Continental Strangers by Gemunden Gerd;

Author:Gemunden, Gerd; [Gemünden, Gerd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.6A–C Angel Flight as the emblematic Bunker Hill location in Act of Violence, Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949), and Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955).

While the film insists that Frank Enley’s existential crisis, which leads to the destruction of his home and his family, is the result of his wartime betrayal, it also becomes clear that postwar society has failed veterans like him and Parkson. As I noted earlier, the film entails repeated ironic comments on the disrespectful treatment of the disabled veteran (such as Parkson’s exclusion from the Memorial Day parade), as well as an overall indictment of society’s unequal distribution of rewards for service rendered during the war. Consider the hired killer Johnny, who boasts that he escaped the war unharmed thanks to a cushy desk job in the army, a clear indication that cowardice and opportunism remain undetected. A particularly strong indictment of postwar America is voiced by Parkson himself, who, in lines cut from the final film, explains to his girlfriend Ann: “You don’t care [what Enley did]—that’s the trouble. That’s the trouble with the whole world. People don’t care, people forget. And as long as guys like Adams [as Enley was called in earlier drafts] can get away with it and come home and be heroes and big-shots, as long as men can lie and betray and kill and not pay for it—it’ll all happen again. All over again. From the little things to the big things. From a sell-out to war.”43

Parkson is largely left to his own devices to cope with his trauma, as his prolonged stays in recovery wards seem to have had no effect on him. With its ideology of progress and moving forward, postwar America also provides an easy cover for Enley’s hypocrisy. What is more, the systems of justice and of law enforcement seem ineffective, thereby giving rise both to Parkson’s vigilantism and Enley’s cover-up of wartime events. The police are not an institution that can deal effectively with Parkson (all they do is send him away when he stalks Enley’s home at night, only to have him return the next morning), nor does Enley trust them with dealing with the stalker (though mostly for fear of what his son will think of him when he grows up). In an earlier version of the script Edith even goes to the police to seek protection for her husband but is not taken seriously and is turned away. This vacuum of jurisdiction and law enforcement is filled by the “lawyer” Enley meets in a downtown bar, an impostor who holds forth about how money can buy the justice withheld by society. While Enley’s sacrifice at the end of the film may indeed provide an act of expiation that absolves his personal guilt, as the director has stated, it is the larger social and political forces, which first thrust men into war and then fail to facilitate their readjustment to peacetime society, that ultimately stand accused.

While Zinnemann and other European émigrés were

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