Where Danger Lives

Odd casting for Mitchum as a solid citizen, first cousin to Dr Kildare, who finds himself on the run after succumbing to the siren songs of a psychotic patient (Domergue, who asphyxiates her husband Rains, letting Mitchum think he killed him in a fight). Nick Musuraca's superb camerawork stresses the noir that is synonymous with the Mitchum persona; Charles Bennett's script seems to be hankering after all those innocent thrillers he wrote for Hitchcock in the '30s. The result is an impasse of cross-purposes which lends the film a sort of bleak abstraction, curious and rather compelling.