Violence

Eddie Muller presents quite a few low-budget movies from the minor studios as part of Noir Alley, movies that often times I've never heard of. A good example of this is Violence.

The movie starts off with some of that titular violence. Fred Stalk (Sheldon Leonard) is interrogating a guy named Donahue. Donahue is a member of a group called the United Defenders, a veterans' organization run by True Dawson (Emory Parnell). Donahue has learned that Dawson is a phony, and that he's organizing the veterans to be protesters on demand for whatever cause Dawson and his financial backers want stopped, by violence if necessary. Donahue is enough of a threat that Stalk and his companion Joker (Peter Whitney) beat poor Donahue to death.

Meanwhile, back at a meeting of the United Defenders Stalk tells Borden how worried he is about Donahue. Well, not Donahue per se, since he's dead. But Donahue stands for the idea that pretty much anybody could find out the same things that Donahue did. What they don't know is that Ann Mason (Nancy Coleman), a secretary at United Defenders headquarters, is that anybody. Well, not so much that she knows the things, but that she's actually working undercover for a magazine based out of Chicago and is about to take a train there to deliver the goods on the United Defenders personally.

Of course, they do know about her leave of absence; they just don't know why she's going there. Stalk has the hots for Ann, so he shows up at he apartment while she's packing to go to Chicago, figuring that she's going there to see her boyfriend. Or, at least, that's what he implies; whether he suspects Ann might be the source of the leak to members like Donahue is unclear.

So Stalk, being no dummy, has somebody from the Chicago branch of the United Defenders, Steve Fuller (Michael O'Shea) follow Ann once she gets to the train station. She's not a dummy either, so she urges her cabbie to try to shake the guy following her. Unfortunately, this results in her taxi crashing, and her being injured in the resulting crash. The next morning, Steve goes to the various hospitals looking for Ann posing as her fiancé, giving the doctors her description. He finds her, but the doctor informs him that Ann has amnesia, and doesn't seem to remember anything about who she is or why she's in Chicago.

Needless to say, this all seems very dangerous for poor Ann, as she's liable to spill the beans when she figures out who she really is. Steve takes her back to Los Angeles and the United Defenders. Also posing danger for her is the fact that Donahue's wife shows up. She hasn't heard from him in a long time, for the obvious to us reason that he's dead, not that she'd know it. Mrs. Donahue's letters to her husband were collected by Stalk, but for some reason not destroyed, and finding those letters will put people in danger, leading to the climax of the movie.

Violence is interesting, especially 75-plus years on. With the passage of time, the United Defenders could be interpreted to fit almost any political persuasion you want: there were a ton of Communist front organizations in the late 1940s, but "veterans'" organizations of the early post-war era could just as easily be seen as being on the America First right; see Ray Teal's character in The Best Years of Our Lives getting beaten up by Dana Andrews as an example of that. In 2024, some people would say rent-a-mobs are working in conjunction with anti-Israel (or really anti-Jewish) groups, while others would talk about the "threat to democracy", which in the mass media is only ever implied to be coming from one side of the political spectrum.

Violence works well enough as a B movie even if its low budget doesn't ever allow it to become anything better than a B. So it's an interesting period piece, and definitely worth one watch, but not the sort of movie that anybody will consider a great one.