Coming in between The Search (1948) and The Men (1950), Act of Violence is the centerpiece in a trilogy of films by Fred Zinnemann about people living in the physical or emotional ruins of World War II. While the other two offer hopeful visions for displaced orphans and disabled veterans, the film noir Act of Violence is a humane but unsparing look at scars that won’t heal and guilt that can’t be expunged. The original story was by Collier Young, who first tried to interest producer Mark Hellinger before selling the treatment to MGM, where the screenplay was written by Robert L. Richards, a few years before he was blacklisted for refusing to cooperate with HUAC.
A simple thriller premise – a successful and respected family man is stalked by a deranged killer – unravels into a labyrinth of moral ambiguity, which is brilliantly mapped onto the landscape of postwar America by Zinnemann and cinematographer Robert Surtees. Shooting on locations that range from the pristine waters of Big Bear Lake to the decaying Los Angeles neighborhood of Bunker Hill, they give the film a potent blend of documentary realism and expressionistic nightmare. A mere change of lighting transforms a suburban dream home into a prison of shadows. Stairway bannisters, the bars of a playpen, the railings of a fire escape, a chain-link fence, and a traffic tunnel all conjure the prisoner-of-war camp where the hunter and the hunted met – and which, psychologically, neither man has ever escaped.
The film is flawlessly acted from top to bottom, especially by Van Heflin, who physically disintegrates before our eyes as his character’s guilt and fear eat him away from within. But special mention goes to Mary Astor as a worn-out barfly who has seen all the troubles in the world, and who consoles the tormented man with her philosophy: “So you’re unhappy. Relax – no law says you gotta be happy.”

Imogen Sara Smith