The Clay Pigeon

Bill Williams isn’t a name or face that comes to mind in film noir discussions, but his vaguely boyish, innocent persona carried a few noirs in which he played a good-hearted young man embroiled in some kind of criminal trap (Deadline at Dawn, 1946; Wiretapper, 1955). This includes Richard Fleischer’s The Clay Pigeon in which Williams plays Jim Fletcher, a World War II prisoner of war who wakes up in a military hospital to discover he’s being charged with a treasonous murder he can’t remember committing. (This is hardly novel territory for noir: see, for example, Somewhere in the Night, 1946; The Crooked Way, 1949; and, again, Williams’ earlier Deadline at Dawn). Fletcher escapes from the hospital before the police nab him and searches for his best friend, Ted Niles (Richard Quine), another POW whom he hopes can clear his name. Barbara Hale plays Martha Gregory, another soldier’s wife whom Fletcher is compelled to kidnap.