The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 9-15
On Dangerous Ground (1951)
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Robert Ryan is justly famous for being underrated in his prime, and this enterprisingly sophisticated cop noir showcases the chops that too many overlooked. Ryan’s Jim Wilson, a lonely and hollowed-out detective prone to violence, is dispatched from the city to decompress and help local police with a presumably straightforward murder that turns out to be improbably cathartic. His redemption by a delicate woman (a typically assured Ida Lupino) while working the crime may be a B-movie contrivance, and the film’s structure is rigidly segmented. But Ryan’s emotional nuance and complexity persist throughout. Furthermore, Nicholas Ray’s direction is characteristically taut, and the deep yet hard-nosed sympathy for off-kilter people that endeared him to the French New Wave filmmakers as well as Scorsese and Wenders shines through. These features of On Dangerous Ground, along with the ambitious subject of the traumatized tough guy, lift the film to iconic status. Jonathan Stevenson (September 10, 7pm at Anthology Film Archives’s Robert Ryan series)