IMPACT is an almost forgotten film noir with a great set up: a guy's wife is cheating on him and colludes with her lover to have him killed. The location of the murder is a mountain top road, but as is usual with this genre of film-making, nothing goes according to plan. The first half an hour is a highly suspenseful journey into darkness, and the set-piece sequence on the mountain is superbly handled and keeps you guessing throughout as to what's going to happen.Sadly, the quality of the narrative takes a serious nose dive from this point in and never really recovers. Brian Donlevy, who's a bit too over the hill for this role, loses his identity and decides to go into hiding while the police investigate his wife. Sadly, the writers then see fit to shoehorn an unnecessary romance into the storyline, which really drags things down and evaporates all of the momentum so carefully built up early on. Things finish with a court case, but IMPACT never regains the highs of the early set up. Donlevy is okay, but his character is unsympathetic, and the supporting players are merely adequate in their parts.

Whoever thought that Brian Donlevy, usually a villain in films, could pull it off with a compelling performance as a faithful, successful husband to an apparent faithless wife who plots his demise with her lover. Of course, things go awry and the lover is killed instead.Donlevy goes into hiding a finds true love in another state at a job way below his capabilities. He does this to gain revenge on the faithless wife who is eventually tried for murder. Changing his mind, he returns only to have the wife turn the tables on him as he accused of killing her lover instead.Charles Coburn is miscast here as the detective who believed Donlevy.

This is absolutely NOT film noir. It's filled with romance and monologues on hope and doing the right thing, not the gritty, pessimistic ambiance of the urban jungle. In fact, it's almost after- school-special-like. Just because a movie has a crime as its major plot point does not make it film noir!That said, I was at first mildly impressed with this film. The poetic justice initially visited upon Mrs. Williams was genuinely clever. The venomous defense attorney was a nice touch. The trickery used by the protagonist to outwit his cheating, murderous wife was interesting.Then, all of a sudden, the film (like others in this faux-film-noir genre - see Kansas City Confidential) was ruined by a needless romantic sub-plot. Instead of darkly, cynically punishing his murderous wife, Walter Williams listens to his new belle and has a change of heart. Her speech wasn't even that convincing: "But that doesn't give you the right to take justice into your own hands."In fact, his wife's attempted murder DOES give him the right to mete poetic justice. That denouement would have made this film interesting. It would have made it dark. It would have made it film noir. Instead, the film's creative potential was sacrificed for a dopey romantic subplot. I'm not impressed.

I was on a noir kick recently and Impact was one of the films that came up as a recommendation that I hadn't already seen. The plot offers a tough promise of revenge, with a man set up by his wife to be killed by her lover – only for the lover to be killed and the original target to go into hiding while his wife faces suspicion from the police. The plot suggests that there will be a dark edge to the film and a story that sees revenge and justice coming as a result of the attempted murder. In reality though what we get is a dramatic opening quarter, which culminates in the death of the lover, but afterwards the film becomes about Williams settling into a new life and a potential romance for an hour until suddenly someone (presumably a writer) reminds him of the actual plot and he goes back to San Francisco just in time to trigger a courtroom finale and race against time to get to the bottom of it all.This approach wastes the potential in the plot because the darker thriller aspect is crammed into the final 30 minutes or so, even if the opening section leading up to the murder is pretty dramatic and effective. Outside of these sections though we have plenty of padding without any real impact or point; I know that the new life is the narrative trigger to the final confrontation but mostly it doesn't have a flow to it and it goes on far too long for what it is. As a result my interest had waned by the time we got back into the main plot and the courtroom action seemed a little muted, rushed and lacking in real urgency or drama. It is a real shame because the plot summary offered so much more and i'm not sure why it ignored its own strengths for so much of the film.The cast are rather stiff and so-so, although this may be in part due to the material. Donlevy does some good work but mostly he isn't allowed to feel much – Raines is cute next to him but seems far too young to be in that role. Coburn is only ever calling it in and his character lacks, well, character. Walker is, in her deeds, a cold, manipulative and disloyal woman but yet she has no edge to her at all and she is pretty dull. This is a film where none of the cast really stood out or managed to rise above the material.Overall Impact is a missed goal. It has potential but it misses it by being melodramatic, overlong and really losing its focus in regards the plot around murder and betrayal. Could have been something but wasn't.