The film equivalent of being sent to sit on the naughty step, Where Danger Lives is where Robert Mitchum was put to cool off after a marijuana bust put him in the newspapers for all the wrong reasons. It is low-level, cheese-paring noir well below his pay grade and with not really enough plot to get it to the finish line. But the finish is spectacularly good and Mitchum puts his back into the role of the decent humanitarian doctor who falls for a bad girl and ends up on the run with her after her husband dies.
Dr Jeff Cameron (Mitchum) is introduced reading a bedtime story to a girl in an iron lung – decent dude, right? – but goes right off the rails after meeting Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue), an attempted suicide who sets off fireworks in his head the first time they meet. Before long, Jeff has left the hospital and his sweet fiancée (Maureen O’Sullivan) behind and is on the run with Margo, the pair of them fleeing the scene of her husband’s death. Jeff thinks it was an accident and that he was somehow involved – as a result of getting a mighty whack on the head he can’t quite get the events of the evening in question in order.
That whack on the head does most of the work a plot would be doing in a better film, and is used to convey Mitchum from near the start of the film to very near its end. Confused, foggy Jeff is still doctor enough to know that he’s suffering from more than a concussion and that he needs urgent medical attention.
It’s a one damn thing plot – Jeff and Margo running into one situation after another as they head for Mexico. They get involved in a hit and run in one town, then get “arrested” in another for not wearing whiskers when it’s the town’s annual festive Whiskers Week. This is the pattern of the movie, each situation a potential for raising Jeff and Margo’s profile just enough that the authorities will spot who they really are.
Domergue appears to be on autopilot for the first half of the movie, though her strangely distant performance suits a character who may be in the grip of something she can’t control. Or maybe it’s just bad acting. But she comes into her own in the second half, as Jeff starts to become less connected to what’s going on around him and Margo’s true nature starts to reveal itself.
In spite of Jeff’s declining condition, for the most part this is a story of a practical male and an impetuous female, intellect and emotion, safety and danger – the female of the species and all that.
Claude Rains gets third billing, playing Margo’s husband, a much older man mistaken for her father when Jeff first meets him. Rains is on screen for maybe a handful of minutes so don’t get too excited, but he is very good as the injured party, reacting with a chilly and off-putting calm when he hears that Jeff is going to take his wife away from him.
Nicholas Musuraca, one of the great noir lighting cameramen, drapes it all in drama, and John Farrow’s direction lifts it even further heavenward. This is a good film, if you can ignore the plot.
In the end it’s a story about a silly man falling for the wrong woman when there was a perfectly good if rather vanilla one back at base. Dark psychology sustains the thin plot, good acting fills in a few gaps and as for the rest of it, lashings of style and a bonkers ending allowing Domergue to let rip might almost convince you it’s a decent movie.
Where Danger Lives (in a box set with Tension) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
