How a Real-Life Prison Sentence Added Another Dimension to Mitchum's Performance as a Woozy Doctor on the Run in a Nightmarish Flight From Justice

Robert Mitchum, "Where Danger Lives" (1950).

By Paul Parcellin

This article contains spoilers

A lot of red flags should go up when Dr. Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) meets Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue). But she’s a real dish and this is noir, so naturally he ignores the many warning signposts screaming at him that he’s about to drive over a cliff.

Margo is an emergency room case whom Jeff treats after a suicide attempt. There’s an instant attraction between the two and she persuades him to meet with her outside of the hospital. 

He ditches his steady girl, nurse Julie Dorn (Maureen O’Sullivan, wife of the film’s director John Farrow), for the more exciting, emotionally scarred rich one. As bad decisions go, this is a whopper and it’s all but impossible to stop watching the impending train wreck take shape. 

In the first part of the movie Jeff is smitten with Margo, and he at least still has his wits about him. A little later he’s smitten again — this time literally. He suffers a concussion and it doesn’t improve his judgment, but it explains why the level-headed physician would fail to see that his newfound love is an erratic maniac. 

She lives with her rich dad (Claude Rains) — that’s what she tells him, at least — and is financially dependent on the infirm old geezer. She and pop reside in a swell mansion and when Jeff stops by for a visit he’s surprised by the opulence but isn’t impressed with it. Money isn’t so important to him, and it’s evident that his infatuation with Margo is taking up a lot of real estate is his brain. 

But things start going sour. He gets into a scuffle, gets clocked on the head with a fireplace poker that puts him in a fitful stupor, his judgment deteriorating — clearly something he doesn’t need. Soon, he’s in the kind of trouble that only femmes fatale can get a fellow into and he and his new lady friend go on the run as fugitives from justice.

Mitchum, Faith Domergue, dazed and confused.

The nightmarish scenario in which he’s trapped is a classic noir trope. He’s the average guy who unexpectedly plunges into a hellish abyss. Mitchum brings his every-man persona to this doctor who’s torn between the straight life and the rush of staying one step ahead of the law. 

Maybe the same could be said about Mitchum, although living strictly on the straight and narrow didn’t much appeal to him. In 1948 he was busted for possession of marijuana, a pretty big deal back then, and he served prison time not so long before shooting this film. The ex-jailbird at first thought that his career was over. But his boss at RKO, Howard Hughes, stuck by him and ignored the voices wanting to cancel the controversial actor. It turns out the publicity actually enhanced his career and this role is but one example of why a pot bust turned into a plus for bad boy Mitchum.

Audiences in 1950 must have sensed that Mitchum brings an essential element of danger to a character who might have otherwise come across as too straitlaced. He did that before the pot bust, too, but by the time the film came out that image was fresh in the public’s mind. It’s not hard to believe that, given the opportunity, Jeff is the kind of guy who just might take up with a dangerous woman like Margo. Maybe his attraction to her is due in part to his doctorly instincts to heal the afflicted. But with his guard down he morphs into a moth drawn to the flame — and his distorted powers of reasoning aren’t helping him see the follies of his ways, either.

Once on the road together, both he and she suffer from bouts of paranoia. Every cop they see is out to get them; people everywhere have them pegged as fugitives from justice. They stumble upon police at the airport, get spooked and hot foot it back to the highway. When they come upon a roadblock they assume it’s a dragnet set to capture them, so they make a U-turn and barrel off in another direction.

Typical of their muddled way of thinking, they opt to dump her expensive auto to a cliche of a used car dealer, as if that would throw the police off their trail. The used car jockey wears a houndstooth sport jacket with mis-matched patterned shirt and tie that are fighting a bloody war against each other. He gets a twinkle in his eye, seeing that the two are desperate and will make easy pickings for a chiseler such as himself, and he promptly fleeces the two pigeons.

They move onward, but try as they might it becomes apparent that they’re playing a losing game. Despite his injuries, Jeff is still thinking clearly enough to realize that his condition is deteriorating, so their mission turns into a dash for the Mexican border in hope of making it before he expires. 

For her part in this fiasco, Margo plays it cool, but a few stunning revelations about her eventually come to light. Like most noir anti-heroes, Jeff comes to the hard, cold facts a bit too late to slow down his inevitable trudge toward the gates of hell. 

We’re left to ponder whether Jeff’s misadventures are due to fate simply paying him back for callously leaving his girl back home. As paybacks go, that one exacts a rather high price. Something like prison time for smoking a reefer.

 

One Step Beyond: Film Noir and the Supernatural

Edward G. Robinson, 'Night Has a Thousand Eyes' (1948).

We can all daydream of possessing special powers, because who wouldn’t want greater insight into their life and extraordinary abilities to manipulate the hands of fate? But if there’s one thing that speculative fiction teaches us is that supernatural powers — mind reading, communicating with the dead and other such phenomena — all come with a steep price tag. 

That’s certainly true for mentalist John Triton (Edward G. Robinson) in “Night Has a Thousand Eyes” (1948). He describes his ability to see into the future as something like travel aboard a train. A passenger might see a farmhouse, then a field of corn followed by a pasture of grazing cows. But someone standing on the train’s roof can see all three motifs in one glance. And for better or worse Triton is one who stands atop his own train car as it barrels through the countryside.

That may sounds enticing to some — certainly not to me. But what if those supernatural powers bring about little more than misery and alienation from the people you care about most? That’s a common theme in “supernatural noir,” a blend of film noir and supernatural fiction, two genres that fit together like a dovetail joint. 

In noir, a protagonist is usually alienated from his or her environment and faces crushing circumstances that threaten their very existence. Add unpredictable supernatural forces into the mix and a noir anti-hero gets a double whammy of everyday and otherworldly forces that mean trouble — a dark place to find oneself, indeed. 

As Al Roberts (Tom Neal), the beaten down piano player in "Detour" (1945) says, "Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you." Noir anti-heroes are destined for failure, and the supernatural  works hand in hand with fate to bring about the flawed character's inevitable downfall.

“Night Has a Thousand Eyes” is one of those noir-tinged leaps into the realm of speculative fiction that in shortened form would fit comfortably in “The Twilight Zone” (1959 - 1964) TV series. Speaking of which, aren’t a lot of “Twilight Zone” episodes especially noir-like?

John Lund, Gail Russell, Edward G. Robinson.

A Charlatan Becomes a Psychic 

It’s odd and somehow fitting that vaudeville mentalist Triton should be gifted with the power to see the future. He’s a fairly successful entertainer with a phony mind reading act who, for unknown reasons, develops supernatural powers. It’s as if  he offended the gods by pretending to be clairvoyant and they are taking revenge by bestowing on him the psychic foresight he’d been faking. Now, he must bear the torment of foreseeing tragic accidents and deaths that befall people around him. That includes not only strangers but also almost everyone in his inner circle. Once it becomes obvious to him that he’s cursed with horrifying powers he begins to wonder whether he’s simply predicting these deaths, or could it be that he’s somehow making them happen? 

Of course, it’s not just tragedy that he foresees. He picks winning racehorses for his piano accompanist and buddy Whitney Courtland (Jerome Cowan) who thinks Triton’s new abilities are just swell. Early on, his powers seem to be a blessing. He helps save the life of a young boy playing with matches who sets his bed afire. But thereafter his predictions grow increasingly grim and depressingly accurate. 

He exists in an existential no man’s land where his “gift” can bring great riches or somehow trigger death and he has little control over which of the two his visions will bring about. Faced with this crisis, he stops using his powers to pick winning racehorses or juicy business opportunities — by and by, Courtland becomes a rich man due to Triton’s psychic insight.

In one of his flashes of foresight he sees doom, and in a panic he abandons his fiancée (Virginia Bruce) and Courtland with no explanation. The only chance of avoiding tragedy, he believes, is to leave and never return. Holed up in a seedy Bunker Hill tenement in downtown Los Angeles, he goes into self-imposed isolation. His room overlooks the Angels Flight funicular that chugs up and down the steep incline. Likewise, he moves through his days with a mechanical repetitiveness, avoiding human contact for it can only bring about tragedy and heartache. 

When finally an opportunity for redemption arrives, it comes wrapped in impending tragedy, so at best Triton can save a life, but in doing so his actions will exact a great cost to himself.

Sidebar:

There’s a handful of noirs with a supernatural theme running through them. They include “Alias Nick Beal,” “Night Tide,” and “Ministry of Fear,” to mention a few — I’m sure there are more. What others am I missing? 

Some, like “Dementia,” "The Seventh Victim" and “Cat People” combine elements of horror, film noir and expressionism. More about them in my next post.