Where Danger Lives (1950)

I have seen Where Danger Lives several times now, and more than once, I have found myself wondering, What if the story were told from Margo Lannington’s, the femme fatale’s, point of view? Lannington is not so easy to pin down because she is more complicated—and thus more interesting—than the usual femme fatale. She’s not just conniving and manipulative, a liar and a cheat (as if all that wouldn’t be enough); she also suffers from mental illness. I think the few details revealed about her background in Where Danger Lives would have been the basis for great story.

(This article about Where Danger Lives contains the most important spoilers.)

The film starts with an ambulance arriving at a hospital in San Francisco, where Dr. Jeff Cameron works. His girlfriend Julie is a nurse and is also on the hospital staff. Dr. Cameron is a much-loved doctor who is cares for children and shows a great deal of empathy for them. He is obviously a sympathetic character, in other words, not an unsympathetic homme fatale or a criminal. He is also the doctor called to examine the patient in the ambulance: a woman who attempted suicide. A man accompanied her to the hospital, but he is not her husband, and he disappears soon after their arrival and before Dr. Cameron has a chance to talk to him. The woman, the patient, gives her name as Margo.

Dr. Cameron discovers that Margo left a phony last name and address. Another doctor tells him that her last name is not Locksley and she doesn’t live at 3164 Lake Street (Lake Street ends in the 2900 block). But after her discharge, she sends a wire to Dr. Cameron at the hospital: “I owe you an explanation. Please see me tonight if you can. Eight o’clock at 112 Sea Cliff. Please try. Margo.” It isn’t just fate that draws Dr. Cameron to visit Margo. She is his patient, and he still has a professional interest in seeing that she is in good health. But he enters a gray area with his decision to visit her at home. By the time he sees her again at her home, in her evening gown, he seems to have made up his mind about her.

At Sea Cliff, Dr. Cameron learns that Margo’s real name is Margo Lannington. He tells Margo that all suicides and attempted suicides have to be reported to the police, even those under fictitious names. She protests; she is sure that she will be just fine. But he dials the phone, and she grabs for it. He stops her, and when their eyes meet, the audience has the second clue that he is in it for the long haul. And it turns out that he isn’t dialing the police; he is calling his girlfriend Julie to break their date.

There’s a bit of a jump in time at this point: Dr. Cameron has started an affair with Margo. (I’ll call him Jeff from now on; Margo is on a first-name basis with him by now.) He meets her at a tiki bar. From their conversation, viewers know that they have seen each other at least a few times. Margo tells Jeff that her father wants to take her to Nassau and that she won’t be able to see him, of course, while they’re away. And did she mention that they are leaving in the next twenty-four hours? It’s a shock to Jeff. After Margo leaves the tiki bar, he drinks by himself and decides to talk to Margo and confront her father.

Back again at Sea Cliff, Jeff learns that Margo is actually living with her husband, Frederic Lannington, not with her father, as she had been telling him all along. Jeff leaves, but he rushes back into the house when he hears Margo scream. She says that Lannington has attacked her, pulling her earring from her ear and leaving it torn and bleeding. Margo wants to leave with Jeff, but Lannington has other ideas and hits him over the head with a poker. Jeff defends himself, and Frederic Lannington is knocked unconscious when he falls to the floor. Jeff goes to the bathroom to get some water for Lannington and to wash his face. He is dizzy and groggy, and he has trouble walking. He collapses on the way back to the living room. When Jeff finally makes it back, Lannington is dead.

Jeff can’t be sure how Lannington died. Did he hit his head in the fall near the fireplace? Did he hit Lannington hard enough to injure him fatally? Is his death an accident or murder? Jeff cannot answer any of these questions because he cannot think clearly. He has a head injury of his own, and it is obvious that it has had an effect on him.

Margo convinces Jeff not to call the police. She thinks that they will rule Lannington’s death a murder. Margo asks him, “Who’d want a doctor who killed a man?” He says that it was self-defense, but he admits that he doesn’t know how he will be able to prove that. The fact that Jeff sustained a head injury makes his situation even more complicated because he can’t think clearly. The extent of Jeff’s injury becomes important later in the narrative when he is trying to escape to Mexico with Margo. It also seems to dilute a lot of his responsibility for the decisions he makes after the attack, so much so that Julie takes him back.

Jeff Cameron is the main character and the only one to go through any sort of transformation. He has a loyal girlfriend, but he becomes obsessed with Margo and refuses to let her go. His head injury blurs his thinking and makes him more susceptible to Margo’s machinations. His physical condition worsens as he and Margo flee toward Mexico, but it isn’t until he is partially paralyzed and they are close to the border that he finally sees Margo clearly: She is a pathological liar, she’s had many men, she’s hatched this plan a long time ago because she has a stash of her husband’s money waiting in Mexico. He also realizes that she’s the one who killed her husband because the husband was still breathing when Jeff went to wash his face in the house at Sea Cliff. When his physical condition is at its worst, it forces him to come to terms with his limitations and to be more realistic—about himself and about Margo.

Where Danger Lives is another example of Hollywood using psychology as a theme in film, but neither Jeff nor the viewers see this aspect of Margo right away. Once viewers hear about her condition on a radio newscast about her husband’s suspicious death (viewers know more about it before Jeff does), Margo becomes frantic. She pulls a gun out of her purse and is frightened when someone knocks on the door of the room she is sharing with Jeff. The significance of her symptoms (her suicide attempt, her lying, her waking from a nightmare screaming in the car going to Mexico) becomes much clearer. I found myself completely engrossed in Margo’s story the way that it was told: from Jeff’s perspective. The story in the film is Jeff Cameron’s so, of course, it is told from his perspective. But I think the factors leading up to Margo’s psychiatric treatment would have made a better story. I enjoy the film just as much every time I see it, but I have this nagging suspicion that it missed an opportunity for a better story in Margo’s situation.

Claude Rains is great as the femme fatale’s wronged and very angry husband. Robert Mitchum is a noir favorite of mine, and he is fantastic as Dr. Jeff Cameron. The role is very physical because he has to portray someone suffering from a concussion and its effects (partial paralysis, confusion). In the climax of the film, he struggles to pursue Margo as she makes her last attempt to cross the border to Mexico alone. She thought he had died in their rented room because she had placed a pillow over his face, just as she had done with her husband. So his appearance on the street at night comes as a shock to her. But she still has her gun, and she attempts to shoot Jeff to finish the job she had already started.

Every time that I have tried to write about Where Danger Lives, I have come smack up against writer’s block. Once I realized, however, that I was more intrigued by Margo’s place in the story, writing about the film seemed so much easier. As much as I enjoy the film and all the actors in it, I think Margo’s story is the most interesting.

July 6, 1950, release date  •  Directed by John Farrow  •  Screenplay by Charles Bennett  •  Based on a story by Leo Rosen  •  Music by Roy Webb  •  Edited by Eda Warren  •  Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca

Robert Mitchum as Dr. Jeff Cameron  •  Faith Domergue as Margo Lannington  •  Claude Rains as Frederick Lannington  •  Maureen O’Sullivan as Julie Dorn  •  Charles Kemper as the Postville police chief  •  Ralph Dumke as Klauber, the pawnbroker  •  Billy House as Bogardus, the Postville justice of the peace  •  Harry Shannon as Dr. Maynard  •  Philip Van Zandt as Milo DeLong, the carnival owner  •  Jack Kelly as Dr. James Mullenbach, Jeff’s hospital associate  •  Lillian West as Mrs. Bogardus  •  Ray Teal as Sheriff Joe Borden  •  Tol Avery as Honest Hal, car seller

Produced by RKO Radio Pictures  •  Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures

Hidden Fear (1957): Murder in Copenhagen

I always enjoy postwar films noir filmed on location. Such films are like video histories, a look into what the location was like after World War II, and, in Europe, that often involves the wreckage left behind by warfare. I was very interested in seeing Hidden Fear, which was filmed on location in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1956 or 1957. The film is a joint U.S.-Danish production, and apparently it was given only a limited release; many in the United States did not see the film until a television screening in 1963.

The opening credits for Hidden Fear start outside an apartment building. They continue over several scenes, including one of a dark-haired woman running down the apartment building’s fire escape, followed by shots of a police car and the sound of sirens and then a dead body carried out of the apartment building and placed in an ambulance. I wish the credits had been placed to allow these opening scenes to be more prominent because they provide some details that are important for the narrative to come. I did notice that John Payne gets top billing, however. I’m sure the Danish studios producing the film were counting on his star power, and it is amusing that several Danish characters in the film make a point of telling Mike Brent how much they like Americans.

The murder victim is Tony Martinelli, the boyfriend of Susan Brent and her partner in a nightclub act. Susan Brent has been arrested for Martinelli’s murder. Mike Brent arrives in Copenhagen to help her (she is his sister), which is the start of the narrative after the opening credits. It’s never made clear why he comes to her aid because he’s not particularly fond of her. He even says as much to the Danish police officer, Lieutenant Egon Knudsen, who greets him and with whom he will be working on the murder case. Mike Brent is very straitlaced and conservative, and he doesn’t approve of his sister’s occupation, choice of boyfriend, and her lifestyle. During one of his conversations with her in the police station, he accuses her of lying to him about her boyfriend’s criminal activities and about her involvement. After Mike slaps her and accuses her of being a tramp, Lieutenant Knudsen decides to intervene. He enters the interrogation room to interrupt Mike.

• Lieutenant Egon Knudsen: “Mike, we don’t work this way.”

• Mike Brent: “Sometimes it’s the only way.”

• Lieutenant Knudsen: “When one way serves, it’s trouble. A man can lose his balance and try too hard, and do things and say things that he wouldn’t let anyone else do and say.”

The lieutenant has a very gentle way of pointing out that Mike Brent is veering toward police brutality. Mike isn’t even trying to cover up his willingness to use force to get what he wants out of a suspect, even if she is his own sister. The other characters in the film may profess their fondness for Americans, but Mike seems willing to tarnish the U.S. postwar reputation all by himself.

Susan tells Mike that she hated Tony Martinelli, which gives her a motive for killing him. Martinelli stole money from her and cheated on her with women in every town they visited while touring. But Susan insists that she knew nothing of his criminal activities and had nothing to do with his murder. She does mention that someone named Inge was Tony’s girlfriend in Copenhagen. Susan admits to all of this in her first conversation with her brother in years. She also tells Mike that her friend Virginia Kelly might know something about Martinelli’s activities.

Mike Brent meets Virginia Kelly in a ritzy jazz club. Her character provides some romantic interest for Mike and some mystery, too. How much does she know about Tony Martinelli, Susan Brent, and Tony’s murder? What does she know about the counterfeiting that Lieutenant Knudsen has uncovered? Mike goes to Martinelli’s apartment to investigate, but he does this on his own, without telling Lieutenant Knudsen or anyone else in the Danish police. But he is not the only one keeping back information on the case.

Mike hears someone inside Martinelli’s apartment, but he won’t break the police seal (string with sealing wax!) outside the front door—not because of an attack of conscience but because a neighbor’s child is watching him. So he goes outside, climbs across the roof, and enters through a window to get inside. He catches a man, someone named Jacobsen, breaking open clubs (they look like maracas to me!) that Susan Brent purchased for her nightclub act with Martinelli. Mike Brent and Jacobsen get into a fistfight (one of several for John Payne’s character), and Jacobsen escapes.

Mike Brent finds counterfeit bills inside the clubs, which is how he learns of the counterfeiting operation. Lieutenant Knudsen doesn’t tell Mike or Susan Brent about the counterfeiting connected to Martinelli until Mike finds the bills in Martinelli’s apartment. It’s quite possible that Lieutenant Knudsen would never have mentioned counterfeiting as a way to learn what Susan Brent knows. It seems that two can play at Mike Brent’s game of deception, although Lieutenant Knudsen doesn’t resort to violence or intimidation like Mike does.

The investigations into Martinelli’s murder and his connection to a counterfeiting ring are complicated and confusing. Characters come and go without introducing themselves or being introduced by others. The progressive alternative jazz on the soundtrack was distracting and loud on the DVD that I watched. The location shooting is a plus, but background noises sometimes overwhelm the dialogue. I had an easier time hearing what people were saying the second time that I watched the DVD because I turned up the volume for dialogue and turned it down when the music was the only sound on the soundtrack. But this technique wouldn’t have helped viewers in movie theaters. The film must have been difficult to follow, and apparently reviewers noted the production problems at the time.

Another draw for me, in addition to the on-location shooting, is the star: John Payne. Payne plays criminals in some wonderful films noir, including Larceny (1948), with Dan Duryea. In Hidden Fear, he plays Mike Brent, a no-nonsense, self-righteous Texas police officer who travels to Copenhagen to help his sister. He’s very believable as a criminal in other films, and although his role in Hidden Fear is in law enforcement, he is an officer who will push past the boundaries of right and wrong if he thinks it’s necessary to get what he wants. It’s easy to forget that one of John Payne’s most famous films is Miracle on 34th Street!

Hidden Fear reminds me of another film noir, Gunman in the Streets. Both were filmed in European cities after World War II (Hidden Fear in Denmark, Gunman in the Streets in Paris), and neither one was widely distributed in the United States. The main character in Gunman in the Streets is a U.S. army deserter who specializes in working the black market in postwar Paris. Mike Brent in Hidden Fear is a Texas police officer who is willing to resort to violence and intimidation to get the information that he wants. It’s easy to see that both films, with their themes of desertion, police brutality, and criminal behavior, would have been hard to accept in the United States after World War II.

Click here for my article about Gunman in the Streets.

I found myself taking in a lot of background detail for both films. I enjoyed each film’s particular view of life in a postwar European city. And I enjoyed Hidden Fear in spite of its production flaws. It has a lot to offer, especially for anyone interested in history—and, of course, film noir. And it has plenty of lines of dialogue worth listening for. For example, one criminal (Hartman) says to another (Gibbs) about his wife’s impending mental health crisis: “My wife walks near the darkness again.” The actor portrays a lot of resignation in that one line, so fitting for noir.

But so is the murder of Tony Martinelli, which opens the film. Everything after that revolves around solving the crime and clearing Susan Brent. Her brother Mike Brent is a force to be reckoned with, and his arrival in Copenhagen right after the murder signals his takeover of the case—but not the plot. Mike may be tough and he may be willing to bend the rules, but he never forgets the reason that he is in Copenhagen.

This article about Hidden Fear is my entry for the Classic Movie Blog Association’s 2022 Fall Blogathon: Movies Are Murder. Click here for the complete list of blogathon participants and links to their blogs. The list is updated each day of the blogathon, from November 7 to November 11.

July 3, 1957, release date  •  Directed by André de Toth (from Pitfall)  •  Screenplay by André de Toth and John Hawkins  •  Based on a story by Robin Howard  •  Music by Hans Schreiber  •  Edited by David Wages  •  Cinematography by Wilfred M. Cline

John Payne as Mike Brent  •  Alexander Knox as Hartman  •  Conrad Nagel as Arthur Miller  •  Natalie Norwick as Susan Brent  •  Anne Neyland as Virginia Kelly  •  Kjeld Jacobsen as Lieutenant Egon Knudsen  •  Paul Erling as Gibbs  •  Marianne Schleiss as Helga Hartman  •  Knud Rex as Jacobsen  •  Elsie Albiin as Inga Jorgensen  •  Buster Larsen as Hans Ericksen  •  Preben Mahrt as a Danish detective  •  Kjeld Petersen as Jensen, a lawyer  •  Mogens Brandt as Lund, a lawyer

Distributed by United Artists  •  Produced by St. Aubrey-Kohn Productions Inc.  •  Produced at Palladium Studios, Copenhagen, Denmark