You got to keep going, but you got to hide like all this trash

[sovay]

Tonight on TCM at their usual midnight EST, Noir Alley is running Act of Violence (1948), one of the films I point to when people ask me what noir looks like: not a shamus or a chanteuse in sight, just the abyss falling fathomlessly away beneath the superficial reassurance of the American dream. Its take on the stock figure of the damaged veteran is confrontational, shape-shifting, as double-sided as its polarity of horror and sympathy. The questions it slides under the skin of America's good war still stick out like badly set bones. Van Heflin deserved a second Oscar for the depths to which he folds like a deck chair when the nightmare of the truth comes home. Robert Ryan and especially Mary Astor shoulder their shares of reality and Janet Leigh and Phyllis Thaxter fill in the perspectives a lot of films would leave cursorily sketched even now. I saw it in 2016 as half of a local arthouse double bill and have watched it every chance I could get since. If you can tune in, you should, too.



(If you cannot tune in, please feel free to resort to the usual suspects of your choice. The film is just worth seeing.)

Comments

[sovay]

Just one paragraph with such great lines!

Thank you so much!

--He definitely looks well folded in this photo (if that's him? That's him, right?)

That's Van Heflin! I believe this picture to be a production still, but there's a shot in the same scene in the film where he has his head in his hands which is very characteristic.