Act of Violence (1949)

Film: Act of Violence (1949)

Stars: Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor, Phyllis Thaxter

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

One of the holdups with classic noir is that they almost always have to follow formula, and not just in the sense that they're in the same genre.  Detective literature of the 1940's broke barriers, but film noir had to stay within the confines of the Hays Code.  This meant that the good guys, while they could be rough-and-tumble, were required to be good at the end of the day.  Humphrey Bogart & John Garfield were figures that your dad might not approve of, but they were the kinds of guys that he'd secretly respect.  Act of Violence, a late-1940's film noir from Fred Zinnemann kind of upends that idea, giving us one of the more complicated protagonists I've seen in a film noir, one who definitely skirts the line between honor and betrayal.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Frank Enley (Heflin), who is a WWII veteran who lives with his wife Edna (Leigh) in suburban California.  They live a life of secret, but when one of Frank's fellow soldiers, Joe Parkson (Ryan) shows up at their doorstep, it becomes clear that there's more to Frank than he's letting on.  The movie continues with Joe essentially trying to kill Frank, and we soon learn he does so with good reason.  During the war, while they were both in a POW camp, Frank played informant to Nazis about a planned prison riot, and in the process all of his fellow countrymen were killed save for Joe, who played dead.  Now Joe is running after him to enact revenge.  Eventually Frank leaves his wife, and works with Pat (Mary Astor as probably a prostitute, but it's not entirely clear as, again, the Hays Code) to set him up to die...only at the last minute Frank comes in and saves Joe's life, finally finding retribution for his behavior during the war.

The movie is solid, but it easily could've been better, and a big part of that was the Hays Code.  In the end of the movie, we're essentially led to believe that Robert Ryan was our hero and Van Heflin an antihero, but come on-it would've been far more interesting had Heflin just been the villain.  The movie is talking about PTSD behind-the-scenes, a thin metaphor for the emotional wounds that soldiers carried coming back from the Front, and making a veteran be totally bad would've been a nightmare for MGM if they'd tried it, but it'd make a better movie if Frank never repented, or better yet, got away with it, using the guise of his uniform & status as a veteran to start over again, his sins buried in a German grave.

That said, it's still a good movie.  In a cast of strong actors, Mary Astor stands apart as the best performance, perhaps because she encapsulates the promise of the film better than anyone.  For much of the film, she's basically throwing herself at another man's husband (sweet, innocent Janet Leigh), obviously in love with him (and let's be honest, they're having sex even if they won't say it in the movie), and playing her character as a strange combination of world-weary and naive, the sort of woman who didn't want this life for herself, but still got it anyway.  It's a solid bit of acting from Astor, who rarely got to play such seedy parts after her legendary turn in The Maltese Falcon, in an era where she was usually a wife or mother.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler