for strings, winds, harp, and viola d'amore to convey Mary's altered perception of the world and her (literally) blind faith. "I felt the instrument had a veiled quality," Herrmann said. "The color of her music was like her character."
There is no score during Wilson's tense confrontation with the killer, Danny, whose repeated threat, "I'll cut you," becomes an almost musical, staccato device. For several minutes Wilson and Danny move quietly through the shadows of an empty cabin, their dialogue and Ray's subtle cutting the sole provider of tension--until Brent charges in, rifle in hand, hungry for vengeance. At last, Herrmann's scherzo, heard allusively throughout the score, explodes with terrifying ferocity, its polyphonic rhythms for nine horns propelling the chase to its tragic end. (Years later, Herrmann cited the sequence as his favorite among his work.)
Wilson's reunion with Mary may seem an unconvincing contrivance ("I don't believe in miracles," Ray later said), but musically the resolution is credible and transcendent, pitting Mary's theme for viola d'amore against the brass and basses of Wilson's city music, until the viola theme is embraced by full orchestra--a climax that for Herrmann is inevitable and celebratory.
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