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Fred Zinnemann's best film, in that noir unease forces a tremor into the craftsman's decorum. New York's silhouetted cityscape sets the stage, Robert Ryan limps out of the darkness to board a bus to California, his presence is the one shadow at a sunny Memorial Day celebration. The humble war hero and community pillar (Van Heflin) unveils a new suite of track homes while his wife (Janet Leigh) beams from the crowd, he first notices the stalker as an implacable speck at the lake, the two have unfinished business. The ugly truth is about starving prisoners and betrayal, it comes out during a noisy contractors' convention: "They gave me food and I ate it. There were six widows, there were ten men dead, and I couldn't even stop eating!" ("Happy Days Are Here Again" fuels the carouse outside the confessional.) After the homecoming of The Best Years of Our Lives, the cost of war descends upon suburbia—the pas de deux of maimed survivors and tarnished deals, the purgatory of a long night with exhumed memories. The desperate hero rushes through the baleful diagonals of Los Angeles at night and comes upon Mary Astor's superb rendition of a worn-out barfly, whose exhausted pronunciation of the word "kicks" contrasts with the sensible hand-wringing back home. "With money you can fix anything," the vengeful pursuer laughs at his offer, he wakes up to realize he's hired a killer. Zinnemann constructs this as the hard-edged grid underneath MGM stability, a dazed walk down the tunnel separating the haunted past and a tentatively hopeful future. Kazan's The Visitors is the proper adjustment for Vietnam. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. With Phyllis Thaxter, Berry Kroeger, Taylor Holmes, Harry Antrim, Connie Gilchrist, and Will Wright. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |