Pasiones humanas

Neither Van Heflin or Robert Ryan were ever considered matinée idols or big box office draws. But both men were consummate professionals who could cast well in a variety of roles. I think that Act Of Violence could have worked just as well if they had played each other's parts.

MGM was a studio that did not do noir films very often, but in this case with Fred Zinnemann directing they did this one very well. No cops or private eyes in this one, both men are your average American of 1948. One has done a terrible wrong to the other and the other is seeking revenge.

Heflin is a former pilot who was shot down over Germany during World War II and Ryan was his bombardier. They both did time in a POW camp where Heflin informed on escape plans that Ryan and others made. No one survived but Ryan and he now walks with a limp, courtesy of Nazi machine gunners.

In civilian life Heflin is now a very successful contractor and when he hears Ryan is looking for him, he gets naturally rattled which concerns his wife Janet Leigh. Heflin who was not going to go to a convention in Los Angeles now changes his mind abruptly, but not before explaining to Leigh the reason for his fear. It's more fear of being exposed than for his life.

In Los Angeles Heflin who won his Oscar for Johnny Eager playing an alcoholic borrows a bit from that role as he ends up in a waterfront dive pouring his troubles out to some lowlifes played by Mary Astor, Taylor Holmes, and Berry Kroeger. Holmes is also drawing a bit from a previous role as a shyster lawyer in Kiss Of Death as he's playing the same kind of character in seedier circumstances. In fact Holmes's character says he is an attorney. I know Fred Zinnemann must have seen Kiss Of Death and cast Holmes as a result of that.

The climax might not be what you think, but in a way it's a fitting ending to the story. Though they get good support from the rest of the cast Heflin and Ryan dominate the story though they have no scenes together until the end. Act Of Violence is a noir classic and fans of Heflin and Ryan should list it among their best performances.

This grim look a couple of demobbed soldiers continuing their private war at home rarely get mentioned in lists of essential noirs; maybe, upon release in 1949, it was just a little too close for comfort -- hinting a truths the victorious American public were unwilling to acknowledge. If so, the film has yet to be rediscovered --or reappraised. Van Heflin is living out the modest American dream in sunny California when into his life strides an old combat buddy, Robert Ryan (at his most menacing, which is nothing to sneeze at). To his wife's (Janet Leigh's) consternation, Heflin takes it on the lam, and slowly we learned what happened, or may have happened, over in a POW camp in the European Theater of War. As Heflin's flight takes him into seedier and more sinister surroundings, he links up with Mary Astor, living on the vague border of prostitution. (After helping to launch the cycle with her spectacular turn as Brigid O'Shaugnessey in The Maltese Falcon, Astor appeared in disappointingly few film noir; her expert performance here makes one wonder why, why, why?) Though the script opts for a strange and bitter "redemptive" ending, the acrid taste of Act of Violence lingers long.

"What is it, love trouble or money trouble?" a burnt-out good-time-gal asks the man she just picked up in a bar. She's seen all the troubles in the world, she tells him, "And they boil down to just those two. You're broke, or you're lonely." Most noir films confirm this: the hero is brought down by lust or greed or some combination of the two; by the temptations of crime or the lure of a femme fatale. But this time the world-weary hooker is wrong; her man's problem has nothing to do with love or money. It has to do with the war, when, as the man tells his wife, "A lot of things happened...that you don't understand."

World War II is an undercurrent in many post-war noirs. A generation of men had faced violence and death; they couldn't settle back into their ostentatiously wholesome communities, and they were all too ready to pull out their service revolvers to solve peacetime problems. ACT OF VIOLENCE offers the most direct analysis of the war as a source of noir angst, becoming both one of the best examples of the genre and one of the best films about the effects of war. Four years after America's victory, it was still daring to admit that not all of our boys behaved honorably overseas, and that our prosperity might rest on corrupt foundations.

Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a perfect image of postwar success, a war hero with a thriving business, a nice house in the suburbs, a beautiful wife and a young son. This idyll of fishing trips and checkered aprons is invaded by Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan), a creepy, limping, gun-wielding, apparently deranged stalker. He was with Frank in the army and in a P.O.W. camp, and holds a mysterious, murderous grudge against him. The first part of the movie plays like a horror film, using magnified sounds--especially the slow, shuffling drag of Parkson's lame leg--in eerie stillness to heighten suspense. As we learn more about what really happened in the war, the black-and-white scenario of threatened innocence unfolds into a complex moral puzzle. Can desperate circumstances or good intentions mitigate an act of betrayal and moral cowardice? Is violent revenge ever justified?

Robert Ryan starts out in typical form: intense, tightly-wound, scary, seething with hate. But we also get to glimpse the suffering and moral outrage that underlie his tortured obsession. His anger might be righteous, but he's still a figure of terror. Van Heflin has the richer part, and he reveals the full measure of his under-appreciated brilliance. He doesn't look like a movie star--he was well described as "attractively homely"--and he doesn't act like a movie star either. He's so transparent and direct; he never advertises what he's doing. Like Arthur Kennedy, he specialized in ambiguity, playing nice guys with something shifty and unreliable about them, or unscrupulous heels with decent cores. Here he evolves from an amiable pillar of the community to a man so sick with self-loathing that he can hardly stand up straight.

In a classic noir trajectory, he moves from the sunny suburbs to the wasteland of an urban night, where the desolate streets around L.A.'s Angel's Flight mirror his state of mind. (The suburbs too have dark shadows and unsettling overtones, like the background motif of the Enleys' baby screaming behind the bars of his crib or playpen, trapped and helpless as his father.) At the end of his rope, Frank meets a friendly, worn-out barfly (a shockingly weathered and tawdry Mary Astor.) Astor works wonders with a clichéd part, all nervous tics and generosity pinched by fear and bad memories. She keeps talking about "getting her kicks"--it's all she has left. "Gee, there's no law says you gotta be happy."

In this seedy underworld, the man with the tortured conscience meets a man with no conscience, a killer-for-hire with a smooth voice and plump, evil face (Barry Kroeger) who plays the part of Satan, tempting Frank to get rid of his problem the easiest way. Heflin manages to retain sympathy for his weak and sometimes despicable character, through the honesty and vividness of his anguish. Fred Zinneman keeps the suspense mounting through taut, spare direction: no excessive music or flashy visuals or extraneous flourishes, just a relentless focus on the collision courses of the main characters, who include Frank's wife (the girlish, gorgeous Janet Leigh) and Parkson's girlfriend (Phyllis Thaxter), who doesn't want her man to be a murderer.

What would you do if you were starving, literally fighting for survival, and you had a chance to save yourself? What if you had done something terrible and knew that only one living witness knew about it? What if you were that witness? There are no easy answers in this movie, which attacks the popular notion that when a war is over it's over, and people can just get on with their lives. An "act of violence" is never the end, it always leads to another.

Van Heflin plays a land developer in Los Angeles in the booming years after WW2, whom we see cutting the ribbon on a new sub-division that's opening up. He has a beautiful young wife played by Janet Leigh who adores everything about him and a toddler son as well. When an army buddy played by Robert Ryan unexpectedly shows up, it throws Heflin's little paradise into chaos. His wartime history emerges, presenting a disturbing picture of cowardice and betrayal, things he's kept hidden from everyone, including his wife, but which his own conscience and Ryan as well, won't let him escape. It turns out Ryan's been trailing him from coast to coast. Heflin's disintegration is awesome, one of the finest acting jobs ever. It's all perfectly capped off when he's trying to explain what happened to his unbelieving wife. He winds up on LA's skid row, meeting a party girl who's seen much better days played by Mary Astor, who gets him to confide in her and introduces him to Johnny (Berry Kroeger), someone who can arrange to have all his problems taken care of for a hefty price. The conclusion, a classic western style noir showdown on a breezy night on the railroad tracks, is beautifully done.

Whilst not strictly a noir, this excellent and tense movie has many noir moments and all the night location photography has exactly the right look, especially the fantastic railway track side denouement. Never predictable this film takes many turns as the truth of what had happened in the wartime past of the main characters is gradually revealed.

Extremely well paced with intelligent dialogue whilst the leads chase about after and away from each other we are left to assess and re-assess just who the baddie really is. In the end, however, it is the only ending possible. Very rewarding and highly recommended.