Best movie of this year hands down!

Absolutely Fantastic

A Masterpiece!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

"Where Danger Lives" is a surprisingly complex film noir with a deliciously vicious undertow. Robert Mitchum, Claude Rains and Faith Domergue are superb. What stands out is that Domergue is the strongest performance, and perhaps because she bears the strongest character. Domergue is refreshingly overpowering. If we consider that Harlow was actually a seasoned actress prior to "Hell's Angels," Domergue is arguably Hughes' best discovery. Seductive danger with surprise twists, indeed.

Film noir plots in which a fall guy gets framed by a femme fatale are not exactly rare but what distinguishes this movie from other similar ones is the way in which the victim's personal road to hell is depicted as a nightmare. The respectable man's normally good judgement deserts him when he becomes infatuated by an attractive woman and later, the effects of alcohol and concussion further impair his powers of reasoning. The disorientation and confusion that follow make his predicament increasingly worse as he experiences the kind of illogicality and loss of control that are common in dreams and feels himself being helplessly propelled towards an uncertain destiny.This sense of everything being off-kilter is also reflected elsewhere in the movie as the femme fatale is mentally unbalanced, the people that the couple meet when they're on the run are extremely eccentric and a whole series of wonderfully off-balance visual compositions are also featured.At the end of a long shift in a San Francisco hospital, hard-working Dr Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) attends to an attempted suicide case. The patient is a young woman known simply as Margo (Faith Domergue) who recovers quickly and is soon discharged. Mysteriously, neither Margo or the man who brought her to the hospital disclose any other details of their identities or addresses but shortly after, Jeff receives a note from his patient containing her address. In an attempt to ensure that she doesn't try to commit suicide again, he visits her mansion and she gives him an account of why she tried to kill herself. Although he already has a regular girlfriend, Jeff continues to see Margo and falls in love with her.When Margo tells Jeff that she's got to accompany her very old father to Nassau the next day, he decides to meet Mr Frederick Lannington (Claude Rains) in the hope of changing his mind and in order to overcome his nerves, fortifies himself with a number of strong drinks. At the mansion, the young doctor tells Mr Lannington that he's in love with Margo and is shocked to be told that Margo is actually the old man's wife who married him for his money. Disgusted by this revelation, Jeff leaves the mansion but then goes back in after hearing Margo scream.Lannington had apparently ripped a earring out of one of Margo's ears and then hits Jeff with a poker before the younger man knocks his attacker out. Jeff is perpetually shaken and unsteady after this incident and after going to the bathroom to freshen up, returns to find that Lannington is dead. Margo persuades him that the police will be suspicious of the circumstances under which her husband died and so the couple go on the run together. Their journey to the Mexican border proves to be difficult and hazardous as Jeff realises he's suffering from concussion and they also get swindled by a whole succession of unscrupulous people.Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains are so good in their roles that they easily outshine everyone else in the cast and make the whole production far better than it might otherwise have been. The growing tension and paranoia that prevails during the couple's road trip is expertly created and maintained and their experiences of feeling trapped and disorientated are also strongly emphasised by the movie's wonderful cinematography and the use of some terrific low-angle shots. "Where Danger Lives" is extremely enjoyable and some of its twists are top class.

John Farrow directed this melodramatic thriller that stars Robert Mitchum as Jeff Cameron, a well-liked doctor who one night treats an attempted suicide victim, who turns out to be an attractive but mysterious woman named Margo(played by Faith Domergue) He foolishly begins an affair with her, despite her being married to a man named Lannington(played by Claude Rains). Margo then causes him to kill her husband, which forces them to flee to Mexico, where they stay at a seedy border hotel, waiting on their chance to be smuggled out, even as the police close in... Good cast but film is overripe and uninvolving, with Mitchum playing a man who should be much smarter than he is!

This peculiar excursion is skillfully shot by Nick Musuraca in the dark black and white nature of the genre in its era, and is capably helmed by John Farrow, who fruitfully captures these delirious visions. It's by and large a character study of an accomplished man blinded by lust, whose life disintegrates as it falls behind him. Mitchum is the guiltless man who is entrapped, but doesn't understand he's innocent until quite late. Too late? Only the will to live in spite of being so far out of his comfort zone and his senses can save him from this interesting spin on the framed-for-murder predisposition of the formula.Mitchum, as was his modus operandi, once again put on airs of sleepy-eyed detachment and barrel-chested reserve, but in this case, he is interesting and sympathetic, realistically showing how a smart guy and such an experienced doctor could be in such a weak position. He genuinely and believably connects to the emotional and sensory reality of his bewildered character, whose feelings and senses are constantly in flux. Likewise, director John Farrow effectively taps the outlandish, hallucinatory traits in this customary noir plot: Mitchum spends the last half of the film barreling down the dirt roads of southern California with a concussion, fainting cyclically and awakening enclosed by some of the murkiest landscape the U.S. has to present.Yes, Mitchum is cast against type as a stable professional, but actually, I think Faith Domergue is equally if not more accountable for the lack of artifice in Mitchum's performance than he is. From moment to moment, and this is most definitely a movie that lives in the present, she genuinely affects him. They're not just saying lines at one another, overlapping their words and movements with some programmed, bottled manner. The sultry, manic, hard-bitten, shifty-eyed edge is real. What's more, Claude Rains as always is superb, in a small role but a pretty important one, where his every motion looks to be controlled over a maniacal wrath all set to gush out, best illustrated by his malicious grin while meeting his wife's lover. And the film's a pleasingly bizarre screwball streak further sets it apart as a unique entry in the film noir canon.