Am I Missing Something?

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is an exciting quick-moving suspenseful film and I will recommend it even though I didn't care for the morally dubious conclusion. Highlights include the lead running from his stalker through a deserted 1948 downtown LA. We get a glimpse of The Angel's Flight railway, the extremely short funicular featured in about 20 films, it seems lots of directors thought it looked cool moving diagonally through the back of their shots. When it's not down for repairs you can still ride its' complete one block route today for two bits. The original was taken down and rebuilt in a new location a 1/2 block south. Janet Leigh was in this film, and she's apparently such a great actor I didn't even realize it was her until I saw her name in the credits, which very oddly for that era were at the end of the film instead of the beginning.

How much you'll enjoy this will probably come down to your affinity for a cat-and-mouse game. Others have written about how taut it is, they're right.But how best to describe its transcendent quality as noir? This I find more interesting. It can't be just a psychology, an explication of themes and morals, which is a passive way to deal with anything, separating it from life. Sure, the film is about guilt and justice, but that makes us no wiser to the immediacy. So I'd like here to carefully extricate the opening passage from the film, because it is so 'pure', and directly point at it, which is the true moment of noir where illusion comes into being.Two men have come back from the war, one of them bitter and mad, his mental state reflected in his eerie limping. As he gets off the bus at LA, he walks right into a military parade, signifying the war he emerges from, the polished image of that war, but we see in his limp the bitter reality. The other is the pillar of his community, a builder of things, a good husband. The first will be looking for him around sunny California, stops by his house one morning to query the beautiful wife. So a bewildered man emerges into the world, as simple as this. A man, who by his very emergence, creates the other's hallucinated nightmare, suggests something shadowy. This is always the first movement of noir, the coming back to, the emergence. In Detour, a dishevelled man washes up in a desert bar. In Double Indemnity, he staggers to a phone. In Deadline at Dawn, he wakes up with money in his pockets and no memory of his time spent with the wrong woman.It's all so mesmerizing in the opening movements, done with such clarity, you must have this in your cinematic life. The circling of boats in the lake. The drawing of the curtains in the house, to shield the wife from knowing. The eerie footsteps going around the house. Each one a case of drawing the mystery man closer to perception and unconcealment.Simple but so evocative. It's a thrilling piece, just these couple of scenes. And then we have the moral conundrums, potent but ordinary because all the stuff we grasped from just a handful of images, of simple motions, has to be talked about to signify the complexity. It misspends this great momentum. I'd have liked a more nightmarish journey of atonement, from roughly when our protagonist meets Mary Astor in a bar.Noir Meter: 4/4

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.

In the period immediately after Word War Two there was this massive divergence of moods in cinema, with fantastical escapism on the one hand, and dark pessimism on the other. This was particularly pronounced at MGM. Although the Arthur Freed unit was carrying on the studio's reputation for dreamlike extravagance, new production chief Dore Schary was also pushing a line of frank and gritty "message" movies, many of which dealt directly with the recent conflict.Act of Violence runs like a kind of dark flipside to the sublimely poignant Best Years of Our Lives, which won Best Picture for MGM a few years earlier. The director is Fred Zinnemann, who would later film a couple of Best Pictures himself, but at this point was still honing his craft in the B-unit. As in the handful of other features he had made up to this point, his primary concern seems to be creating atmosphere and tension through use of space and lighting. Virtually every shot is filled with streaking shadows and stifling frames, and to be honest this is all laid on a bit too heavily, even if it is very precise. Ironically though, his aim to give the picture this consistent claustrophobic feel means that sometimes he is forced to achieve it more subtly – for example in the shot where Robert Ryan crosses the road in front of the military parade, Zinnemann frames the action neatly with objects and people. The effect is the same but it looks very natural and unforced.Zinnemann also gets to prove his ability at handling action scenes. This is something directors usually perfect sooner than they do drama, which again is ironic for Zinnemann as he would spend most of his later career making deep dramatic pictures with little action. His staging of drama is coming along here though. He does a lot of long takes in dialogue scenes, where against cinematic convention one actor has their back to the camera whilst talking, thus focusing us on the reactions of the listener. One of the strongest pieces of direction however is the way Zinnemann introduces the two lead characters. We first see Ryan walking from a distance, then closer to, but from behind, we then see he has a gun, and then we finally pan up to his face. We are thus given clues as to the kind of man he is and what he may be capable of before we are allowed to connect with the character. The opposite approach is taken for Van Heflin, who is introduced to us with a big facial close-up, which would have been meaningful to audiences of the day as they would know Heflin and the sort of characters he played. From this point on Zinnemann allows the story to deconstruct Heflin's stereotype and add flesh to Ryan's.This intelligent focus on actors naturally brings out the best in the performances. Heflin's is strong if a tiny bit overdone at times. He probably relished this chance to show off his range. Ryan sadly doesn't get to do enough with this character, but he has great presence, and that is essentially what his character is for most of the movie – a presence. Mary Astor is great too – another player with fantastic range. I'll also mention Berry Kroeger, who plays the hit-man Johnnie, and was clearly cast as a face to fit the part, yet he does a pretty good acting job as well.One thing that does link these darker MGM post-war flicks with the studio's lighter upbeat fare is a kind of melodramatic overstatement, which is great in the right place but harms a picture like Act of Violence. In spite of the staccato, atonal intro, the music is largely schmaltzy strings spoiling the sincerity of the dramatic moments. The dialogue is fairly trite and unmemorable. It is mainly the good acting and competent direction which saves this one.