The character:	Frank Enley
The actor:	Van Heflin
The movie:	Act of Violence (1949)

In modern movietalk, you can put any three movies together that have similar themes and the same director and call it a trilogy. Forgive me for being similarly tiresome. At least there’s a little novelty for me in applying that framework to Fred Zinnemann just after World War II. The Search (1948), Act of Violence (1949), and The Men (1950) don’t have the same cachet as Roberto Rossellini’s triad of war movies, and on the American side, none of them come up to the fame or quality of The Best Years of Our Lives. For those reasons, I doubt very much that there will be a Criterion box set of Zinnemann’s Postwar Trilogy, but Zinnemann, who was raised in Vienna during World War I and seems to have brought some of that savoir faire to Hollywood with him, sees postwar ruination in a different light than his compeers. The Search, in which we watch a mother try to track down her little boy after they were separated during the Holocaust, looks and feels more like Germany Year Zero than any other contemporary American film I can name. The Men, written by HUAC victim Carl Foreman, gets into similar territory as the Homer stuff in The Best Years of Our Lives, but with a plain exception. Homer may not have hands, but he still has a working johnson; the paraplegics of The Men may not even have access to that consolation.

Act of Violence, if it feels like another Hollywood movie of the era, probably comes closest to Crossfire. Bad Day at Black Rock is closer in spirit, but being a color movie from the ensuing decade, I can’t quite make it nearer than Crossfire. (Am I unduly influenced because Robert Ryan plays a damaged veteran in each of these movies? Who knows.) In both pictures, the war has raked over men who already carried dangerous flaws. In Crossfire, that flaw is antisemitism. In Act of Violence, the problem inside Frank Enley is less obvious. Enley has a little Jean Valjean in him when we first come across him. He seems like a great guy, everyone loves him in town, things are swell. What Frank is forced to reveal to us, piece by piece, scene by scene, is that his wartime traumas are not the kinds of things you can fix with therapy or a gentle wife. This is not Dana Andrews with PTSD or Fredric March with alcoholism, and Janet Leigh, despite being as sweet as Teresa Wright or as understanding as Myrna Loy, cannot break through. The PTSD attacks Fred, and the alcoholism sweeps Al up and inconveniences and scares others. In the first half of the film, Frank’s past is darker, and yet his woman does her best to understand just as much as Fred or Al’s do.

War is like parenting in that you try not to judge other people’s attempts at doing it unless there’s something really bad going down. There’s a two-decade difference between Van Heflin and Janet Leigh as husband and wife in this movie, an age gap which isn’t problematic but necessary. Edith does not want to judge Frank’s war too harshly, even when she finds out the reason that his life is jeopardized. Frank was a POW, and on the eve of a prison break, ratted out his American companions to the Nazis because he thought the breakout was doomed and he thought he could keep those Americans alive. If the breakout was not doomed before, it certainly was after Frank snitched; the escapees were gunned down and all but one died. We can be generous. Obviously what Frank did was wrong, but he had reasons. A Kantian would say that the killing was not in his hands at all. We cannot really put ourselves in Frank’s shoes, not when he was under such duress. Edith makes these points in one way or another. She doesn’t even yield when Frank says that maybe he did it because the Nazis gave him food, not because he was so concerned about the others’ lives.

What makes Act of Violence more than just a film noir and something more like The Scarlet Letter is that, like Dimmesdale, Frank Enley refuses to take the punishment which might honestly be meted out to him. Joe (Robert Ryan), lame in his leg but able in vengeance, has it in mind to kill Frank in the name of those that Frank saw killed during the war. What makes Frank so loathsome is that even once he has confessed to his wife, speaking the words aloud that he could not linger on in his own mind, once he has looked at the sins of his past and counted the drops of blood that he knows are on his hands, his plan is still to finish the job the Nazis had in mind. It’s a noir, so in the end Frank changes his mind about having Joe offed, it kills him instead, yadda yadda. A fiery death in which Frank manages to save the life of the guy he was trying to kill, the guy who he more or less had killed once before, is not a reclamation. In the 11th Century, the church reformers argued that no person, not even a noble or a king, could just pray for forgiveness right before you die after willingly living a life of sin. They would have had much the same perspective about Frank.