Trailer
Plot summary
Frank Enley is a former prisoner of war who settled in a small California town, where he is held in respect and lives with his wife Edith and their child. Joe Parkson, once his closest friend, survived the same camp with a crippled leg and blames Frank for the men who did not come home. A newspaper story about Frank's civic work leads Joe to the town, and Joe arrives determined to make him pay. Joe's girlfriend Ann Sturgess cannot talk him out of it. Edith knows nothing of her husband's past. Frank travels to Los Angeles for a business convention, Joe follows him there, and Edith follows her husband.
Cast
- John Albrightas Bellboy(uncredited)
Show all 20 cast
- Margaret Bertas Bystander(uncredited)
- Douglas Carteras Heavy Jowled Man (uncredited)
- Bill Cartledgeas Newsboy(uncredited)
- Fred Datig Jr.as Bystander(uncredited)
- Douglas Carteras Heavy Jowled Man(uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Act of Violence (1948)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Act of Violence was first planned as a low-budget independent film with Howard Duff attached to star; Mark Hellinger then acquired the script intending to pair Gregory Peck with Humphrey Bogart, but after Hellinger died in 1947 it was sold to MGM.
- Film historians Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner note that screenwriter Robert Richards was a future blacklistee who told HUAC questioners he devoted his final pre-blacklist years to writing screenplays about stool pigeons.
- Film historian Peter Hay wrote that the film's critical praise vindicated Dore Schary's 1948 MGM policy of realism and led to other "descriptively titled" MGM thrillers, among them Scene of the Crime, Tension, Shadow on the Wall and The Asphalt Jungle.
- Act of Violence was one of the first films completed under the personal stamp of MGM's new head of production Dore Schary, hired to be "the new Thalberg" by the studio's New York board as television competition and the loss of its theater chain in the 1948 antitrust case sent profits plummeting.
