The redemptive woman often represents or is part of a primal connection with nature and/or with the past, which are safe, static states rather than active, exciting ones, but she can sometimes offer the only transcendence possible in film noir. They Live By Night and On Dangerous Ground (both directed by Nicholas Ray, 1949 and 1951) are characterised by the darkly romantic element that can exist with the cynical. In the former, the young lovers are doomed, but the possibility of their love transcends and redeems them both, and its failure criticises the urbanised world that will not let them live. Their happiest moments are outdoors in the sunlight, with ‘normalcy’ an ideal they can never realise because there is no place for them in the corrupt world. Mary (On Dangerous Ground) is not only cut off from the corruption of greed, money and power of the urban environment by living in a rural setting, she is further isolated (and purified) by her blindness. She teaches the badly disturbed and violent Jim to feel, and her reliance on him releases him from his emotional prison. Both characters are crippled — he emotion- ally and she physically — and need each other to achieve the wholeness of health. This interdependence keeps both characters and their relationship exciting, while other ‘innocents’ of film noir who exist only to contrast with the dangerous woman simply fade into forgetfulness.