On Dangerous Ground: Try and Get Me (1950), Where Danger Lives (1950)

 

Try and Get Me (Cyril Endfield, 1950)

 

Take away this San Jose, replete counter-factual 

lynchings, deep into the genotypical. And if 

offending the offendable, remove the offence,

or, for that matter, sleazoid jurisprudence.  

Preambled by yet another religious nutter, his 

sign, gulp, muddy water, turkey in all this 

chinoiserie: like, "How much are you guilty 

for the evils in the world?" Swallow, head down. 

Numb post-war suburban man, washed with a yen 

for monopoly capitalism. Lurking in a tostada-

with-all-the-trimmings clink. Ain’t no get outta 

jail free card in this star spangled banana republic. 

And "no law against what's right." But what is right? 

Poor pendejo, coming back to his little chickadee. 

In darkness, a window, his only art, sans tv to 

distract, sans disposable dosh to schlep his sitcom 

son to a ball game. Still, ducks will slurp for the 

nearest psycho, and rungs on the ladder will break 

with lumpen farce, Elmer Fudding raison robbery. 

Born to shoot shit, his marriage crumbles for lack 

of middle-class moxy. Spilling beans on a barroom 

floor, to a wallflower displaying her magnificent 

ambersons, plumaged to shop the schmuckable, 

revving the reviled to break into jail, their monkeys 

signifying one man's guilt might well be another 

man's gelt. Whether backroom boy or tinselled 

mensch, seething to insert an immigrant root-canal 

cosmopolitan, eurosplaining vigilantism. Pre-

Murdoched with a by-lined Green Stamp wallop, 

sans hostages to redeem, for this, buy easy bay lurch. 

Where Danger Lives (John Farrow, 1950)

Who doesn’t “do” anxiety, influence or discontents.  

High rollers, disguised as low hitters. Dodge-ball 

pretenders and four-square curators. Likewise, scionic 

border rats, and their calico partners. Blimey! It’s a 

replicant of Willeford’s Wild Wives, six years later.  

Uncredited, forgotten, unmentioned, or marooned in 

anodyneland. But let’s gloss this lipstick, mire this 

pig in graveyard proverbials. Picture a wealthy young 

wife, her past perturbing her present, secondhand

clocking a handsome young doctor. We wonder, is

the old guy her husband or father? Well, Cassandra 

is nothing if not complex. That Dr Mitch and the old 

man come to blows, is more ontological than generational. 

That Dr Mitch dances like Sluggo, must impair his

gamut of suicidal tendencies. Like travelling to Mexico, 

with warts and all peccadilloes. Nearing the border, her 

psychosis riles, tries to kill Dr Mitch. Hardly una 

mojada, but shot all the same, straight to the core of her 

consequentialism.  Her confession prompting a debate 

on the nature of false consciousness. Is this a  stitch-up, 

or simply a gold digger’s diet? Ubiquitous, granular 

paranoia, so lopsided this autonomy, so why can’t these 

fuckers recycle their trash as they do their movies or  

wives? I had no choice. I fell under her spell. As old as 

Hollywood, clueless though it was and always has been.