Despite some sterling efforts by director and photographer, it is hard to work up much interest in this psychological thriller. The characters are unconvincing - and the stars don't help: Van Heflin goes through his usual motions ("Register shock, Van!"), Janet Leigh lays on the mousey housewife bit with a trowel, Phyllis Thaxter once again does her duty by the worried and sympathetic friend, and Robert Ryan is so hammily obvious a neurotic nut, it's impossible to understand why he was not carted off to the psycho ward the minute he stuck his head out of doors. The supporting cast is much more realistic and lifelike, with Mary Astor, Taylor Holmes and Berry Kroeger trying valiantly to give their roles depth and conviction - though they are largely defeated by the script. Still, at least they succeed in making their portrayals interesting - which is more than one can say for the star performers. The actual plot mechanics are dated and old-hat now, but the script could have succeeded - despite its unconvincing characters - had the writers made some effort to preserve the dramatic unities. Here is a yarn that is a natural for a tight time span (say no more than ten or twelve-hours) and for confinement to the environs of a particular locale. Instead, the story meanders all over the place, introducing superfluous characters at every turn and having no sense of urgency. And then it tacks on a ridiculous, melodramatic climax that conveniently avoids having to deal with the moral or social issues previously raised!

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

A surprisingly frank and morally complex film noir released immediately post-WWII.Van Heflin plays a man who ratted out some fellow soldiers in a Nazi POW camp; Robert Ryan is one of the survivors who comes to seek vengeance on Heflin after they've all returned to the States and have spent time rebuilding their lives. The movie poses difficult questions, much more difficult ones than movies of its kind normally did, and it doesn't let itself off easy by making either Heflin nor Ryan all good or all bad. One of the most daring elements of the film is its suggestion that Heflin is deserving of forgiveness, because the codes of conduct that govern men in the theater of war are different from those that govern us in our day-to-day lives. That maybe doesn't seem like a daring thing to say now, but at the time it would have been.Heflin and Ryan are both terrific; Ryan is one of my favorite film noir actors. But the women in the film make quite an impression, and no wonder given that two of them are played by Janet Leigh (as Heflin's wife) and Mary Astor (as a world-weary good-time gal who takes Heflin under her protective wing). If the mens' world -- both at war and at home -- is one of violence and revenge, it's the women who act as the voice of reason and sanity, trying to impose a sense of stability amid the chaos.A really, really good movie.Grade: A

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.