Where Danger Lives (Westwood Productions, RKO, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Coogan’s Bluff TCM ran an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of a really quirky film by director John Farrow (Mia Farrow’s father) from the Howard Hughes-owned RKO in 1950, Where Danger Lives. This one had high-powered talent at the typewriters: the original story was by Leo Rosten and the script by Charles Bennett, the British-born thriller writer who had worked for Alfred Hitchcock on six films from 1934 to 1940, including the first The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), and earlier one of his plays, Blackmail, had been the basis of Hitchcock’s first talkie in 1929. I’ve long thought Bennett was to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra: the writer who helped an auteur in the making crystallize his style and set his overall basic themes. The film is credited as “A John Farrow Production” – which seems to have been one way RKO lured Farrow from his previous studio, Paramount, where he made two back-to-back film noir masterpieces, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in 1948 – though the credits list two other producers, Irving Cummings, Jr. and Irwin Allen. (Allen would later become a major Hollywood figure specializing in disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno in the early 1970’s.)

Where Danger Lives is an odd movie in many ways; though the original poster art promoted Robert Mitchum and promised, “MITCHUM IN ACTION!,” the film itself makes Mitchum’s character, Dr. Jeff Cameron, pretty much a patsy in the hands of a scheming woman, Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue in her first major release, though Howard Hughes had bought her contract from Warner Bros. in 1941 when she was only 15; Warners had changed her name to “Faith Dorn” but Hughes changed it back and spent the next nine years starring her in a film called Vendetta that cycled through four directors – Max Ophuls, Preston Sturges, Stuart Heisler and Mel Ferrer, as well as Paul Weatherwax and Hughes himself in a few scenes – over five years of pre-production and four years of actual shooting before Hughes finally released it a month after Where Danger Lives). Unlike most of Hollywood, Robert Mitchum actually got along with Howard Hughes; in 1948, as Hughes was buying RKO, Mitchum got himself arrested for possession of marijuana. Hughes worked out an ingenious plan to get Mitchum released from state prison; he dredged up a pretty stupid script called The Big Steal and had one of his aides present it to the judge in Mitchum’s case. Hughes’s agent persuaded the judge that he had 120 people on his payroll ready to shoot this movie in Mexico, and if the judge didn’t release Mitchum he’d have to lay off all those workers. It worked; The Big Steal got made (it’s a pretty mindless action movie but also a lot of fun), and Mitchum was once again available for future projects while his bad-boy image was actually bolstered by his pot bust. Unfortunately, Hughes preferred to use Mitchum as a basic weakling and a sucker for a pretty female face and a hot bod attached to it.

Dr. Cameron meets Margo in an emergency room in San Francisco where she’s been taken after an attempted suicide. Once she’s well enough to be discharged, the two start dating, to the understandable discomfiture of Dr. Cameron’s nurse, Julie Dorn (Maureen O’Sullivan, then Mrs. John Farrow and Mia’s mother), who’d been in love with him herself and was hoping they’d get married when he left the hospital staff and started his own medical practice. Jeff is anxious to meet the mystery man whom he’s been told is Margo’s father, Frederick Lannington (Claude Rains in a part that ends way too soon; he plays with the cool authority he showed in Casablanca and Notorious), and when the two finally meet Jeff tells him he wants to marry Lannington’s daughter. “I’m afraid she’s not my daughter,” Frederick tells the shocked Dr. Cameron. “She’s my wife!” Jeff and Frederick end up in a brawl in Frederick’s fancy living room and Frederick repeatedly beats Jeff with a fireplace poker. Then Jeff pushes Frederick to the floor near the fireplace, though John Farrow is careful to show us where Frederick’s head landed: not anywhere near an andiron, which in previous people’s movies had meant certain death. Given how high Claude Rains had been billed (third, on an above-title card below Mitchum and Domergue) and how well his character had been established, I was fully expecting him to return later on in the film, not dead at all but just embittered and out for revenge. Alas, he’s dead, all right, and Jeff and Margo flee the country, or try to, sure that they’ll be arrested as soon as Frederick’s body is found.

Their first plan is to use the plane tickets to Nassau Frederick had bought before his death to take himself and Margo on a Caribbean vacation, but they get scared by a page asking “Nicholas Lannington” to come to the desk at the airport. It’s just a letter bidding him bon voyage signed by his office staff, but the two guilt-ridden love/hatebirds run out on their flight thinking it’s a sign that the police are after them. Messrs. Farrow, Rosten and Bennett pull the same gag later when Jeff and Margo pull up at a police roadblock – though it’s really just an agricultural quarantine inspecting people’s fruits and vegetables for pests. The two unlikely fugitives finally make it to Arizona and prepare to cross the U.S.-Mexico border at Nogales, but in the meantime they’re taken into custody by the sheriff in Postville, Arizona. It seems that Postville is in the middle of its annual “Wild West Whiskers Week,” and every male in Postville is required to wear a beard – real or fake – during the event. Down to their last $13, they are forced into a quickie wedding and given the bridal suite, which they won’t be allowed to leave. They finally work up an escape plan involving a traveling carnival (one of whose entertainers is a buxom woman who sings a raucous version of the song “Living In a Great Big Way” from the 1935 RKO musical Hooray for Love) and $1,000 in money a local pawnbroker paid them for a valuable bracelet Margo was carrying, but in the end Jeff learns that Margo is certifiably crazy – she was under the care of two New York psychiatrists – and, what’s more, she killed Nicholas by smothering him with a pillow and Jeff had nothing to do with it and is in the clear legally. Ultimately the police kill Margo in a shoot-out at the border and Jeff goes back to San Francisco and the waiting arms of Julie Dorn (ya remember Julie Dorn?), presumably to marry her and set up his own medical practice.

Robert Mitchum is hardly the late-1940’s Hollywood actor you’d think of in terms of playing a doctor, but he’s good enough to create a tough and multidimensional character out of what Farrow and the writers have given him. Aside from that, however, Where Danger Lives is pretty much a mess – a stylish mess, it’s true (Nicholas Musuraca is the cinematographer; he was a master of RKO’s frequent attempts at shadowy menace, and looks it), but still a mess. I was especially disappointed in the whole Postville sequence; as in the next film Mitchum made for RKO with Farrow as director, His Kind of Woman (1951), the film’s climax is terminally silly but also a sheer delight for overwrought camp, but it’s the sort of madcap humor that really doesn’t belong in a film noir. And I was wondering just how the issues surrounding Jeff’s future were going to sort out: remember that he and Margo were legally married before the cops croaked her, and that would presumably mean that with both Lanningtons dead Dr. Jeff Cameron would hold the entire Lannington fortune and he’d have no trouble with the seed money to start his practice.