The New Pictures, Jan. 31, 1949

Act of Violence (M-G-M), a realistic, tight-knit study in fear, hatred and revenge, is a well-made movie melodrama. Director Fred (The Search) Zinneman, who gets as much power out of his lens as if it were a fire-hose nozzle, deals this time with a deadly game of hide & seek. The fugitive is an ex-bomber pilot (Van Heflin) who once betrayed a group of fellow prisoners to curry favor and food in a Ger man prison camp. Stalking him with a maniacal single-mindedness is Bombardier Robert Ryan, the only survivor.

Director Zinneman first builds strong sympathy for Heflin as a prosperous, affectionate husband and father who works hard in postwar days to get housing for his fellow veterans. Then he takes a closer look at Ryan, the would-be killer. The picture’s real shocker is that the audience has little choice between hunter and hunted. The edge, if any, belongs to the hunter. Plainly, Veteran Heflin can never live down the one fateful, irretrievable act that even stands between him and his wife (Janet Leigh). But Ryan has a chance to make a life for himself if only he can be prevented from doing murder.

Until a choice is made, Act of Violence is a fine movie chase. The ending, while unconventional, is dramatically and morally satisfying.

The Quiet One (Film Documents; Mayer-Burstyn) is a shoestring documentary which ties up a big subject in a compact package. Produced as a 16-mm. film at a cost of $28,000, this gentle study of a childhood tragedy has stirred such enthusiasm among preview audiences and potential exhibitors that it has been blown up to standard 35-mm. size and will be distributed nationally.*

The Quiet One pictures the disappointments and fierce resentments of a young Negro boy (played by nonprofessional Donald Thompson) who has been abandoned by his parents and left to shift for himself with an unsympathetic grandmother. When his fears and confusion have made him into a sullen “incorrigible,” he is sent to a school for boys and given psychiatric treatment.

In showing the boy’s cure, the picture also vividly reveals the source of his illness. An oblique lecture to parents who may forget how easily children can develop a sense of rejection by feeling unwanted and unloved, the film ends with this moral: all the clinics and psychiatrists in the nation can only make children “a little better able to take care of themselves … a little better able to live usefully and generously … a little better able to care for the children they will have, than their parents were to care for them—lest the generations of those maimed in childhood, each making the next in its own image, create upon the darkness, like mirrors locked face to face, an infinite corridor of despair . . .”

Waterloo Road (Gainsborough; Eagle Lion), made for British home consumption some four years ago, is just being released in the U.S. A warmly entertaining little picture, it proves that a good director and a sound story can make an unpretentious production gleam with humanity, humor and sharp characterizations. Director Sidney Gilliat has proved this point before (in Green for Danger, The Adventuress, etc.). This time he manages it with the tale of a young couple (John Mills and Joy Shelton) in wartime England.

While the husband is away in the army, his wife is chased by a slightly mangy wolf (Stewart Granger) full of bad intentions. Gilliat’s sympathy for all the people caught in this grade B triangle gives it the look of pathos. He softens contempt for the villain by proving him to be as much an unhappy fool as he is a rascal. When the hero’s sister writes a tattling letter, Gilliat balances the tattler’s meanness with a compassionate picture of her miserable marriage. Besides endowing his work with warmth and humanity, Director Gilliat knows how to make it move; the hero’s hunt through London for his wife is a series of hairbreadth misses, played at the galloping pace of a horse opera.

On Stage (MARCH OF TIME) takes a brief look at both sides of the brassy street called Broadway—the mink-coated, white-tied and marquee-lighted side, and the darker lanes leading backstage to rehearsals where the work is done in drudgery, wild hope and exaggerated despair. Following the career of a young actress (Margaret Garland) who lands a minor role in the current hit Anne of the Thousand Days, this documentary shows Stars Rex Harrison and Joyce Redman going through rehearsals. It also takes a quick look at Director Jed Harris in the process of preparing Red Gloves, starring Charles Boyer and John Dall, and riffles through some quick shots of famous playwrights who, accurately enough, look like middle-aged gentlemen as well able to cut a dividend as to pare a script.

On Stage, with its own pleasantly romantic, stage-struck air, helps to explain why show business, in good times or bad, retains its .own peculiar brand of glamor.

*Said Distributor Joe Burstyn, whose firm imported Paisan, Open City and other highly successful foreign films, “When I see what a few young people with good ideas can do when they take a camera and go out on the streets of New York, I wonder why the hell we go overseas to look for good pictures.”