One of the first films completed for MGM's new production head Dore Schary, Zinnemann's taut thriller was “a little ‘B' that turned out to be a big ‘A' in quality, audience response and press praise” (The MGM Story). Van Heflin plays a WWII veteran whose life as an upright citizen is disrupted when a vengeful ex-comrade (a limping Robert Ryan) turns up to reveal his guilty past as a POW-camp informer. Janet Leigh portrays Heflin's disillusioned wife, and Mary Astor, an aging small-town prostitute. “Zinnemann's unpretentious movie, arguably the best of the returning war-veteran strand of film noir, makes expressive use of sets and locations to suggest a continuum of pessimism and entrapment (bars, wire, tunnels predominate) to undermine society's determination to build new lives. Mary Astor and Janet Leigh are outstanding as the women torn between rational humanity and devotion to their neurotic men” (National Film Theater, London).