Act of Violence (MGM, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning (Sunday, December 8) I watched a movie I was hoping my husband Charles and I would get to watch together last night, though due to the vagaries of local bus schedules we didn’t get back from our out-of-town trip in time: Act of Violence, a 1948 film noir made at MGM (which sounds like a contradiction in terms right there!), directed by Fred Zinnemann from a script by Robert L. Richards based on a story by Collier Young. Collier Young was an aspiring screenwriter and producer who married a major Hollywood star, Ida Lupino, and co-founded a company called The Filmakers (only one “m”). According to Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, Young originally wrote the story as a project for Mark Hellinger’s production unit at Universal, only once Hellinger died suddenly on the eve of shooting for Criss Cross Universal put the project in turnaround. MGM acquired it mainly due to their newly hired production chief, Dore Schary, who’d been brought in after he ran afoul of Howard Hughes at RKO at least in part to update MGM’s output and get some more noir projects going. MGM’s long-time production head, Louis B. Mayer, predictably hated film noir; referencing the 1947 classic Kiss of Death, he said, “Kick an old lady down a flight of stairs, and they call that art?” Art or not, it was what a lot of late-1940’s movie audiences wanted to pay to see, and Act of Violence gave it to them in spades. Ironically, one of the flaws of Act of Violence mirrors one of the problems with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: it’s trying so hard to be “socially significant” that the moral and political commentary gets away from the sheer thrill of the story. That was a common weakness of Dore Schary – he green-lighted so many socially significant films the joke was, “He’s selling out MGM for a pot of message” – and also of Collier Young, who took the money he got for the story for Act of Violence and used it to set up Not Wanted, the first The Filmakers production, a story of unwed motherhood. (Not Wanted’s direction was credited to silent-era veteran Elmer Clifton, but he had a heart attack after the first week of shooting and Ida Lupino took over the direction herself; she later went on to some quite challenging social-comment films, including Outrage, The Bigamist and her greatest film as a director, The Hitch-Hiker.)

Act of Violence starts in the bucolic small town of Santa Lisa, in which returning World War II veteran Frank R. Enley (Van Heflin) has created a company to build homes for fellow veterans and has become a local hero. There’s even a parade for him in progress as the film opens. Alas, he’s got a dirty little secret in his war past, which comes to town to haunt him in the person of disabled fellow veteran Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan). Joe is shown in the opening scenes of the film carefully loading a handgun and concealing it on his person, then taking a bus from Los Angeles to Santa Lisa. Once he arrives, he goes to Enley’s house and stalks him. When he finds out Enley is out of town on a fishing trip, he browbeats Enley’s wife Edith (a very young Janet Leigh) and their two-year-old son George (Larry and Leslie Holt, obviously following the common dodge of casting identical twins as a pre-pubescent character to avoid breaking California’s strict laws on how many hours per day a child can work). She lets him know where Frank is, and Frank abruptly cuts short his fishing trip to head home when he recognizes Joe stalking him on the lake in a rented boat. Frank learns that Joe has told Edith his secret: when the two were prisoners of war in 1944 being starved by the Germans who were holding them, Joe and the others planned an escape through a tunnel. Frank blew the whistle and told the Nazi camp commandant about the escape attempt. The commandant promised Frank the escapees would be treated leniently, but of course he was lying: instead the Germans were waiting for the 11 men as they came out of the tunnel and bayoneted them, leaving them to die slow and painful deaths. Joe was the only one who survived, but the incident left him with a permanent limp (Muller said after the movie that a lot of film historians have said it was Robert Ryan’s idea to have the character limp, but the limp is mentioned in all the extant copies of the script) that becomes a physical metaphor for his psychologically twisted character. Frank has an out-of-town builders’ and contractors’ convention he was planning to attend, but Joe’s omnipresence leads him to leave town a few days early, and there are some great scenes (anticipating the similar use of a convention in the film D.O.A. a year later) in which Joe is stalking Frank through the forced gaiety of a convention, while Edith is also trying to find her husband and warn him of what he’s up against. Ultimately Frank and Edith confront each other and Frank confesses that Joe’s accusations against him are true.

Frank wanders the mean streets of L.A. and ultimately gets picked up in a bar by Pat (Mary Astor), the proverbial whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, who introduces him to a corrupt lawyer and fixer named Gavery (Taylor Holmes). Frank, who has previously offered to give up his business (whose worth he estimates as $20,000) and transfer it to Joe to repay him and get him off his back, is told by Gavery that he can hire a hit man, Johnny (Berry Kroeger), for $10,000 to get Joe off his back … permanently. (After the recent murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by an unknown gunman on the streets of New York, this aspect of the plot seemed all too timely today!) At one point Frank stands in the middle of the L.A. rail yards and stands on a track while a train comes barreling down at him, but he steps away just in time. It all climaxes at the Santa Lisa train station, where Johnny is supposed to show up and kill Joe, only Frank runs out on his wife and child to make it to the train station. Frank saves Joe’s life by stepping in front of Johnny and taking the fatal bullet himself, thereby fulfilling the iron law of the Production Code that, no matter how sympathetic he seemed in the rest of his life, he had to pay for his one moment of evil. (This left me wondering what’s going to happen to Frank’s business and all the veterans who were depending on him to supply them housing, though I mentally remixed the film’s ending so Edith would take over and show unexpected skills as a businessperson.) I have vague memories of seeing Act of Violence on a previous go-round back in the days of VHS, when I used to tape TCM by the proverbial yard before the Tech and Media Gods got rid of the technology, but I liked it this time considerably more than I had then. It’s true that the social-comment aspects of the story still tend to drag it down, but Zinnemann’s direction is powerfully understated (and very Hitchcockian; the ending in particular reminded me of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and there’s even a key scene involving a confrontation on a staircase). Also, like Shadow of a Doubt, though the film is called Act of Violence there is no on-screen act of violence until the very end. There’s also the obligatory shot of the Angel’s Flight railway that was ubiquitous in L.A.-set noirs – back when it still worked!

Act of Violence is also quite unusual in that it has no opening credits except for the film’s title; all the other credits are at the end, which is standard practice today but was highly unusual in 1948. And the supporting cast is unusually good; Eddie Muller gave particular praise to Mary Astor but I thought the standouts among the down-list cast were Phyllis Thaxter as Joe’s girlfriend Ann (who pleads with him not to do anything stupid, like killing Frank, that will ruin their future prospects); and Berry Kroeger as the sinister hit-man Johnny, who in his disinterested understatement seems to have wandered in from a film made a decade later. Of course one can’t watch Act of Violence without thinking of Mary Astor from her role in The Maltese Falcon seven years earlier – though the two parts couldn’t be more different – and Janet Leigh from her role in Psycho 12 years later, another movie in which she was stalked by a crazy killer!