On Dangerous Ground (1952) and Foreign Land (1996) and Conflict between Nature and Culture

In both 20th and 21st century movies, nature and culture are typically bifurcated, with the urban representative of the culture binary usually constructed as dangerous, suffocating, and many times deadly. Nature, on the hand, is primarily represented as a haven, a pastoral escape from a deteriorating city environment where all life seems to be threatened. Such a division is particularly striking in film noir.

In Nicholas Ray's film On Dangerous Ground (1952), Detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) finds solace in the rural hills, away from the decaying noir urban setting he escapes. Wilson has become so embittered by his dealings with the heartless criminals of the urban underworld that his superiors notice his violent episodes of torture with his suspects. To curb his violence, he is ordered out of the city to pursue a young girl’s killer in the mountains up north. 

In this idyllic pastoral setting, Wilson gains self-awareness, with the help of Mary (Ida Lupino), the murderer’s blind sister, and frees himself of his own rage. Nighttime urban shots in the film maintain Wilson’s cynicism and desperation, but gradually, as his view of the world changes, rural shots brighten, suggesting that Wilson’s own blindness about himself has lifted. In film noir, the city is a dark, shadowy, and dangerous underworld separate from a life-giving natural environment.

This same view of the city as an oppressive space occurs outside the United States. The cityscape of Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’s Brazilian neo-noir Foreign Land (1996) resembles that of On Dangerous Ground. Foreign Land chronicles the union between Paco (Fernando Alves Pinto), an aspiring actor living in Sao Paulo, and the virtuous Alex (Fernanda Torres), who works as a waitress in Lisbon, Portugal. Like Jim Wilson, Paco seeks to escape the decay of the city and the empty seediness of his role there and find solace in San Sebastian, his dead mother’s home. Paco feels trapped by forces beyond his control, in this case literally trapped by the role of “mule” forced upon him after his mother’s death.

Devoid of a clear sense of self, Paco, like Wilson, frantically battles the city and its underworld while searching for salvation outside the city and its corruption. As in On Dangerous Ground, a virtuous woman and pastoral solution to urban corruption contribute to the salvation Paco seeks. Although Paco’s attempts to escape a broken city in wild nature fails, both On Dangerous Ground and Foreign Land provide opportunities to explore representations of nature in the cities where we live. They also highlight the connections between cinema and both modern and postmodern constructions of urban space.