This bizarre, all-but-forgotten noir is filled with incongruities that make it work, as Steve Jenkins points out in his Monthly Film Bulletin revival: “The gulf between the characters, the emptiness of the narrative, and the sense of things that don't quite fit (Mitchum...impossible to describe at any age as a ‘young hero'...(here) as a doctor?), combine to give Where Danger Lives an edge of bleakness striking even in its generic context.” Romantically involved with a disturbed patient who has attempted suicide, Mitchum-as-doctor becomes implicated in the murder of her husband (Claude Rains). The two flee toward Mexico, Mitchum suffering increasing paralysis as a result of a skirmish with Rains. They find themselves in a series of disconnected, almost surreal situations, e.g., arriving in a cowboy town and being threatened for having broken the rules of “Whisker Week.” The tone of such incidents “really springs from (their) arbitrariness...the sense that all that lies between murder and the dream of Mexico...is the desert and a tatty burlesque theatre. In a non-noir context, this would presumably have been taken up with the developing relationship between the fleeing couple, but this is specifically precluded by the almost inevitable conception of the woman as the disturbed embodiment of evil....
“Given the solid RKO noir nexus of Mitchum, (cinematographer) Musuraca and...(director) Farrow, it is clear that the odd man out in the credits is Charles Bennett, who is chiefly remembered for his script contributions to most of Hitchcock's Thirties work, including The Man Who Knew Too Much (and) The 39 Steps....” --Steve Jenkins