On Dangerous Ground is a 1951 film noir directed by Nicholas Ray, starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, and produced by John Houseman.

He joins a manhunt pursuing the murderer of a young girl and teams up with Walter Brent, the father of the victim.

And while a most galling performance of the farmer is given by Ward Bond, Ida Lupino is mawkishly stagey as the blind girl who melts the cop's heart.

For all the sincere and shrewd direction and the striking outdoor photography, this R. K. O. melodrama fails to traverse its chosen ground.

"[3] In 2005 critic Dennis Schwartz liked the film and acting in the drama: "Robert Ryan's fierce performance is superb, as he's able to convincingly assure us he has a real spiritual awakening; while Lupino's gentle character acts to humanize the crime fighter, who has walked on the "dangerous ground" of the city and has never realized before that there could be any other kind of turf until meeting someone as profound and tolerant as Mary.

Easily mushy, the material achieves a nearly transcendental beauty in the hands of Ray, a poet of anguished expression: The urban harshness of the city is contrasted with the austere snowy countryside for some of the most disconcertingly moving effects in all film noir.

His work is strongly evocative of his later, better-known score to Alfred Hitchcock's famed 1958 thriller North by Northwest.

He also later reused a sequence that became the opening theme of the 1957 television series Have Gun Will Travel, as well as other fragments of incidental music later adapted for use in the TV show.