Few people have portrayed somebody who can hold a grudge indefinitely as well as Robert Ryan. In 1948’s Act of Violence, we see glimpses of him on the long bus ride from New York City to Los Angeles, and he has murder in his heart the entire way.
His goal is to kill Van Heflin, his former army buddy with whom he flew 21 bomber runs and spent roughly a year in a prisoner of war camp. It was while interred that everyone in the squadron but he and Heflin were killed in an attempted escape. Heflin tells wife Janet Leigh he told a Nazi commandant of the planned escape only because he hoped to avoid the slaughter he thought would inevitably happen. Instead, guard dogs and bayonets awaited the men on the other side of the tunnel they had dug.
I was curious if that was ever Heflin’s intention when he ratted out his fellow soldiers. “They were dead and I was eating. Maybe that’s why I did it. To save one life—my own.”
Ryan definitely believes Heflin only did it to save his own skin. And he has a personal score to settle, as he was shot in the leg in the attempted escape, leaving him with a severe limp.
I like how that limp leg often makes a dragging scene, which adds to the suspense. A scene with Heflin and Leigh hiding in their kitchen in the dark of night scans like a horror movie, as we hear that slow scraping sound when Ryan comes to the back door. Then, in close-up, we see the doorknob turn.
Something especially interesting about this picture is neither of the two men who are our leads are either wholly good or bad. Ryan may have murder in his heart, but it is understandable how he came to be this way. Heflin is supposedly an upstanding member of the community, yet he is proven to be a coward in his steadfast refusal to face Ryan.
He won’t even talk to him on the phone. Even when evading Ryan by phone, he hides behind two different women. An another interesting aspect of this film is the women are headstrong. Leigh actually stomps out of the house to confront Ryan directly in an early scene. A barfly played by Mary Astor makes a call to Ryan for Heflin, as the intermediary for the offer of a large amount of money the man refuses with a laugh. Another interesting role here is Phyllis Thaxter, as Ryan’s girlfriend, who flies out to L.A. to beg him to come home. Unlike a great many films of this era, the women are strong and have agency.
There isn’t much action, but one moment towards the end warrants particular attention. Heflin stands on railroad tracks, intending to let an ongoing train kill him. It is obviously the actor is standing on those tracks for an uncomfortably long time. There is an edit to an alternate angle where I suspect he was replaced by a stunt person. Whoever was on the tracks just before jumping off did so at the last possible second. Heck, I wouldn’t have been able to stay in place as long as Heflin does even before that edit.
From the very beginning, this picture feels a bit different than other fare of the time. A cold open has Ryan bolting up a flight of stairs to an apartment where he gets a gun from a dresser bureau. He loads a clip into it and only then does the title of the film appear. There had been no stars before that title card, nor will there be any credits immediately after. All of that is set aside until the very end of the runtime. This may not sound like anything significant, but I cannot recall another movie of this vintage doing that.
Heflin was brave to take a role which makes him look so weak and ineffectual. The trajectory of the plot had me wondering when he would bottom out. One scene has a shady character offer to have thug Barry Kroeger assassinate Ryan, and Heflin pathetically looks like he is finally seeing the faintest glimmer of hope. Ryan is perfectly cast, as always, as an obsessed psychopath. It is interesting to see Janet Leigh, who didn’t look that much older in Psycho twelve years later. Mary Astor, on the other hand, is made to look substantially older and more world-weary than she was in The Maltese Falcon just seven years earlier. I was also pleased to see Garry Owen in one of the seemingly hundreds of such bit parts he was in throughout his career, such as the cab driver in Arsenic & Old Lace.
The film largely looks fantastic and is full of the chiaroscuro photography that is one of the main identifiers of noir. Many real locations are used, most notably a lake where Ryan is stalking Heflin, who had gone on a weekend fishing trip. Of particular note in that sequence is a boulder extending out over the lake’s surface, the underside of it lit by the sun reflecting off the ripples of water. Close-ups change to in-studio rear projection, but even those are done as well as can be.
I assume many of the interiors are sets, the only I’d like to most know whether or not it is would be the home of Heflin and Leigh. This California arts & crafts styled bungalow feels like a real location. If it wasn’t, then props to those who designed this set.
There is much of Act of Violence which was very much keeping with noir and, of greater interest, the many ways it deviates from the expected. The characters played by Heflin and Ryan are more nuanced and less black-and-white than the crisp monochromatic photography. As Leigh says in a monologue near the end, she used to think Heflin was perfect, but what she now knows about his past means he has weaknesses like anybody else, and she loves him just the same. I didn’t love this movie, but its subtleties and complications, and even some of its flaws, make it more interesting than some of its peers.
Dir: Fred Zinnemann
Starring Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray