Fred Zinnemann, a truly sweet and reticent man, could also be as stubborn as the devil. He undervalued himself grievously. In 1992, I helped him 'talk' his life story out of himself, but it was vexatious, if informative work.
'Oh, no, Alex, don't let's talk about The Old Man And The Sea - you know I withdrew from directing it.' 'Oh, no, Alex, we can't write about Man's Fate - MGM cancelled it a week before we were due to begin. For me, its a non-picture.'
Some day, a Zinnemann biographer (though it shall not be me) will fill these gaps.
About Act Of Violence, which he made in 1948 in the MGM 'factory' where he was under contract, Fred was a wee bit more forthcoming. Indeed, he was almost boastful.
'That was the first time I felt confident I knew what I was doing,' he said to me, and let the words stand in his Autobiography (Bloomsbury). Like Fred, it's a modest picture, but a damn good one. What you would have then called 'a programmer' - which simply meant a movie churned out to fill a bill. Yet today, with cineastes on the scent of any disregarded movie by a master such as Zinnemann, Act Of Violence is slowly getting its due.
It's the story of an obsession. An ex-GI who's survived a German PoW camp hunts down the only other survivor, a man who had sacrificed his comrades' lives in order to save his own skin. Robert Ryan plays the pursuer; Van Heflin the hunted. Janet Leigh plays Heflin's wife; Mary Astor, a streetwalker. If this sounds pretty simplistic - it certainly sounds economical, for MGM weren't lavish with the cents on 'programmers' - it wouldn't be a Zinnemann film if it didn't wrestle absorbingly with conscience and with human nature.
Fred himself quoted Robert Louis Stevenson's dictum to me, about 'character being destiny', or, as one of the characters puts it, 'You've done it once, you'd do it again.' Zinnemann's best films - High Noon, A Man For All Seasons, Julia - have this moral wrestling match at their centre and Act Of Violence demonstrates how it could be graphically represented through the dynamics of a manhunt movie.
Technically, the film is rewarding, too. Most of it was photographed at night, in inky black and highlighted white, by Robert Surtees, among 'the eerie slums of downtown Los Angeles' and shows Fred continuing his semi-documentary taste for real locations which had been given him by his previous film, The Search, shot in the blitzed ruins of Nuremberg. Bronislau Kaper's score is a bit overblown, but the full MGM orchestra was conducted by a boy whom Fred characterised as 'a promising young musician' - Andre Previn. Small riches in a little room, maybe - but genuine.
Act Of Violence
Cert: N/A
