The Day of the Jackal (1973): Fred Zinnemann's Masterpiece

After his exquisite A Man for All Seasons (1966) won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, Fred Zinnemann had every reason to feel like the luckiest director in Hollywood. The truth is he would not get to direct his next film for another seven years. His attempt to direct an adaptation of André Malraux’ Man’s Fate for MGM had fallen through, and a court battle with the studio almost pushed him over the edge and into bankruptcy. It seemed like his career had nowhere left to go when, suddenly, straight out of nowhere, an offer from Universal came to direct an adaptation of a spy novel that was about to be a huge best-seller. The book, published in 1971, was Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, and the movie, released in 1973, is a masterpiece—the greatest film of Zinnemann's career.

Not everyone felt that way at the time, least of all Zinnemann himself. In an interview, he was modest: “The Day of the Jackal was made purely as entertainment,” he claimed, “and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It should not be taken seriously politically or in any other way, because it’s just a technical exercise in suspense.” Today, The Day of the Jackal is widely regarded as one of the best thrillers of its era: politically-charged, suspenseful to the max, and taken seriously (for a variety of reasons) by a host of devoted fans all around the world. And yet Zinnemann would forever insist that the movie was little more than a simple crowd-pleaser; one look at the finished film and it is clear he was underrating his own masterpiece. Why did he do this? In his 1992 autobiography, A Life in Pictures, he provides some hints as to why.

Zinnemann, it seems, was intensely paranoid about the modern Hollywood system after the cancellation of Man’s Fate, which, as he wrote, “marked the end of an era in picture making and the dawn of a new one, when lawyers and accountants began to replace showmen as head of the studios and when a handshake was a handshake no longer." In a strange career move, he must have determined that the best way to sell a complex project like The Day of the Jackal to those lawyers and accountants was to reduce its qualities; it was, he claimed, just a simple thriller about a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, and that was it. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

From its opening voiceover (“August, 1962 was a stormy time for France…”), The Day of the Jackal presents itself as a radical portrait of the seething, right-wing French “patriots” of the 1960’s, who felt betrayed by General Charles de Gaulle’s controversial decision to pull France out of the Algerian War. The general, during his terms in office, was hated equally by the right and the left, but for different reasons. The right despised him for losing the war, and the left would never forgive him for carrying on the war in the first place (actress Anne Wiazemsky once claimed that even Jean-Luc Godard thought de Gaulle deserved to be shot). Knowledgeable lovers of cinema will recall that Gillo Pontecorvo’s excellent The Battle of Algiers (1966) ended with the nationalists uniting victoriously while the French military pulled out of Algeria, shamed and embarrassed. Zinnemann’s film is the story of what happened next.

At the center of Zinnemann’s film is a continental chase between two European men, one a professional assassin, the other a detective. The first man, the assassin, is an anonymous Englishman, codenamed the Jackal (Edward Fox), hired by the French OAS (Secret Army Organization) to assassinate Charles de Gaulle for half a million in cash. The second man, the detective, is Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale), the French spy who is appointed by a committee at Élysée Palace to help hunt down the Jackal before time runs out. For the longest time in the movie, Lebel and the rest of the authorities believe they have an idea who the Jackal may be, only to eventually realize (at the last minute) that they’ve been wrong the whole time. By the end of the film, the Jackal remains a mystery, his anonymity left unsolved.

Lebel is technically supposed to be the movie’s hero, and the Jackal technically its villain, but both men are equally likable, and I think part of the reason why the movie works so well is because the two characters are perfect foils for one another. By giving us both an appealing hero and an appealing villain, Zinnemann allowed it so that audiences could watch the film with fluctuating sympathies towards both men. When we’re disgusted with the Jackal’s reprehensible killings, we root for Lebel. When we grow tired of Lebel’s long, slow, calculated process of cracking the case, we find ourselves rooting for the Jackal again. This is a fun, ongoing process of love/hate feelings towards both men that we share all throughout the picture. Audiences who saw Zinnemann’s Spanish Civil War epic Behold A Pale Horse (1964) were disappointed that it didn’t end with Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn duking it out, but no worries: Zinnemann doesn’t make that same mistake here. We are promised a final showdown between Fox and Lonsdale, and, fortunately, we get one.

The Jackal has got to be one of the most interesting antiheroes ever to lead a Hollywood film. Watching the movie, we have a mixed response to the character. In a sense, we can’t help but like him; he’s a charming, fairly uncomplicated man, who seeks to kill de Gaulle not because of any personal feelings he may have about the man (hell, for all we know, he may even like de Gaulle a little), but because—to put it frankly—he wants the money. “You must understand: this is a once-in-a-lifetime job,” he warns Colonel Rodin (Eric Porter) and his OAS cronies. “Whoever does it can never work again.” His insists that his fee of half a million in cash is quite sound: “Considering you expect to get France in return, I’d have thought it a reasonable price.” On the other hand, much as we’d like to sympathize with the Jackal’s dreams of fortune and glory, we also have to take into account that he is, at the end of the day, a killer, and that an assassination of the general will do a lot more harm than good. De Gaulle has, arguably, done his military a great favor by pulling them out of a pointless, unpopular war. Why kill him?

The film is wall-to-wall with sudden bursts of violence, many of them committed by the Jackal himself. To ensure that we are repulsed, not excited, by such moments, Zinnemann visually associates the Jackal’s killings with pornography in certain scenes. In the scene where the Jackal smashes in the gut of a forger (Ronald Pickup) who has tried to blackmail him, Zinnemann moves for a close-up of the Jackal’s face—hardened, silhouetted in shadow—while a portrait of a topless model looms tall in the background. In the scene where the Jackal kills Madame de Montpellier (Delphine Syrig), Zinnemann once again closes in on the Jackal’s shadowy face, quietly snapping the neck of the woman underneath him—a murder committed during sex. In the scene where the Jackal kills a landlady who has offered him a glass of water, a small picture of a naked baby can be glimpsed on the wall behind him. Another murder, in which the victim is a homosexual (Anton Rodgers), serves a different purpose: it occurs offscreen while John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (which was about a handicapped dwarf) plays on a TV set, foreshadowing the grand finale in which the Jackal will, ironically, disguise himself as a handicapped war veteran.

A number of Zinnemann’s most famous films (High Noon, From Here to Eternity, The Nun’s Story, A Man for All Seasons) share a common theme: the isolated protagonist with a conscience in crisis. In The Day of the Jackal, it is not the Jackal who suffers a conscience crisis, but Lebel; he is not at all pleased with being assigned this demanding job of tracking down a dangerous killer. In Forsyth’s book, the character is described as “the cartoonist’s image of a hen-pecked husband,” and no wonder: when we first see Lebel in the movie, he is innocently tending to pigeons in his backyard when his wife suddenly comes running out of the house, telling him he’s needed at work, demanding that he remember to come home early. To cope with the difficulties of the job, he requests the assistance of a younger colleague, Caron (a young Derek Jacobi), and warns him that many things will be needed to set up their new office, among them “a percolator and lots of coffee.” Some of the best moments in Kenneth Ross’ brilliant screenplay involve the back-and-forth rapport between Lebel and Caron, among them this memorable exchange:

Caron: You know, sir, what they’ll do to you if you don’t catch this man in time?
Lebel: I’ve been given a job, so we’ll just have to do it.
Caron: But no crime has been committed yet, so where are we supposed to start looking for the criminal?
Lebel: We start by recognizing that, after de Gaulle, we are the two most powerful people in France.

And so they are. Before we know it, Lebel and Caron become France’s answer to Holmes and Watson. Indeed, as we later realize, they are even better detectives than we’ve given them credit for. They are, for example, keeping a close watch for the white Alfa Romeo two-seater which the Jackal is reportedly driving around Europe. They are quick to arrive on the scene of a hotel near Grasse where the Jackal has allegedly spent the night. They successfully trap an OAS spy who has infiltrated Élysée Palace. And so on. We like Lebel and Caron so much, in fact, that, yes, we do want to see them catch the Jackal in time, even though we also harbor a perverse desire to see the Jackal succeed in eliminating his target first. By giving us both a likable villain and a likable dynamic duo, Zinnemann achieves the impossible: he has ensured it so a majority of his audience will be satisfied with his movie no matter who wins in the end.

Trains. There are trains in nearly all of Zinnemann’s movies. Remember the train filled with young Holocaust survivors in The Search (1948), Frank Miller’s train in High Noon, Omar Shariff’s missed train in Behold A Pale Horse and the several trains which Lillian boards in Julia (1977). The great critic Marilyn Ferdinand has commented on Zinnemann’s “affinity for trains, close-ups, and ability to coax iconic performances to dizzying heights,” and in The Day of the Jackal he provides a set piece for a train sequence that is dizzying, indeed. The Jackal, disguised as a schoolteacher named “Perl Lundquist,” has just arrived in Paris and is headed for a Turkish bath. In the film’s most spellbinding shot, Zinnemann and his cameraman, Jean Tournier, track the Jackal’s taxi as it speeds off—while Lebel and Caron’s car passes the taxi in the opposite direction, towards the train station, in the exact same shot. Other sequences in the movie boast some fine editing by Ralph Kemplen (the only crew member who was Oscar-nominated for his efforts) and a thunderous score by Georges Delerue. Roger Ebert, in his glowing 4-star review of the film, summed it up best: “The movie’s technical values (as is always the case with a Zinnemann film) are impeccable.”

The movie is well-remembered for its impressive gallery of British and French actors, some of them playing nuanced characters, some of them not. Forsyth’s 350-paged book had enough space for an unlimited amount of backstories; the movie, with its 143-minute running time, doesn't. In the movie, the gunsmith (Cyril Cusack) who sells the Jackal an elaborate rifle is just a simple salesman who takes his job seriously; in the book, he is given a name, "M. Goosens," and is revealed to be a lonely, divorced family man. Also in the book, the OAS have a bodyguard, Viktor Kowalski, who is kidnapped by Action Service after he is baited with news that his daughter is dying of leukemia. In the movie, he is named Wolenski (Jean Martin, who played Colonel Mathieu in The Battle of Algiers), does not have a daughter and is intercepted by Action Service simply because they know his wrist is handcuffed to the OAS’ important files. These backstories didn’t make their way into the film because they don’t have much to do with the conflict between the Jackal and Lebel (another sequence from the book that was cut involved the Jackal entering a gay bar, dressed in drag!), but otherwise Kenneth Ross’ screenplay remains fairly true to Forsyth. Ross, for some unexplained reason, would go on to write only three more screenplays after this film, two of them for John Frankenheimer.

                  

One subplot that Ross and Zinnemann do retain from Forsyth’s book turns out to be one of the film’s more emotionally-involving stories, and it doesn’t even involve the Jackal or Lebel. The OAS have a female spy, Denise (Olga Georges-Picot), named “Jacqueline” in the book, who seeks to avenge her fiancée’s death in Algeria. In a scene in the film that, once again, subtly equates violence with pornography, an OAS member burns a photograph of Denise’s fiancée while ordering her to “get involved” with one of de Gaulle’s officials; a tear can be seen sliding down her face while she helplessly watches her lover’s picture cast into the fire. Later in the film, however, she makes a stunning transformation into a sexy, irresistible femme fatale, and we realize that she is actually very good at her job. Her scheme to seduce St. Clair (Barrie Ingham) during a ride on horseback looks as though it were inspired by Hitchcock’s Notorious, and it’s little surprise that a seemingly committed family man such as him winds up falling for her.

Alas, it is not a match made in heaven, and eventually St. Clair realizes he’s been duped. A phone conversation with an OAS contact is played before the committee at Élysée Palace, and, yes, that is most definitely Denise’s voice on the phone. The Minister (Alan Badel) demands an explanation. Then, in one of the saddest moments in the film, St. Clair slowly stands up before his peers, and tells the truth: “I regret to have to inform you, Minister, that it was the voice of a friend of mine... she is staying with me at the moment... excuse me.”

This scene is beautifully, heartbreakingly delivered by the actor Barrie Ingham, who also provides the film’s opening narration; he would later be more well-known to juvenile audiences as the voice behind Basil of Bakerstreet in Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective (1986). But he steals this one scene in The Day of the Jackal so unexpectedly that he’s one of the things about the movie we remember the most. In the book, the character of St. Clair is a nastier piece of work: an obnoxious ball-buster who resents Lebel’s authority, and whose eventual disgrace before his peers is hardly worthy of our pity. Zinnemann and Ross, however, are wise to make him more of a naïve and pathetic figure in the movie, and we can’t help but feel a little bad for him; his downfall is a reminder of the Van Heflin hero’s fate in Zinnemann’s classic film noir Act of Violence (1949). True, in retrospect, St. Clair has nobody to blame but himself; his mistake could have been easily avoided if he had simply remained true to his family. But not every sinner in the world finds themself in the unusual position of somehow committing treason in the wake of adultery, making his suicide of a drug overdose at the end of the film all the more tragic.

Another emotionally-charged subplot in the film involves the tragic fate of Madame de Montpellier, nicknamed “Colette,” who is unfortunate enough to meet the Jackal at the hotel near Grasse. The wonderful actress Delphine Seyrig (from Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) portrays her as a rich housewife who appreciates the Jackal’s attempts to flirt with her; she comfortably admits to him that her life story is “unfortunately” true, and that she is not terribly pleased about her 19-year old son getting a military commission. They discuss mountain-climbing in the Alps, foreshadowing Zinnemann’s great final film, Five Days One Summer (1982). They have sex twice, once at the hotel, another time at her own house when the Jackal arrives on her doorstep uninvited (there is, amusingly, a plentiful amount of nudity and sex in the film for a PG-rated thriller). It is here, at the house, that the Jackal murders her when she innocently inquires about what he’s up to. At this point we find ourselves starting to hate the Jackal; Colette has given him her hospitality and her love, and we sincerely believe her when she insists she won’t rat out on him, so his decision to execute her as a witness feels grossly unjust. She, like St. Clair, is another poor soul in the movie who pays an unfair price for her adultery.

If there’s anything in the movie that may turn off some viewers today, it might be Zinnemann’s depiction of the gung-ho, by-any-means-necessary attitudes of the Action Service, who are willing to go to just about any extreme measures to ensure that the Jackal is caught. Which means that, yes, they are open to torture; one of the most excruciating sequences in the movie involves the torture of Wolenski the bodyguard, who suffers so badly from his electric shocks that he dies immediately after spilling the beans. In scenes like these, Zinnemann is dangerously skirting the borderlines of a pro-torture argument, but I don't think he's going so far as to make an outright case for torture. One scene shows an Action Service cop listening to Wolenski’s confessions, disgusted by the cries of suffering on the audio tape, ripping off his headphones and roaring, “What the hell did they do to the bastard!??” Here, the movie is quick to demonstrate that the practice of torture has flaws of its own.

Lebel, too, finds himself having to go to some ruthless measures in order to do his job, and when it is discovered that he is the one who wire-tapped St. Clair’s phone, the Minister asks him how he knew whose phone to tap. “I didn’t,” Lebel coolly replies, “so I tapped all of them.” This is a disturbing line, yes—especially in our era of the dreaded Patriot Act—but I would argue that Zinnemann is simply asking us if a practice as immoral as wire-tapping might be necessary in such a drastic ticking time-bomb situation, unethical as it may be. As Neil Sinyard thoughtfully puts it in his book on Zinnemann, Films of Character and Conscience, “The implication seems to be that terrorism can only be combated by terrorism from the State, which necessitates an indifference to the relation between means and ends. It is a depressing thought, for the danger is that it might ultimately blur the distinction between the two.”

The movie's lead actors are sensational. Edward Fox is absolutely right for the Jackal, bringing to the role a sense of mystery and anonymity that a more famous actor would have been incapable of supplying. Fox revealed in a recent interview with Riverside Studios that he was cast in the role because Zinnemann was impressed with his delivery of an absurd line of dialogue (“Nothing is ever a lady’s fault!”) in Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1970). In the same interview, Fox informs a live audience that Zinnemann and Frederick Forsyth got along rather well (he claims they even went to bars together, where they were accosted by hookers), although Fox adds that their working relationship was more formal: "Zinnemann wasn’t very keen on having anybody who wasn’t integral to the film on the set. Visitors weren’t terribly welcome, and that included old Freddie Forsyth, too."

Michael Lonsdale’s portrayal of Lebel is a terrific demonstration of Zinnemann’s favorite type of protagonist: tense and uneasy about his responsibilities, before finally gathering up the courage to face his fears and live up to the challenge awaiting him. Lonsdale has often been typecast throughout his career in roles as religious figures; his portrayals of clergies in Orson Welles’ The Trial (1962), Jacques Jean-Annaud’s The Name of the Rose (1986), Milos Foreman’s Goya’s Ghosts (2006) and Xavier Beauvois’s recent Of Gods and Men (2011) all come to mind. But whenever he returns to his thriller roots, it is always a true delight; Steven Spielberg has verified that he cast Lonsdale as the crime lord “Papa” in Munich (2005) after fondly remembering his portrayal of Lebel in Zinnemann’s film.

The final confrontation between Fox and Lonsdale is one of the great final confrontations in the history of movies. The Jackal just barely misses his target (de Gaulle has bent too far forward), and suddenly the door bursts open and Lebel is up there in the same room with him—it's the first time they've met face-to-face. Both struggle to load their weapons and fire at each other, but Lebel fires first (with a MAT-49 picked up from a fallen CRS guard), and the Jackal is blasted against the wall. There is an unforgettable close-up of Lebel's face, sweaty and well-lit (as opposed to shadowy, like the Jackal's face after the murders of Colette and the forger). He cannot quite believe it: he has struck down the Jackal himself. The look of astonishment on his face suggests this may be the first time in his life he has ever killed a man.

The film’s only flaw is the quickened pace of the concluding scenes following the Jackal's death, which feel too rushed. Disappointingly, the chilling last line of Forsyth’s book (“The day of the jackal was over”) is never included. The final shot, of a key character standing sadly over the Jackal’s freshly-buried grave, is so mesmerizing that we want Zinnemann to hold the shot for a long time—but he doesn’t. The end credits begin rolling sooner than they should, although the closing image of a lion statue parked in front of Élysée Palace does, in some ways, remind us of the lion and dragon statues in the closing moments of A Man For All Seasons, another film about a martyred rebel.

Zinnemann leaves us with some troubling questions, among them the question of whether or not the heroes have actually succeeded in, well, learning anything at all about their enemy. "I don’t think we ever really had any idea what kind of man you’ve been pursuing during the past two weeks," the Minister confesses to Lebel—and that, unfortunately, remains to be the case when the movie is over. The Jackal may be dead, but so what? They didn't even get to find out what his real name was; their suspicion of him as being one “Charles H. Calthrop” turns out to be a false lead. "If the Jackal wasn’t really Calthrop," ponders Inspector Thomas (Tony Britton), "then who the hell was he?" All that torture and wire-tapping, it seems, may have saved the general’s life, but there are no personal rewards to be reaped. Few things are uglier than killing a man with no identity and no recorded background, doomed to be buried in a forgotten and unmarked grave. They never knew anything about him.

Claude Lebel is the only character left standing at the end of the movie who still truly, honestly wants to know who the Jackal was. For everybody else in the movie, it doesn't matter, and life goes on. For him, it won't. He’ll have to go back home to his wife, back to his pigeons, back to his job, back to his missions with Caron, continuously wishing he could have had a little more time to learn something about his enemy. He never does get to find out who the Jackal was, or why the Jackal turned to a life of cold-blooded killing. But Lebel, bless his heart, would still like an answer to those questions. In its own special way, that is a sign of progress. And he is the only person in the movie who goes to the Jackal’s funeral.

Behold A Pale Horse (1964)

There is an unforgettable moment in Behold A Pale Horse when Fred Zinnemann brings two of Hollywood’s greatest action stars together at last, in an unforgettable sequence of unrelenting tension. We see Omar Sharif, dressed in a black priest’s robe, walking peacefully down a road in the French countryside when a car suddenly pulls up beside him, and Gregory Peck steps out. Angry and impatient, he grabs Sharif by the arm.

“Get in, priest!” he growls.

“Beg your pardon?” Sharif asks, confused.

“I said GET IN, PRIEST!” Peck roars.

He shoves Sharif into the car with two other people, interrogates him, mocks him and—at one unexpected moment—smacks him hard across the face. Up until now, we haven't been too involved in the movie. But now Peck and Sharif have finally been brought together, and suddenly we're drawn in.

A $3.9 million movie headed by a strong director with an impeccable cast, Behold A Pale Horse was a notorious box office flop in the summer of 1964, grossing a mere $900,000 and embarrassing Columbia Pictures’ reputation in international cinemas overseas. The movie, a political thriller about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, was made at a time when Franco was still in power in Spain; the Spanish government was reportedly so offended by the film’s subject matter that Columbia was even forced to sell its Spanish distribution business. Advertised as a reunion between Peck and Anthony Quinn after The Guns of Navarone (1961), and also as a reunion between Quinn and Sharif after Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Behold A Pale Horse promised audiences an action-packed Hollywood vehicle and gave them, instead, a moody, meditative morality play.

If Behold A Pale Horse has been all but forgotten today, it’s easy to see why. Shortly before his death in 1997, Fred Zinnemann admitted, “The film didn’t really come together… it was interesting, but it did not really feel right except in a few spots.” Zinnemann may have been ruminating over the film’s disappointing finale, in which Peck—portraying an aging Spanish assassin—walks out to San Martin for a final showdown with Anthony Quinn, who plays a military police captain. We expect Peck to kill Quinn at the end. Instead, Peck wastes his ammo on a former friend—a “traitor”—and dies in a hail of bullets, while Quinn walks off scot-free.

The movie's ending was not a happy one, but that's not the only reason why audiences didn't take a liking to it. The ending was bad for a variety of reasons. It offered no catharsis. It failed to deliver on the promise of the film's earlier, greater sequences. Most importantly, the dying actions of the protagonist were not in the least sympathetic. The Day of Jackal (1973), arguably Zinnemann's richest masterpiece, is another film that ends with the hero getting killed immediately after failing his mission, but at least in that film the hero has an excuse: he simply misses his target. The same cannot be said for Behold A Pale Horse, in which the hero fails not because of bad aiming, but because of his own stupidity; it doesn't make for very exciting cinema, nor does it do much in the way of inspiring intelligent critical perspectives. The film’s central question (why doesn’t Peck shoot Quinn at the end?) is not a very compelling one.

Watching Behold A Pale Horse today, I’ve found that the most compelling aspect of the film is the onscreen relationship between Peck and Sharif, both of whom are, in a sense, playing quintessential Zinnemann-type heroes in the film. Peck’s character, the Spanish bandit Manuel Artiguez, is a lone gunman plagued with feelings of self-doubt, much like Robert Ryan’s Joe Parkson in Act of Violence (1949) and Gary Cooper’s Will Kane in High Noon (1952). Sharif’s character, an innocent young priest named Father Francisco, is torn between following the customs of his church and doing what is right for his country. He might as well be a cousin to Audrey Hepburn’s Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story (1959). Whenever Peck and Sharif are onscreen, playing Artiguez and Francisco, respectively, they succeed in delivering material that is pure Fred Zinnemann. The other characters in the story—the ones played by Anthony Quinn, Marietto Angeletti, Paolo Stoppa and Raymond Pellegrin—are not nearly as interesting: they are bland, uninspired and two-dimensional, and they have no business being in a Zinnemann film.

Zinnemann’s decision to cast Gregory Peck as Artiguez (a role originally meant for Quinn) caused bitter sniping amongst critics at the time. They didn’t take too kindly to seeing Peck cast against type as a crotchety old Spanish mercenary. Richard Schickel complained in Life magazine, “What is needed is the internal stimulus of a powerful performance from Artiguez… what we have instead is gentle, attractive, intelligent Gregory Peck, an actor who sometimes smolders but is quite incapable of bursting into angry flame.”

It is possible that critics like Schickel were too accustomed to Peck’s image as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) to imagine him playing tougher characters by that point in his career. While Peck might not have been the right ethnicity for Artiguez (the character was based on a real-life anti-Franco rebel named "Zapater"), he got everything else nailed down perfectly about the character: his laziness, his grumpiness, his method of viciously pulverizing all those who lie to him or stand in his way. Zinnemann, who in his autobiography praised Peck as having turned in a “riveting performance," was right to cast him.

Peck’s performance in the film is matched by the equally riveting performance of Omar Sharif, whom Zinnemann had met through David Lean at a screening of Lawrence of Arabia. Zinnemann thought Sharif was a “terrific” actor with “an enormous capability.” Many of the best scenes in Behold A Pale Horse depict Sharif, as Father Francisco, reflecting quietly on individual circumstances, choosing his words carefully and responding to arguments with effective counterarguments. Consider the scene in which Captain Vinolas (Anthony Quinn) captures Artiguez’ ailing mother (Mildred Dunnock), and then asks Francisco—who witnessed her death—to reveal her dying words to the police. Francisco refuses, warning Vinolas, “If you try to force me to tell you something my vows forbid me to tell, then you are also desecrating the church.” Or look at the scenes in which Francisco is accidentally separated from his party of priests during a trip to Pau, as he finds himself wandering helplessly in the menacing streets all around the French underworld. In each of these scenes, Sharif’s panic and desperation are essential in order for the audience to identify with him.

Both Artiguez and Francisco are suffering an unbearable crisis of conscience. Artiguez is afraid he’s grown too old to kill Vinolas. Francisco wants to warn Artiguez of the trap Vinolas is setting up for him in San Martin, but isn’t sure if doing so would violate the doctrines of his church. Zinnemann first attempts to bring the two characters together when Francisco stops by Artiguez’ apartment to deliver a letter, which—for complicated reasons—finds itself flushed down a toilet. Normally the delivery of a letter in a Zinnemann film means bad news: think the opening sequences of High Noon or A Man for All Seasons (1966). When Artiguez and Francisco finally do meet, however, it results in the film’s single-greatest sequence, in which they sit across from each other in Artiguez’ darkened apartment, breaking bread and exchanging religious disagreements. When Francisco, for example, brings up the subject of a brain-damaged priest (Jean-Paul Moulinot) who may have been assaulted by Artiguez during a bank robbery, Artiguez is unsympathetic: “Priests should stay out of banks!” A discussion about a neighborhood in Lorca, however, leads to smiles, a toast over wine and an area of mutual understanding.

Unfortunately, when Zinnemann is left with the other characters, he finds less dramatic ammunition. The character of Paco, a 10-year old boy who asks Artiguez to kill Vinolas for executing his father, is admirably portrayed by Marietto Angeletti, but harbors a burning desire for vengeance that he is too young to fully understand. The occasional father-son type rapport between Peck and Angletti, while amusing, has none of the depth that we got between Montgomery Clift and 9-year old Ivan Jandl in Zinnemann’s The Search (1948). Both Paolo Stoppa, as the bandit Pedro, and Raymond Pellegrin, as Carlos—Artiguez’ best friend who is secretly Vinolas’ mole—are left with thankless parts.

But the most disappointing character is far and away Anthony Quinn’s Captain Vinolas, a surprisingly boring villain. We see him romancing a mistress and lighting candles asking God to help him slay Artiguez, but that’s it as far as his psychological troubles go. Zinnemann also fails to draw striking parallels between Vinolas and Artiguez. You’d think Quinn and Peck would have a lot in common, but the most Zinnemann can do is make them both out to be incredibly salty, lecherous men who can’t seem to resist checking out a fine woman’s ass.

To be sure, it sounds like everyone had a lot of fun making the film. Anthony Quinn would often bring his newborn son onto the set to watch bull fights; Zinnemann described Quinn as "colorful", “cooperative”, “professional” and “very entertaining" on the set. Omar Sharif was thoroughly impressed with Zinnemann’s directorial technique, raving in the New York Herald Tribune about how he believed the director had “a marvelous rapport” with his actors (Sharif would later dismiss Behold A Pale Horse as one of many “bad movies by good directors” he made late in his career, long before his excellent comeback in 2003's Monsieur Ibrahim). Gregory Peck’s biographer, Gary Fishgall, reports that the actor considered the overall shoot to be “a marvelous experience”; he was allegedly so impressed with Zinnemann’s technique that he believed it to exceed even that of Hitchcock.

The film’s technical aspects have aged nicely. The score by Maurice Jarre, while not one of the composer’s most memorable efforts, makes chilling use of drums and isolated guitar chords. The black-and-white cinematography looks beautiful today, although Zinnemann hated working with DP Jean Badal, admitting, "On occasion, I had wish-dreams about putting a match to his beard." The film's story was adapted by J.P. Miller (scribe of Days and Wine and Roses) from the book Killing A Mouse On Sunday by the great Emeric Pressburger, although Zinnemann, fearing the title sounded too Disney-like, had it changed. The current title of the film, taken from the Book of Revelation, is just as misleading, although perhaps it makes for a more appropriate title for a political thriller.

And yet, despite the solid craftsmanship of the film, one thing has always kept Behold A Pale Horse from going down in history as the masterpiece it should have been: that damned ending. It stops the movie from taking off around the tracks, just when it’s gaining momentum.

Oh, it starts out well. Artiguez sneaks into San Martin, climbs up a rooftop, aims his sniper rifle and locates Vinolas in his sights. Then he takes aim… only to shoot Carlos instead. It’s a truly crummy anticlimax—although Zinnemann, at the time, went to great pains to defend it. “In my opinion,” he told reporters, “Manuel, when faced with the choice of killing a lifelong enemy or somebody who he considers a traitor, would kill the traitor. Perhaps in some way his enemy is an honorable adversary, but a traitor is like vermin.”

A valid defense, but Zinnemann ignored the central problem behind Artiguez’ decision: how selfish it is. By refusing to eliminate a totalitarian Spanish dictator, Artiguez is not only doing Vinolas a favor—he’s depriving the people of Spain of the democracy they won’t be getting for several more decades. His decision to shoot Carlos, instead of Vinolas, feels more inspired by stupidity than anything else.

One striking detail of the ending that is often overlooked, however, comes in the seconds just before Artiguez dies in a hail of bullets on a hospital staircase. As Zinnemann’s camera spins faster and faster around the hospital ward, the last image that pops into Artiguez’ head is the memory of young Paco kicking a soccer ball into the air. It seems like a random image, at first, but maybe it’s reminding Artiguez of a time when he was younger, and was happier—before he devoted himself to a life of crime.

In a sense, the movie is Zinnemann's most potent description of a man whose entire life has ended in failure. Manuel Artiguez had this one chance to eliminate a lifelong enemy, and he blew it. He had a grand opportunity to lead his country one step closer towards freedom, and he threw it away. Life as a bandit, it seems, has condemned him to one sorry disappointment after another. Consider that scene between him and Father Francisco, in Artiguez' darkened apartment. The young priest can do nothing more except stare in amazement at this tired, pathetic old man. “Go ahead, priest,” Artiguez raves, “tell me I’m a bandit!” And Father Francisco has a simple, five-word answer for him: “You know what you are.”

High Noon (1952): Fred Zinnemann and the Hawks/Wayne Backlash

It had been twelve years since the release of High Noon, and Fred Zinnemann was getting fed up. For over a decade now, he had had to stand by and watch helplessly as his masterpiece was subjected to one of the harshest backlashes in the history of film criticism. Francois Truffaut had called it "facetious". Manny Farber had dismissed it as "white elephant art". Then, director Howard Hawks, upon finishing Rio Bravo in 1959, raised eyebrows after proudly stating, "I made Rio Bravo because I didn't like High Noon… I didn't think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn't my idea of a good Western."

Finally, Zinnemann could not take it anymore. In an interview with James R. Silke in 1964, Zinnemann responded to Hawks’ criticisms: “I admire Hawks very much. I only wish he’d leave my films ALONE!” Zinnemann was puzzled as to why so many critics over the years were starting to complain that High Noon centered on a protagonist—Marshall Will Kane—who behaved more like a human everyman than a traditional, all-powerful Western icon. “If you say this is not a Western character,” Zinnemann retorted, “it’s true. I wasn’t there in 1860. Neither was Mr. Hawks.”

Zinnemann would spend his whole career defending High Noon as a film that stressed a universal theme: a simple story about the individual pitted against an overwhelming majority. As he later described the film in his 1992 autobiography, “It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day.” Indeed, this was the kind of theme that dominated all of Zinnemann’s greatest films, from the paranoid POW escapees of Act of Violence (1949) to the impoverished pioneers of The Sundowners (1960); from Thomas More’s hopeless fight for justice in A Man for All Seasons (1966) to a love triangle tested by the icy crevices of the Alps in Five Days One Summer (1982). It was an overlooked filmmaking career, founded on an underlying sympathy for the underdog; after High Noon, everyone in Hollywood would remember Fred Zinnemann’s name.

Today, it is fashionable to think of High Noon as dated and worthless—a film that still has the AFI and the Academy Awards on its side, but not much else. Jonathan Rosenbaum once called it “vastly overrated,” and Roger Ebert confessed as recently as 2007 that it’s a film he “doesn’t like very much.” Much of the recent dislike for the film appears to stem from a bizarre insistence by critics to cite Howard Hawks and John Wayne’s own criticisms of the film. In his Great Movies essay on Rio Bravo, Ebert had attempted to pan High Noon by quoting from his 1972 interview with Wayne, who sputtered, "What a piece of you-know-what that was! Here’s a town full of people who have ridden in covered wagons all the way across the plains... and then when three no-good bad guys walk into town and the marshal asks for a little help, everybody in town gets shy. If I’d been the marshal, I would have been so goddamned disgusted with those chicken-livered yellow sons of bitches that I would have just taken my wife and saddled up and rode out of there.”

What Ebert seems not to have realized is that John Wayne actually had a more personal reason for disliking High Noon, a reason which he rarely expressed in public: the fact that the film's screenplay was written by Carl Foreman, a former Communist who had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which Wayne had proudly supported. Foreman made it no secret that High Noon was basically his allegorical slap at McCarthyism; Wayne was reportedly so outraged by Foreman’s intentions that he criticized High Noon as “the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life!” Both Wayne and Howard Hawks felt that the movie violated their macho code of honor; they believed there was something fundamentally wrong with making a Western about a hero who was capable of feeling fear. Here was Gary Cooper playing a decidedly anti-Gary Cooper character: Will Kane, frightened town marshal, ostracized authority figure, humiliated husband. Something was happening here. Something about the Western was about to change forever.

Another problem with Wayne’s criticism of High Noon was his charge that Kane could simply leave town, rather than staying and facing the evil Frank Miller and his gang. But the thing is, Kane can’t just get out of town. He and his wife, Amy (Grace Kelly), are planning on opening up a general store once they find a place to settle, and they can’t risk the possibility of Miller’s gang tracking them down. “We’d never be able to keep that store, Amy,” Kane reminds his wife. “They’d come after us, and we’d have to run again—as long as we live.” The fact that Kane will also have to turn in his badge and guns if he leaves town poses another problem: how could he possibly fight Miller outside of town without his authority? Or without guns? The whole point of Foreman's screenplay is that it's designed specifically to ensure that Kane has no alternatives. He’s got to stay.

Nobody in town is willing to help him. Everybody has some kind of excuse. Martin (Lon Chaney Jr.), the retired town marshal, says he can’t assist Kane because of his arthritis and complains, “People got to talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it, maybe because deep down they don’t care. They just don’t care.” Harv Pell (Lloyd Bridges) won’t help him because of a jealous intuition that Kane has feelings for his girlfriend, Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado), and vice versa. The town judge (Otto Kruger), who sent Miller to prison, hurriedly leaves town and takes the city hall American flag with him, thus stripping the town of all its democracy. Mayor Henderson (Thomas Mitchell) deprives Kane of any possible allies by seducing an audience of churchgoers with a speech about how blood in the streets might do significant damage to the town’s economy and tourism. Even Amy turns her back on Kane; both her father and her brother were casualties of gun violence and, as a Quaker, she refuses to stand by her husband as long as he continues to fight.

Because the movie questions pacifism as an alternative, High Noon is sometimes dismissed as an apologia for violence, but a deeper reading indicates that the film’s violence doesn’t come easy. For one thing, Foreman’s screenplay offers an insightful (if often-missed) critique of the death penalty. At first, Kane is bitter about Frank Miller going to prison instead of the gallows, but then considers the possibility of Miller returning to town nonviolently: “Sometimes prison changes a man...” In another scene, when the local bartender (Larry J. Blake) cracks jokes about Miller shooting Kane dead, an enraged Kane knocks the bartender to the ground, then feels bad about it and tries to help him up. This scene critiques the myth of the marshal as a slap-happy, vigilante Western hero. And out of all the people refusing to help Kane, the local minister (Morgan Farley) is perhaps the only man in town with a good excuse: “If you’re asking me to tell my people to go out and kill, and maybe get themselves killed… I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

The film’s long-awaited finale, in which Kane prepares anxiously for Miller’s arrival, is developed by Zinnemann with a montage defined by three lingering visual elements.

The first element is the sense of urgency, symbolized by obsessive close-ups of the many clocks in town, all of which seem to get ominously larger as the noon train approaches.

The second element is the film’s victim, Kane, walking helplessly through the streets before stopping and being regarded in a rising crane-shot of the entire town; Zinnemann achieved this complex shot through the use of a long Chapman crane.

The third and final integral element to the film’s visual style is the railroad tracks themselves. They are always static, always threatening, always waiting patiently for Miller’s train. When the train finally does arrive, it chugs black smoke and blows a loud whistle, reminding us of the train in the finale of Zinnemann’s Act of Violence. And when we finally see Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), he has the face of a Tin Man and the burning revenge fantasies of your typical Zinnemann-esque villain. He is flanked by three bad guys: Pierce (Robert J. Wilke), the second-in-command; Colby (Lee Van Cleef), silent but deadly; and Ben Miller (Sheb Wooley), who is loud, horny and reckless—and, naturally, is the first one to die.

Zinnemann did not agree with Carl Foreman that that the story was an allegory for McCarthyism. “With all due respect, I felt this to be a narrow point of view,” the director wrote in his autobiography. “To me it was the story of a man who must make a decision according to his conscience.” Nevertheless, Zinnemann, like Foreman, became embroiled in the controversies surrounding the film. During a disastrous screening in July 1952, Zinnemann's son, Tim, overheard an executive in the bathroom muttering, “What does a European Jew know about making Westerns, anyway?” And the debate over the film’s allegorical subtext has always refused to go away. Although some conservatives—indeed, the film’s own star, Gary Cooper—admired Carl Foreman’s insights into violence, patriotism and human weakness, other conservatives cried foul. Howard Hawks and John Wayne took their hatred of the film to their graves. There is a still a temptation today to compare High Noon to Rio Bravo and determine whether or not one film is better than the other.

Why do we have to choose between the two films? Rio Bravo is one kind of Western. High Noon is another. Rio Bravo is a triumph of invisible style; High Noon is a triumph of real-time, documentary style. Hawks specialized in films about professionals; Zinnemann specialized in films about characters suffering a crisis of conscience. One film was a love letter to Westerns as they used to be; another film marked an attempt to bring Westerns into strange, unfamiliar territory. A marshal like John T. Chance knew exactly what he was doing. A marshal like Will Kane makes it all up as he goes along.

High Noon is one of the best movies ever made. That much must be said, right now, in case it isn’t clear. In the end, Fred Zinnemann delivered a film that was meditative, innovative, and just as American as apple pie. It was true to the complex feelings that all gunslingers have ever shared in the Old West (and beyond). It still has relevance for all parties—whether you’re liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Green or Libertarian. One way or another, you’re guaranteed to find something to love about this story. Take your pick and choose your villains. This is a movie for everyone.

Act of Violence (1949)

Fred Zinnemann begins Act of Violence (1949) with a sequence that every movie buff should be familiar with: the opening shot of a limping Robert Ryan, dragging his way down the lonely city streets at midnight. He walks up the stairs to his apartment, and Zinnemann’s camera follows him as he limps across his room, bends down and opens up a dresser. The camera zooms in to reveal him taking a handgun out of the bottom drawer, and then the title flashes across the screen. There are no beginning credits.

It is anyone’s guess how Zinnemann was ever selected to direct the picture. Act of Violence is one of the great postwar film noirs, but nobody could have anticipated that Zinnemann—who had never directed a film noir before—was practically tailor-made for the job. Zinnemann was notorious in Hollywood for being one of those “arthouse” directors at MGM. He had achieved success directing Spencer Tracy in The Seventh Cross (1943) and Montgomery Clift in The Search (1948), but in between those years he had had a reputation for turning down jobs, rejecting bad screenplays and rebelling, constantly, against a Hollywood system that was always trying to conform him into a studio hack. By the end of the decade it seemed like he would never again get the chance to direct another quality film. Then Act of Violence fell into his lap, and his career officially took off.

The movie is currently only available on DVD through a Double Feature with John Sturges’ Mystery Street (1950), which is a shame; it deserves a DVD of its own, and there is so much about it that warrants continued discussions for future generations of moviegoers. A Criterion is perhaps too much to ask, but isn’t the unfortunate treatment of Act of Violence in recent years not unlike the treatments bestowed on every other film made by its director? Zinnemann is one of the most grossly neglected cinema auteurs of the 20th century; critics like Andrew Sarris have charged that he made “anti-movies for anti-moviegoers”, and this might account for the lack of public desire to examine Zinnemann’s work in the present.

But such contrarian arguments against Zinnemann would not hold water in critiquing Act of Violence, one of the first films to have confirmed his artistry. The screenplay by Robert L. Richards, based on a story by Collier Young, takes one of Zinnemann’s favorite themes—society’s crushing and unraveling of the individual—and puts it on display most beautifully. We follow the limping Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan) as he boards a bus to a small town, checks into a hotel, flips through the phone book and finds two matching names of the man he is going to hunt down. His target: a building contractor named Frank Enley.

What is Joe’s motive? We don’t know. When we first see Frank Enley (Van Heflin), he is carrying his baby boy up on his shoulders, smiling joyously in front of a large crowd in celebration of his latest completed housing project. He has a beautiful wife, Edith (Janet Leigh), and seems like an innocent family man. But later in the afternoon, Joe will track Frank all the way out to Redwood Lake, where—in the film’s first sequence of intense suspense—he rides a boat out into the middle of the lake; spots Frank fishing on another boat with his neighbor, Fred (Harry Antrim); hides behind a rock; takes his gun out and readies for the kill. Fortunately, Frank’s boat just misses him, and Frank and Fred return to the dock unscathed; but when Frank learns from the dockman (Will Wright) that a man went out on the lake looking for him, he frowns, packs up his gear and heads home. He knows who the man with the limp is. He knows that he’s still waiting for him out on the lake.

“Anybody been around while I was gone?” Frank asks his wife. Edith at first says no, but then pauses and remarks, “Oh, wait a minute! There was a man here—just after you left!” It is here when cinematographer Robert Surtees photographs Frank shrouded in darkness, with the shadows concealing the obvious fear on his face. He behaves strangely throughout the evening, refusing to answer the phone, refusing to talk about why he came home early, blowing up at Edith (“I just don’t want to talk to anybody or listen to anybody! I don’t want to see anybody! I want to spend a quiet evening in my own home! Is that asking too much?”), and then panicking even further when the doorbell rings. We can hear Joe Parkson’s creeping footsteps outside, and we can see the locked doorknob turning unsuccessfully as he tries to force his way into the house. The Enley’s baby son screams in the night because of a bad dream. Now the entire family is aware of the presence of the limping man with the gun.

From here, the pieces begin to fit together. We find out that Frank and Joe were together in the army, that Joe might be deranged, and that he might be holding Frank responsible for everything that went wrong between them during the war. Edith asks Frank, “When we packed up, all of a sudden; came out here from Syracuse; 3,000 miles across the country… was that on account of him?” But Frank continues to be maddeningly elusive—he even flees to an LA convention and pathetically leaves Edith to confront Joe herself. We finally get to hear Joe’s side of the story when he breaks into the Enley home and starts questioning Edith about her husband. "What did he tell you about me!??" he angrily demands. "What did he tell you? Did he tell you that I'm crippled because of him? Did he tell you about the men that are dead because of him? Did he tell you what happened to them before they died?" He tells Edith something truly bizarre: that he and Frank were POWs in a German prison camp, and that Frank was "a stool pigeon for the Nazis" who ratted out on his fellow inmates after they tried to hatch an escape plan.



Unfortunately, Joe is telling the truth. Frank did everything Joe says he did, which Frank confirms to Edith in a blistering monologue: “Do I have to spell it out to you? Do I have to draw you a picture? I was an informer! It doesn’t make any difference why I did it; I betrayed my men! They were dead! The Nazis even paid me a price: they gave me food, and I ate it… I ate it!” One of the flaws of Act of Violence is Frank’s rather irrational insistence on refusing to go to the police and have Joe arrested. True, what Frank did at the prison camp was stupid, and it will no doubt attract unwanted press. But the fact that Frank sold out his men in hopes that they wouldn’t be harmed during the prison escape does make a big difference; and his position as a POW who would do anything to survive is equally understandable, even if Frank is not the most sympathetic character around. But, then again, if Frank were so rational, there would probably be no story. The rewards of Act of Violence are endless—provided that the audience is willing to suspend some of its disbelief.

Consider the ways in which the film is structured, and then compare it to the director’s later works. Zinnemann specialized, more or less, in movies about hunts, and told his stories from the points of views of the ones being hunted. Frank Enley—like Will Kane in High Noon (1952), Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (1966) and Lillian Hellman in Julia (1977)—is thrown out by society and left to be devoured by the hyenas. He’s paranoid, and quickly becomes delusional himself, as evidenced during the sequence in which he walks down a dark tunnel, hears the echoes of the massacre at the prison camp and cries out, “DON’T DO IT, JOE!” It is a plea not just to the Joe of the past, but to the Joe of the present who is hunting him.

The women in Act of Violence are like a blissful light in the darkness conjured up by the men in this criminalized noir underworld. Edith stands by Frank as long as she possibly can; she refuses to give up on him, even when she finds out that he is guilty of some incredibly serious things. Joe’s former flame, Ann (Phyllis Thaxter), wants to put a stop to Joe’s mission, and attempts to convince him to wash down his thirst for blood. Pat (Mary Astor), a friendly hooker, spots Frank in a bar, takes him to her place and offers her support. “What is it: love trouble, or money trouble?” she asks him. “Listen, Frankie, I’ve seen ‘em all. I’ve seen all the troubles in the world; they boil down to just those two. You’re broke, or you’re lonely. Or both.” Like Edith, Pat believes that Frank shouldn’t be penalized just because he made one mistake—this is one of the film’s principal themes. She introduces Frank to the old lawyer Gavery (Taylor Holmes), believing that he can help sort out Frank’s problems. But when Frank spills out his troubles to Gavery in a private room, we can see the shadows of the hitman Johnny (Berry Kroeger) creeping under the door, as he sits outside and listens. Pat immediately catches on that these two men may not be so trustworthy after all.

This is another one of the principal themes of Act of Violence: the class difference between hired killers and self-made killers. Johnny and Gavery, like the Jackal in Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal (1973), have no qualms whatsoever about their jobs; they see killing not as a moral issue, but as a business. In a slick sales pitch, Gavery warns Frank, “It’s up to you: he dies, or you die. It’s him… or you.” On the other hand, Joe Parkson is like Artiguez in Zinnemann’s Behold A Pale Horse (1964): he’s wrestling with a bit of self-doubt. Should he kill Frank? Should he not? Ann lectures Joe nonstop about the error of his way of thinking. “What are you going to prove anyway, with your vengeance, your violence?” she cries. “You aren’t going to bring those men back—you’re just gonna smash a few more lives!” The movie also considers what happens when innocent Americans are faced with the possibility of having to defend themselves with guns; this is represented when Edith buys a gun, brings it home and mutters, “I don’t even know how to shoot it.” Well, neither would most people.

Every actor is cast to perfection. Van Heflin had previously worked with Zinnemann on Kid Glove Killer (1942), and here, as Frank Enley, he paints a shattering portrait of one of the most tragically flawed protagonists in film noir. Robert Ryan, as Joe Parkson, trudges on throughout the film with his unforgettable limp; like Thornton, the character Ryan would go on to play most memorably in The Wild Bunch (1969), Joe Parkson holds a vengeful grudge against an old friend and is hellbent on chasing him down—and yet, by the end of the film, is left regretting his failure to be a little more forgiving. Mary Astor has great fun as Pat, the kind of dame that Brigid from The Maltese Falcon (1941) might have eventually become (had she not been hung by her sweet neck). As the hitman Johnny, Berry Kroeger, an Orson Welles lookalike, fills every scene he’s in with an uncomfortably poisonous aura. And Janet Leigh, with her brunette hair, is almost unrecognizable at such a young age; she makes Edith a character who is warm, brave and understanding. “Ever since I first knew you, Frank, and up until yesterday, I thought you were the finest, most wonderful man in the world,” she tells Heflin, in their last scene together. “Now I know that you’re like everybody else. You have faults and weaknesses… that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, or that I don’t want to be your wife—because I do.” It is one of Leigh’s very best performances.

Is there redemption at the end? I think so. The finale of Act of Violence takes place at a train station in which Frank and Joe find themselves striding dangerously towards each other, Johnny lurks in a car off to the side, and a train ominously comes barging into the scene screaming off its whistle—sort of like the train in High Noon. There is a struggle, and it ends in disaster. But when Act of Violence closes, we are left confidant that heroes who could not find a way to redeem themselves have finally done so; that villains who persisted in their taste for blood have taken that taste with them to the grave; and that antiheroes who initially could do no right, from here on out, will be determined to do no wrong. We are also left with the sense that a director who was not finding happiness in Hollywood at the time had found it at last. “This was the last movie I directed for MGM,” wrote Zinnemann in his autobiography, “and the first time I felt confident that I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. Personally, I like this picture very much.”

This piece is a contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon, hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and Farran Smith Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren. The blogathon runs from February 14 - 21. Please make a generous donation whenever you can.