Act of Violence (1948) says as much about the immediate post-war years (and my own first decade of life) as any film I know. In it, an ex-army-officer who survived a German POW camp has acquired a pretty wife and a sunny suburban California home, but he is guilt-ridden because while in the camp he betrayed his fellow prisoners. He's pursued by a revenge-obsessed former comrade. The film is not, for once, a melodrama. Good and evil, innocence and experience intermingle in the main characters, and, most rewardingly, in the smaller parts. Mary Astor (otherwise Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon) turns in a brilliant performance as a tired, opportunistic but ultimately decent prostitute. In fact, women in this film (in addition to Mary Astor, Janet Leigh and Phyllis Thaxter) are for once as complex and cliche-free as the male leads (Van Heflin and the always pitch-perfect Robert Ryan).
The story-telling is flawless and economical, the mood is sombre and intense. The unsettling themes are the burden of the past, the menace of the future, trepidation at the unknown, and the expiation of guilt.
Robert L. Richards, who wrote the spare screenplay, was fingered as a leftist and blacklisted. He lost his promising career, became a carpenter, and died, embittered, in exile. is it necessary to note that Act of Violence is a not the least bit subversive? It's a genuinely patriotic film. Fred Zinnemann, the director, escaped from the Nazis but left both his parents behind. They were murdered in the camps. Zinnemann was therefore superbly positioned to bring to the screen an exploration of the "guilt of the survivor."
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