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ACT OF VIOLENCE (MGM, 1949). Director: Fred Zinnemann. Producer: William H. Wright. Script: Robert L. Richards. Cinematography: Robert Surtees. Music:
Bronislau Kaper. Cast: Van Hefl in (Frank Enley), Robert Ryan (Joe Parkson), Janet Leigh (Edith Enley), Mary Astor (Pat), Phyllis Thaxter (Ann), Berry Kroeger (Johnny).
One of the most impressive of those fi lm noirs that uncover the darkness and violence hidden behind the curtains of the brightly lit streets of American subur-bia, Act of Violence explores, through the characteristic noir themes of revenge and guilt, the lasting effects of wartime experience on people. Protagonist Frank Enley harbors a dark secret about his war service that the arrival of a wounded comrade in his idyllic suburban home threatens to expose. Joe Parkson, the damaged man seen limping into Frank’s small Californian town in the fi lm’s credit sequence, is a symbol of the psychic wounds of war. Similarly, the darkness that comes to envelop the home Frank shares with his wife, Edith, is an image of the persisting shadow cast by the war over postwar American life.
What Joe is seeking throughout the fi lm’s highly compressed plotline of just two days and nights is revenge. His purpose is indicated in the multiple meanings of the title of Act of Violence: alluding to the atrocity that occurred during the war, to what Joe has planned for Frank, and to what happens in the fi lm’s climax.
The opening scenes show Joe’s sense of mission, his goal. He tells Edith that her husband, with whom he had suffered the privations of a German prison camp, had been a stool pigeon for the Nazis, betraying a group of escapers to the guards so that all but Joe were killed. Behaving almost like an automaton and bearing both
Act of Violence (1948). Directed by Fred Zinnemann. Shown from left: Janet Leigh (as Edith Enley), Van Hefl in (as Frank Enley). MGM/Photofest.
the mental and physical scars of war, Joe is ready to take Frank’s life as vengeance.
Only his noble girlfriend, Ann, newly arrived from New York, tries to dissuade him from this course using her compensating moral values of forgiveness and mercy.
Once he hears of Joe’s visit, Frank begins to feel that he does not deserve the hap-piness and prosperity he is experiencing. Frank is fi rstly jumpy, then passive and ac-cepting, questioning his motives in the war. Fearing scandal, he tells Edith his side of the story: that he had informed on the escapers for their own sakes and was shocked at the Nazi response of bayonets, dogs, and men left to die. But he acknowledges that perhaps he did it only to be able to eat some decent food. Self-preservation is offered to Frank a second time as he thinks of ways to defl ect Joe’s revenge. Edith, his sexy younger wife (Van Hefl in was 17 years older than Janet Leigh), is braver than him. She dutifully accepts his faults (a trait representative of American women acknowledging the effects of war on their men). Stressing their strength and unity as a couple, Edith tells Frank that you cannot suffer all your life for one mistake.
Act of Violence is thus typical of the noir genre in that it depicts a man whose life is disrupted by weakness and ill fortune. As well as dramatizing a loss of trust between husband and wife, it also embodies the noir phenomenon of the reversal
of goodies and baddies. This is most clearly delineated in the sequence of Frank’s fl ight through the nighttime city. Leaving a drunken convention in downtown Los Angeles in fl ight from Joe, Frank descends to a stylized demimonde under the Angel’s Flight cableway and into a bewildering landscape, which becomes symbolic of the shift in this suburban man’s life. At a low-rent bar he meets Pat, a hooker, and uses her to try to buy off Joe by handing over his business to him. When that does not work, she suggests employing a hit man. Once this course of action is in train, Frank staggers outside and, in a highly subjective scene, comes close to committing suicide under a train after hearing echoing accusatory inner voices in the Bunker Hill tunnel. The following day, Frank wakes to the realization of what he has set in motion , suffering the agonies of conscience and feeling that his morals have been compromised by drink and desperation. With an air of doom, he tries to prevent the death of Joe. Still trying to protect Edith, Frank sneaks out of the house to intercept the hired killer and the main characters gather at the hometown’s train station for the climax. It is a dark, windy location, an existential no-man’s-land. In a sequence edited like a western gunfi ght, Frank is shot by the hit man instead of Joe as he jumps in the way in an act of atonement. A bewildered Joe kneels over him, as Ann looks on with a heavy heart.
In its visual style, Act of Violence effi ciently evokes the contradictions of postwar America. Pride in war service is symbolized by a military parade of veterans in prog-ress on the day Joe arrives in town, but its positivity is undercut by the sight of him limping counter to the rhythm of their healthy march. A housing project opening, which salutes Frank’s dynamism, represents postwar promise. However, Frank’s own house becomes visibly darker after Joe calls in. Thereafter Frank and Edith are seen in shadows, and his face is harshly lit when he behaves out of character. The bright music at the builders’ convention (“Happy Days Are Here Again”) is ironic, and his running through the dark city tunnel revives memories of the war’s terrors.
In their book Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward say that the fi lm is typical of Zinnemann’s detached, dispassionate tone (p. 10) but that it is still very subjective in such scenes, drawing the audience inside the mind of Frank.
Brian McDonnell
ALDRICH, ROBERT (1918–1983). As a director, Aldrich worked in many different fi lm genres, and his reputation rests with his achievements in a wide variety of projects such as Attack, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and The Dirty Dozen, all of which demonstrate his exhilarating visual style. Often depict-ing excessive characters in highly emotional stories, he made only one great fi lm noir (Kiss Me Deadly), but that was enough as it is an absolutely crucial title from the classical period. Robert Aldrich was born in Cranston, Rhode Island, into a prominent political and business family. He started his fi lm career at the RKO studio in the 1940s and was an assistant director to luminaries such as Jean Renoir,
Charlie Chaplin, Lewis Milestone, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, and Joseph Losey. An example of his exposure to the emerging genre of fi lm noir during this period was the creative freedom he was given as assistant director by Milestone on The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in 1946. Aldrich also briefl y worked in television during the 1950s. His work in classical noir occurred at the start of his directing career, and he went on to make fi lms of other genres subsequently. His fi rst noir fi lm was World for Ransom (1954), starring Dan Duryea, which was set in Asia and had a particularly convoluted story line.
The fi lm noir he directed the following year, Kiss Me Deadly, was perhaps Aldrich’s fi nest fi lm. In it he and writer A. I. Bezzerides subverted the swaggering persona of protagonist Mike Hammer, novelist Mickey Spillane’s macho private eye fi gure. Aldrich elicited great performances, not just from Ralph Meeker in the central role, but also from the rest of the principal cast of Kiss Me Deadly. The vio-lence inherent in the fi lm’s story line is certainly exploited, but at the same time it is lampooned, and a subplot about atomic warfare is added to the sadistic concerns of the Spillane novel. In effect, Bezzerides and Aldrich give their own view on what a 1950s private eye should be, rather than trying to accurately show Spillane’s vision. The Big Knife (1955) is a very different piece, a dark exposé of Hollywood infi ghting adapted from a Clifford Odets play and retaining some of the staginess of the original. In the middle of the 1970s, at a time when the fi rst modernist examples of the neo-noir genre (such as Chinatown, Night Moves, and Hickey and Boggs) were being released, Aldrich directed the bleak, pessimistic Hustle, starring Burt Reynolds as a fated detective.
Selected Noir Films: World for Ransom (1954), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Big Knife (1955), Hustle (1975).
Brian McDonnell
AMONG THE LIVING (Paramount, 1941). Director: Stuart Heisler. Producer:
Sol C. Siegel. Script: Lester Cole and Garrett Fort, from the unpublished story by Brian Marlow and Lester Cole. Cinematography: Theodor Sparkuhl. Music: Gerard Carbonara. Cast: Albert Dekker (John Raden/Paul Raden), Susan Hayward (Millie Pickens), Harry Carey (Dr. Ben Saunders), Frances Farmer (Elaine Raden), Gordon Jones (Bill Oakley), Jean Phillips (Peggy Nolan), Ernest Whitman (Pompey), Maude Eburne (Mrs. Pickens).
Among the Living was released in September 1941, 12 months after Stranger on the Third Floor and a month before The Maltese Falcon. This fi lm is another example of the signifi cance of the horror genre in the development of fi lm noir. In a pattern similar to Stranger on the Third Floor, Among the Living was promoted as a horror fi lm, and it does include many aspects of the traditional Gothic story with its story of twin brothers—one insane, Paul Raden, and the other, John Raden, a successful businessman. Both brothers are played by Albert Dekker.
When John returns to his small southern hometown for his father’s funeral, the family doctor, Ben Saunders, tells him that Paul, who supposedly died 25 years
ago, was living in the family mansion under the care of Pompey, a family servant.
Paul kills Pompey during a frenzied attack, which is brought on by the sound of a woman screaming. Paul escapes from the family mansion and tries to assimilate himself into the local community while the police search for Pompey’s murderer.
He befriends the fl irtatious, and mercenary, Millie, daughter of the proprietor of the local boarding house, when he seeks a room. Sexually excited by Millie, who shows him a new dress she purchased with his money, Paul visits a sleazy bar late that night, where he is picked up by Peggy Nolan, a crude facsimile of young Mil-lie. However, when he tells Peggy that he prefers Millie, she humiliates him. Later, in the early hours of the morning, Paul follows her from the bar, and after a long chase through the empty streets, he kills her when she screams.
The fi nal section of the fi lm is less successful as the fi lm’s short running time of 67 minutes inhibits the full development of the characters and situations. After John offers a reward for the killer, Millie persuades Paul to take her to the Raden mansion. However, when she screams, Paul attacks her and then runs away. Just at this moment, John enters the house and is arrested for the murders committed by Paul as the townspeople believe that only one Raden is still alive—John. The fi lm’s use of coincidence as well as the last-minute change of heart by Dr. Saunders that Paul is not dead, clearly reveals the melodramatic basis of the fi lm. John, saved from a lynching by Saunder’s confession that he falsifi ed the death certifi cate 25 years ago in exchange for money for a medical center, warns the townspeople that Paul is still alive. However, consistent with melodrama’s reliance on pathos, they fi nd Paul’s body draped over his mother’s grave, a reminder that his insanity was caused by the violence infl icted on his mother by his father as her screams trig-gered Paul’s violence.
Despite its meager budget, this is an impressive fi lm due largely to Theodor Sparkuhl’s evocative cinematography, which captures the repressive desolation in the Raden mansion that fostered Paul’s insanity. This visual correlation culminates in the fi lm’s set piece, Peggy Nolan’s desperate attempt to fl ee from the monster pursuing her as she runs through the streets in the early hours of the morning.
Her murder in an alley, fi lmed by Sparkuhl and director Heisler in a deep-focus long shot, is an archetypal noir image that combines terror, pathos, and alienation.
Sparkuhl’s career extended from German expressionism in the 1920s, to French poetic realism in the 1930s, including La Chienne, to key Hollywood productions in the 1940s, such as Paramount’s remake of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key in 1942, also directed by Heisler. Among the Living also gave Susan Hayward her best role to date as Millie, the sexually aware young woman eager to exploit Paul’s interest in her, as it did Albert Dekker, who, due to typecasting and political obstacles, rarely had such a chance to display his acting range.
Geoff Mayer
ANDREWS, DANA (1909–1992). Though not nearly as famous as fi gures such as Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, the phlegmatic Dana Andrews was very
effective in the leading roles he played in more than half a dozen key fi lm noirs.
He generally played the part of a man of integrity and decency who was tough and stoical on the outside but vulnerable on the inside, a man with weaknesses who could slip over the edge of respectability. Undervalued by some critics because he tended to underplay his roles, Andrews became very much the American Every-man. Born Carver Dana Andrews, he was the son of a Baptist minister who moved the family around several parts of the South. Andrews studied accountancy before traveling to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. A small part in The Westerner (1940) by chance garnered him much exposure because studio publicists mistook his fi rst name for a female one and mistakenly billed him as Gary Cooper’s costar on the fi lm’s posters. Andrews’s fi rst signifi cant role was as one of the men condemned to hang in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), an allegorical western that is included on some fi lm noir lists because of its dark, pessimistic tone. However, he became forever an iconic part of the genre when he memorably played the determined, unfl appa-ble, philistine, and eventually obsessed police detective Mark McPherson in Laura (1944). This was one of the earliest A budget noirs, and, along with Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, and Vincent Price, Andrews helped make the fi lm a popular hit.
The next year he went on to play a rather more morally ambiguous fi gure in Fallen Angel, as the drifter Eric Stanton. Stanton is at fi rst happy to bilk the naïve June Mills (Alice Faye) out of her money and for a while is suspected of killing sultry waitress Stella (Linda Darnell), but in the pat and unsatisfactory ending of the fi lm, he turns out to be righteous. Andrews had one of his most complex roles as the somewhat sadistic cop Mark Dixon in Where the Sidewalk Ends, in which he was reteamed with Tierney and director Otto Preminger from Laura. He is again excellent here in a truly noir role as the man caught up in frightening moral com-promises and having to face up to weakness and a criminal heritage. Andrews’
essential integrity shone through in his role as caring priest Father Roth in Edge of Doom, a part that was expanded from the original plot to make Roth a more central fi gure. Andrews made two late noirs in the mid-1950s for director Fritz Lang: While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In the fi rst he is a rather unlikable and ruthless television newsman, while in the latter he is a calculating killer caught up in a bewilderingly tortuous narrative whose guilt is discovered only through chance. In these two fi lms Andrews’s handsome features had begun to coarsen a little, and drinking problems plagued his later career, with rumors that he was even sometimes under the infl uence while working on set in the studio.
Selected Noir Films: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), Boomerang! (1947), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), Edge of Doom (1950), While the City Sleeps (1956), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), Brainstorm (1965).
Brian McDonnell
ANGEL FACE (RKO, 1953). Director: Otto Preminger. Producer: Otto Preminger.
Script: Frank Miller and Oscar Milliard, from an unpublished story by Chester
Erskine. Cinematography: Harry Stradling. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin. Cast: Robert Mitchum (Frank Jessup), Jean Simmons (Diane Tremayne), Mona Freeman (Mary), Herbert Marshall (Mr. Tremayne), Leon Ames (Fred Barrett), Barbara O’Neill (Mrs. Tremayne), Kenneth Tobey (Bill).
From 1947 to 1953, Robert Mitchum perfected his screen persona as the laconic, detached, slightly amoral drifter/victim in a series of fi lm noirs for RKO, beginning with Out of the Past (1947) and culminating with Angel Face. Angel Face, adapted from an unpublished story by Chester Erskine titled “Murder Story,” was written in 18 days as Howard Hughes, the owner of RKO, wanted one last fi lm from Jean Simmons before her contract expired. Simmons, who was cast against type as the femme fatale in Angel Face, was assigned to the fi lm by Hughes as a punishment for her refusal to “socialize” with him. In a further attempt to antagonize Simmons, Hughes ordered that her long black hair be severely cut before the start of fi lming.
Hughes borrowed the autocratic director Otto Preminger from Twentieth Century Fox and told him to shoot the fi lm quickly—which he did, in 19 days.
There was, however, considerable tension on the set, especially after an incident early in the fi lm when the script required Mitchum to slap Simmons. When Prem-inger called for retake after retake, Mitchum, worried about his costar’s face, fi nally hit the director across the face and then asked him if he would like another slap.
This incident brought Simmons and Mitchum closer together.
Mitchum is ambulance driver Frank Jessup, who is called out to the Tremayne house in Beverly Hills after Mrs. Tremayne is nearly asphyxiated due to gas poison-ing. Jessup is intrigued by Tremayne’s stepdaughter Diane, especially after he fi nds her playing the piano while her stepmother suffers upstairs. His interest intensifi es when Diane becomes hysterical after learning that her stepmother did not die.
The young woman’s reaction provokes Frank into slapping her face in an attempt to calm her down. Diane reacts to his slap by slapping him back, and from this moment Diane and Frank are locked into a perverse relationship involving lust, denial, and murder. Frank immediately deceives his long-time girlfriend, Mary.
Diane then exploits this indiscretion by telling Mary that Frank has betrayed her and invites Frank to work as the chauffeur in the Tremayne household.
Frank is initially fascinated by Diane’s childlike beauty and her promise to convince her stepmother to provide fi nancial assistance so that he can open his own garage business. However, his lust dissipates when he realizes that Diane intends
Frank is initially fascinated by Diane’s childlike beauty and her promise to convince her stepmother to provide fi nancial assistance so that he can open his own garage business. However, his lust dissipates when he realizes that Diane intends