Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

GrimPrecise I'll tell you why so serious

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

chaos-rampant 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

jotix100 Frank Enley is being honored as a war hero in his small town of Santa Lisa. This WWII veteran has made a life for himself, his wife Edith and son Georgie. They appear to be living the "American dream" as it was known in the late 1940s. Joe Parkson, a man from Frank's past enters the picture with an agenda. He has come to kill his former colleague, whom he blames for his own injured leg and the death of a few of their fellow soldiers after a failed attempt to flee a German prison camp.Frank has everything to lose. His reputation in the community, his new life, his family, and the business he has built by himself. It is no wonder he has no desire to meet Parkson, who blames him for ratting on the group. Frank, who acted selfishly, under strenuous circumstances, thinking he could prevent the death of his fellow soldiers, must face his past head on. His guilt about the tragedy he caused haunts him everywhere he goes. His only choice is to stay away from Joe is to leave Santa Lisa in favor of the anonymity of Los Angeles, where he goes to a construction convention.Joe Parkson, determined to hunt him down, follows Enley to the hotel where the festivities are being held. Frank is able to get away. Knowing he is a hunted man, he goes into a dive, where he meets Pat, a woman who might be a hooker, with connections to the criminal element. She realizes there is an opportunity to sell Frank Enley to a man that will get rid of his tormentor for a price.This seldom seen MGM film from director Fred Zinnemann of 1948 was shown recently on a classic film channel. Based on a Collier Young story and a screenplay by Robert Richards, the film does not disappoint. Thanks to the excellent Robert Surtees cinematography, the director opened the action to the Los Angeles of that era. Mr. Zinnemman's camera angles are impeccable, plus the locales chosen to stage the action add texture to the drama. Mr. Zinnemann seemed to be a natural for this kind of genre, as he later demonstrated with his masterpiece "From Here to Eternity", about the effects of the war to the people that fought it, and in this case, the prisoners of war that had to deal with the violence of their captors and the actions they undertook to liberate themselves at whatever price. The guilt of Einley follows him no matter where he tries to hide.The two principals, Robert Ryan and Van Heflin was a coup of casting. Both actors were at the peak of their career. Both give solid performances as the former friends now turned enemies. A young Janet Leigh plays Edith, the wife without a clue as to her husband's past. Mary Astor did a superb job out of her Pat, a woman that would sell a man for cash. Phyllis Thaxter appears as Ann, the woman in love with Joe.

secondtake Act of Violence (1948)Is this possibly Janet Leigh's best performance ever? Oh yes, that's Janet Leigh, the one in the shower in "Psycho." And Van Heflin is continually underapprectiated, so another chance to appreciate him here. Robert Ryan and Mary Astor are both in top form, too. And so is cinematographer Robert Surtees, making this one of the most dynamic (and varied) of film noirs.This is a classic. It has the feel of a noir, of course, even though much of it is set in a small town, but it has the key plot elements of the returning veteran unable to cope with the new post-war reality. Filled with believable surprises, fast and gorgeous, acted to the hilt, and yet still stylized a little beyond mere reality. A gem, a joy. The director? Fred Zinnemann, who used Leigh in the original "Manchurian Candidate," is also the man who pulled of "High Noon" and "From Here to Eternity." All four of these films have a combination of vigorous visual style, top notch acting with subtlety, and most of all, social significance. They deal with issues of their various times in ways that never preach, however. Of the four, it's actually possible that this one is the tightest and best of them all. Higher praise? Not possible.

dwpollar 1st watched 4/27/2009 - (Dir-Fred Zinnemann): Well written and played post-World War II drama that's really about the effect of the war on two veterans due to an act of betrayal that occurred during the event. Both characters, played by Van Heflin and Robert Ryan, are struggling with the event and dealing with it in different ways. Van Heflin's character is a vet who has settled in life by ignoring the act and living his life. Robert Ryan's character has been carrying it with him since leaving the war and plans on acting on his emotions. The Robert Ryan character initially appears to be the enemy of the story, but as things are revealed we understand that Heflin's character ratted on the rest of the group in a nazi war prison and Ryan's character is out to get him for it. The appeal of the movie then is trying to figure out who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. The movie is structured like a typical chase movie but we are shown other characters and how they react to the main characters(primarily the women counterparts). The story then becomes a drama about what was right and what was wrong during war, and can those things be looked at in the same light during civilian times. This is probably the first movie I've seen dealing with this war on a serious level as far as those who we're in it and affected by it. The movie keeps your interested to the very end, not just on a psychological level but also as a mystery. This is a very unique movie that should be viewed by many others and I'm just surprised that I just fell into it at my local library without hearing much about it. So watch it,if you can, you will definitely be rewarded.