Act of Violence has one of the all-time great openings, which director Fred Zinnemann amazingly manages to stretch it out over the first half-hour: a wild-eyed man (Robert Ryan) retrieves a gun from his hotel room and hops a cross-country train to a small town in California. When he arrives, he circles a name in a phone book: Frank R. Enley. He discovers that Enley (Van Heflin) owns a construction firm and is dedicating a monument to his fellow soldiers who fought in World War II. He's a war hero, and everybody in town loves him. So why does this guy want to kill him? Zinnemann's not telling, at least not for a while.

The story is a noir staple: our hero is haunted by something bad he did in the past, which comes to get him just as he thinks he's left it behind. It's the backbone of Robert Siodmak's masterful The Killers from two years earlier, as well as the pinnacle of the genre, Out of the Past from the year before. Like those films, too, the protagonist here "deserves" what's coming to him, although these films tend to question the idea that anyone "deserves" it. The casting is interesting, though, because if anybody looked like he deserved it, it was Van Heflin, with his nervous mannerisms. He seems guilty, even before we learn what he's accused of. Even given Robert Ryan's intense, wild-eyed determination, which makes him look more than a little crazy, just the fact that his target is Van Heflin implies that he has a justifiable grudge.

We finally find out what Frank Enley did when Joe Parkson (as we finally learn Ryan's character's name) forces his way into Enley's house and corners his wife Edith. Parkson tells her that Enley was a stool pigeon for the Nazis when both men were held in a German prison camp during the war. At first she doesn't want to believe it, even after her hubby lams it to Los Angeles to hide from Parkson instead of simply calling the police, but when she journeys there to confront him, he confesses. This scene is a visual marvel courtesy of cinematographer Robert Surtees, who, along with art directors Cedric Gibbons (who probably didn't set foot on the set) and Hans Peters and set decorator Edwin B. Willis, manages to make the back stairs of a convention hotel look like the guard tower in a military prison camp.

Janet Leigh's Edith is one of the most hyper-infantilized performances in all of noir. Most noirs have the "good girl," but this film takes it to another level. Leigh's character is creepily childlike: she spends most of the film in pigtails and several key scenes in little-girl pajamas; she's considerably younger than her husband, and she mentions on at least two occasions that they married when she was "little more than a girl." Frank pats her shoulder and embraces her, not as a husband or a lover, but as a father figure; when he calls her "baby," it's not a romantic term of endearment but an expression of her age bracket. I'm not sure what the filmmakers were getting at, either: does Frank require a relative innocent to believe his story of heroism, someone who won't question his abrupt cross-country moves?

It's too bad that the middle portion can't maintain the tension created in the first half-hour. After Frank confesses, Parkson tracks him to the hotel, and Frank runs off into a labyrinthine noir cityscape, complete with odd angles, oppressive shadows, and alleys that circle back onto themselves. But then he encounters Pat (Mary Astor in a brave peformance unfortunately saddled with bad lines), a down-on-her-luck lady of the evening, who takes him in and introduces him to sleazy lawyer Gavery (Taylor Holmes) and common thug Johnny (Berry Kroeger). The tension drains out of the film as Frank flip-flops over whether he wants his creepy new friends to take care of Parkson in exchange for the profits from the sale of his business. However, it's in this section that any traces of easy morality, of good and bad, are obliterated. Despite what he's done and what he's thinking about doing, Frank's the poster child for postwar America, a hero who translated his wartime achievement (that is, staying alive) into postwar success as a builder and community leader. What's Parkson, then, but a relic, a man who doesn't realize that the war should be forgotten in the name of progress, memorialized by statues and parades but not by violence?

Despite that momentum-killing middle section, this is still an above-average noir. Zinnemann shows a knack for suspense and moral ambiguity that he unfortunately abandoned in his later Oscar-mongering prestige pictures, and the set design and cinematographer are both top-notch. I only wish the film had integrated its questioning of postwar progress with its suspense a little more effectively; as it stands, they seem like two distinct sections of the film instead of being integral parts of the same story.

—July 4, 2006