Nemesis Never Misses
“Sure, I was in the hospital, but I didn’t go crazy. I kept myself sane. You know how? I kept saying to myself: Joe, you’re the only one alive that knows what he did. You’re the one that’s got to find him, Joe. I kept remembering. I kept thinking back to that prison camp. One of them lasted to the morning. By then, you couldn’t tell his voice belonged to a man. He sounded like a dog that got hit by a truck and left him in the street.”
In Act of Violence, Robert Ryan is the Terminator – he travels to LA from far off, gets your address in the phone book, and comes after you to kill you. He will not stop. Dragging one dead leg behind him, wearing his New York clothes, raincoat and fedora, in the LA heat, a sheen of perspiration glazing his features. You go fishing and he rows after you, one oar squeaking like his stiff leg. He hides his boat in the shade of a rocky crag sculpted by God when drunk as an abstract Robert Ryan portrait (all the rockpiles of the Earth are drunken Robert Ryan likenesses), he even comes to your house. He sees your pretty wife and your baby and they inspire nothing but envy and the desire to kill.
Van Heflin, amphibious face with bulging brow, boiled egg eyes, mouth a remorseful stoma, is the Everyman, the quarry. He’s a good guy, a family man, runs a business, pillar of the dreamy small-town community, only he did something bad back in the war. Is Robert Ryan his conscience? Yes, a six-foot-four Jiminy Cricket with a handgun, coming to settle a debt.
Fred Zinnemann only made this one film noir, an unlikely genre at MGM, especially with a story that flips the lid off respectable family life and finds seething corruption in the all-American householder’s soul. Robert Surtees lights it for the highlights in Janet Leigh’s wide eyes, and the creeping darkness. Even the family home has perpetual window-frame cruciform shadows quartering up every room. Robert Ryan in the bright sunlight is even scarier because he simply has no business being there.
Janet Leigh, only in movies for a year, is exquisite as an innocent, an angel, a strong young woman – it sounds crazy to compare Leigh to Lillian Gish, but that’s the closest comparison. Phyllis Thaxter brings a fierce, driven quality to Ryan’s lover who wants to save him from vengeance, stop him becoming a murderer. And Mary Astor plays a streetwalker, run-down yet somehow regal, world-weariness and a spark of decency at war within a woman with sore feet.
Amazing how good noir reinvigorates the clichés, those formed by filmmaking tropes exploited once too often, or by critics pinning them to their cork boards for display and study. We have post-war malaise (in human, limping form!) and denizens of the night (lost souls Mary Astor and Berry Kroeger) and the much used Bunker Hill district of LA: that shiny Blade Runner tunnel, that narrow, steep flight of steps between townhouses, that funicular railway carving out an expressionist angle of its own.
Zinnemann’s humanism glimmers in the darkness, but by no means washes out the gloomier stretches. Yes, the film believes redemption is possible. You did one bad thing, one very bad thing, but maybe you can make up for it. Maybe Robert Ryan will leave you alone. All you have to do is pay with your life.
by David Cairns