Trails followed by hunters have a nasty habit of going cold very fast, but how long does it take a dish to get correspondingly cold? After all, there is that popular tip about the ideal temperature for serving up revenge. One would have thought five or six years ought to do the trick, and that’s about the time Ray Milland’s character takes to get round to seeking out the man responsible for the death of his brother towards the end of WWII in Circle of Danger (1951). Yet revenge is such a corrosive business, rarely bringing any kind of satisfaction to those who most desire it, and then there’s always that thorny question of whether or not it’s actually justified.

It’s perhaps a little unexpected to see a movie mainly shot in and featuring a cast and crew drawn largely from the UK opening on a salvage vessel operating off the Florida coast. Well that’s where we first come across Clay Douglas (Ray Milland) as he and his partner have just struck gold, or maybe I should say tungsten. This is the opportunity Douglas has been waiting for, five years of hard work finally paying off and allowing him to trade in his share in the business for thirty thousand dollars. He’s not looking to retire or anything, instead he’s been working to earn enough money to fund a trip to the UK in search of the truth about the demise of his younger brother. Despite his seemingly easy manner, Douglas is something of a driven man, fully focused on finding out how the kid brother he had almost single-handedly brought up came to die on a commando raid. People die all the time during major conflicts, even those plying trades nowhere near as perilous as that of a commando. So why would a man travel half way round the world to dig into this particular event? The fact is that the fog of war seems to lie especially thick around it all, and there was a rumor that the younger Douglas was dispatched by one of his own comrades in arms. The hunt for the truth has Clay Douglas cannoning round all the points of the compass, from London to the valleys of Wales and on to the Highlands of Scotland. Both the war and the subsequent passage of time has whittled the list of men who might be able to furnish him with the information he craves down to a mere handful. And it remains to be seen whether the tale that emerges is the one he had hoped to hear at the outset.

Straightforward revenge stories are never all that interesting. Sure there’s a certain visceral thrill to be tapped into if the elements are lined up in the right way, but such yarns tend to take on an exploitative feel which I generally find unappealing. The better examples, and I think Circle of Danger qualifies as such, raise questions that ought to make both the protagonist on the screen and the audience facing it a trifle uncomfortable. It all boils down to whether or not life’s thorny tangles can be adequately addressed in cut and dried, binary terms. I don’t think it’s giving too much away here to say that Philip MacDonald’s script turns the central quest back upon itself by the end, forcing not only the avenger to question himself, but also requiring the viewer to reassess a number of preconceptions we’ve been hitherto encouraged to blindly accept. This renders that three cornered confrontation on the Scottish moor all the more fascinating, and consequently leads to a resolution which is enriched by its acknowledgment of the sometimes ambiguous nature of justice. A delicate subject of this kind needs to be handled sensitively, not with a heavy lump hammer approach, so producers Joan Harrison and David E Rose deserve credit for securing the services of a director  with the lightness of touch and subtlety of Jacques Tourneur.

There has to be something steely and almost obsessive about a man who is prepared to hand over a significant chunk of his life in the pursuit of retribution. I wouldn’t want to claim it is a state of mind exclusive to the years following the Second World War but, in cinematic terms at least, it is a motif that was explored recurrently and came to characterize more than a few screen protagonists – James Stewart was a prime example of this phenomenon but he was certainly not the only one. This needs a quality of intensity to carry it off, something Ray Milland touches on throughout Circle of Danger, particularly in the climactic scenes in the Highlands, but probably not as consistently as he might have. That’s not to say his character is ever less than focused on the ultimate prize, but he does drift towards casualness bordering on nonchalance on occasion, not least when he’s flirting with Patricia Roc. She brings a freshness and vitality to the movie, a teasing allure that still allows her to switch to a more serious mode when she senses betrayal of one form or another. The other person vying for her attention is Hugh Sinclair’s reticent Scot, the one-time leader of the commando group and a man who seems none too keen on furnishing any more details on past than he can help. His is a key role and Sinclair does well in getting across both the caution of the man as well as what I can only term contained suffering. Then there is Marius Goring giving an energetic yet wholly credible performance as the man whose homosexuality is never openly stated (it is a 1951 movie after all) but which is very clearly alluded to. I think one of the most interesting aspects of the script in general is way it encourages the audience to make various initial assumptions about all three of the male characters before challenging these preconceptions and upending them.

Circle of Danger had been released on DVD by the now defunct Network in what was an entirely acceptable edition. However, it has recently reappeared on Blu-ray via Studio Canal – I haven’t seen that transfer yet but I would expect it to enhance the visuals, and there are some fine looking shots in the film courtesy of cinematographer Oswald Morris. This is a good movie, deftly directed by Jacques Tourneur and cleverly written by Philip MacDonald, drawing the viewer in, setting up certain expectations and then neatly subverting them in a way that continually poses questions which tend to defy pat or convenient answers. It’s a film I’m happy to recommend.