In this taut thriller, Van Heflin plays a World War II veteran whose life as an upstanding citizen is disrupted when a vengeful ex-comrade (Robert Ryan) turns up to reveal his guilty past as a POW-camp informer. "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 (as an aging small-town prostitute) and Janet Leigh (as Heflin's disillusioned wife) are outstanding as the women torn between rational humanity and devotion to their neurotic men." (NFT, London)