Clay Pigeon
Directed by Richard FleischerNavy veteran Jim Fletcher wakes in a military hospital with no memory of the past two years. The doctors inform him that he has been unconscious since a Japanese POW camp, but the Navy has other news: he is to be court-martialed for treason, accused of betraying fellow prisoners to the enemy, a betrayal that cost lives. Fletcher remembers nothing that could condemn or exonerate him, and the institutional machinery of military justice moves indifferently around his bewilderment.
Before the court-martial can proceed, Fletcher escapes the hospital and seeks out Martha Gregory, the widow of the man he allegedly betrayed. Rather than the hostility he expects, Martha becomes an uneasy ally, and the two trace a thread of evidence back toward Ken Tokoyama, a Japanese-American whose wartime loyalties remain ambiguous, and toward a black-market racket that offers a more earthly motive for the accusations against Fletcher than ideology ever could.
Clay Pigeon operates as a tight procedural dressed in the anxieties of the postwar moment – the returning veteran whose reliability is in question, the institutions that judge before they understand, and the civilian world that has reorganized itself in his absence. Richard Fleischer keeps the film lean and purposeful, using its sixty-three minutes to argue that guilt is a commodity as easily manufactured as innocence is difficult to prove.
