The Fallen Sparrow

Kit McKittrick was taken prisoner in the Spanish Civil War and tortured for months. He is freed through a friend on the police and comes back to New York. He hears that the friend who got him out has killed himself, and does not believe it. When he starts looking into it, people come after him. His captors are after something, and Kit knows where it is. Richard Wallace directed the film from Dorothy B. Hughes's novel, and it is one of the few openly anti-fascist Hollywood crime films made during the war. John Garfield takes the lead. The most striking thing in it is how it shows the hero's trauma: sounds, and footsteps in particular, take him back. Maureen O'Hara is also in the cast.