The Clay Pigeon

The Clay Pigeon is a 1949 American film noir directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Carl Foreman, based on a true story. The drama features Bill Williams and Barbara Hale, a real-life husband and wife.

Plot
Jim Fletcher (Williams), a former inmate in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, awakes from a coma at a Naval hospital, and is then informed that he has been accused of murder. As Fletcher is uncertain of his guilt, he escapes from the hospital to search for his best friend, another ex-POW.

Cast

 * Bill Williams as Jim Fletcher
 * Barbara Hale as Martha Gregory
 * Richard Quine as Ted Niles
 * Richard Loo as Ken Tokoyama aka The Weasel
 * Frank Fenton as Lt. Cmdr. Prentice
 * Frank Wilcox as Navy Hospital Doctor
 * Marya Marco as Helen Minoto
 * Robert Bray as Gunsel Blake
 * Martha Hyer as Miss Harwick, Wheeler's Receptionist
 * Harold Landon as Blind Veteran
 * James Craven as John Wheeler

Depiction of Japanese Americans
Although the movie shows Jim's Japanese captors as extremely sadistic and inhumane, it also casts the much-maligned Japanese Americans in a positive light. As Mrs. Mioto, (a Japanese American) helps Jim escape his pursuers, he sees a photograph of her deceased husband, Sergeant John Mioto, member of the 442d Regimental Combat Team of the U.S. Army. It is accompanied by the certificate for his Distinguished Service Cross, awarded for "Extraordinary Heroism".

Film noir specialist Eddie Muller speculates this is the first time the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed mostly of Japanese Americans, was acknowledged in a movie, and states that this was not simply the studio's formulaic trope of balancing something negative with a positive, but rather screenwriter Carl Foreman's personal progressive outlook.

Critical response
Time Out film reviews wrote of the film, "Directed by Fleischer with tight, spare energy, although the implausible script and bland leading performances (with Hale as the dead friend's wife, initially hostile but soon losing her heart) make it much inferior to The Narrow Margin.''