A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

If you're going to be stalked by somebody with a grudge, you don't want it to be Robert Ryan. This soft-spoken, kind-looking actor had a great career playing psychopaths for a good reason: he made them so normal-seeming, and yet so intense, that they were as believable as they were terrifying. From the moment that Ryan, looking like a pleasant, serious businessman, lets you know he has a gun (you'll gasp), the tension never lets up.Ryan here is after Van Heflin, another very fine and intelligent actor, whose character, from the moment he learns that Ryan has found him out, is torn apart by his dilemma, both practically and psychologically. He can't run, he can't hide, he can't fight, but, worse than this, he can no longer evade feeling that he deserves to die. His flailing efforts to escape get out of his control and put him in even greater danger.Why did this terrific early Fred Zinnemann movie die at the box office? The title was a dog, for one thing, boring and vague. There was no romance. But, most of all, the subject was unbearably grim--not just the manhunt aspect but the soul-searching, the questions the movie asks about guilt, forgiveness, and reparation (the scene when Heflin tries to buy his way out of trouble is one of the most chilling in the film). These were questions that clearly preoccupied Zinnemann, whose previous movie was The Search, and whose parents had died in the Holocaust while he was safe in America.All the performances are wonderful, emotional when necessary but never showy. The most disturbing, in a way, is Mary Astor, an actress as classy as her assumed name, who plays a slovenly middle- aged prostitute with self-effacing simplicity. And, despite the grandeur of the theme, there are nice little touches, such as Ryan's being so obsessed by his quest that he tries to cross the street in front of a patriotic parade--a scene that has a grotesque echo later, when Heflin's wife, desperate to save him, has to push her way past a parade of stumbling, leering, drunken convention-goers.One quibble: It is reasonable that Ryan should have some kind of handicap or disfigurement, to symbolise his damaged body and soul. But did it have to be a limp? The limping villain, with the sound of his creepy, irregular gait offscreen frightening people in the silence of the night, was a cliché a generation before this movie was made.

Fred Zinneman directed this and apparently it was forgotten and impossible to find for decades but I can whole heartedly recommend it to anybody who love "film noir" genre - instead of being just another, nice old black and white movie, this turned out to be such a good, strong thriller that I ended up fully alert and awake until the very end. Zinneman weaves excellent story where the all American good guy is haunted by some mysterious limping man but as the movie progresses we suddenly realize that roles are changing and viewer can't help but start questioning some really important moral issues here - contrary to simply passive watching, we started to THINK " hey, who is really a bad guy here?" - there is not much to talk about female characters here (wives and girlfriends are terribly one-dimensional in their "goodness" and meekness) until in the second part of the movie story proceeds into a criminal underworld where we meet elderly, tired prostitute played by brilliant Mary Astor (previously known for her elegance and aristocratic poise) who almost steals the whole movie with her realistic, powerful acting. Her character "Pat" is worlds away from all these wives and girlfriends who live protected from anything unpleasant, here is a woman living on her own by her own wits and still possessing far more humanity than anybody around her. Excellent, excellent movie.

Slow and dully plotted in the first half, the film picks up in the second half, in this revenge tale with a WWII back-story. Deciding whom the hero or the villain is may not be quite as easy as one assumes.The B&W cinematography makes up for the somewhat lackluster first-half plot. The blackness, punctuated by bits of light, is striking. The montage sequence in the middle, where Frank (Van Heflin) runs through downtown at night and ends up in a seedy bar, is one of the better sequences, with those wind-swept streets and urban desolation.In addition, the ending sequence at night, especially the film's climax at the railroad tracks, is terrific, with the dark, wet streets and sounds of the wind, a man's dragging foot, and a lonesome train whistle, sans dialogue. Casting and acting are fine. I really liked Mary Astor in this film, as a defeated bar girl.The film's theme relates to a character's dark past and how the character deals with it. And a stylistic noir ambiance pervades the second-half plot. Though the first half seems mundane and perfunctory, perhaps because the plot setup is too long, the heart of "Act Of Violence" is the second half, with a compelling theme, fine acting, and riveting visuals and sound effects.

A surprisingly frank and morally complex film noir released immediately post-WWII.Van Heflin plays a man who ratted out some fellow soldiers in a Nazi POW camp; Robert Ryan is one of the survivors who comes to seek vengeance on Heflin after they've all returned to the States and have spent time rebuilding their lives. The movie poses difficult questions, much more difficult ones than movies of its kind normally did, and it doesn't let itself off easy by making either Heflin nor Ryan all good or all bad. One of the most daring elements of the film is its suggestion that Heflin is deserving of forgiveness, because the codes of conduct that govern men in the theater of war are different from those that govern us in our day-to-day lives. That maybe doesn't seem like a daring thing to say now, but at the time it would have been.Heflin and Ryan are both terrific; Ryan is one of my favorite film noir actors. But the women in the film make quite an impression, and no wonder given that two of them are played by Janet Leigh (as Heflin's wife) and Mary Astor (as a world-weary good-time gal who takes Heflin under her protective wing). If the mens' world -- both at war and at home -- is one of violence and revenge, it's the women who act as the voice of reason and sanity, trying to impose a sense of stability amid the chaos.A really, really good movie.Grade: A