Impressing Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with his spring-coiled interpretation of Stanley Kowalski as a replacement for Marlon Brando in the original Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire, Ralph Meeker won a studio contract and enjoyed a tight tenure as a Hollywood leading man. After playing a brooding boxer in Raoul Walsh's Glory Alley (1952), Meeker was cast as a shattered World War II veteran attempting to reenter peacetime society in Shadow in the Sky, directed by Fred M. Wilcox. Adapted from a 1950 New Yorker short story, the production bore the working titles Rain, Rain, Go Away and Come Again, Some Other Day - both reflecting the psychotic blackouts suffered during rainfall by Meeker's character, a veteran of the stormy Pacific Theater. James Whitmore, Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan), and Jean Hagen are winning in supporting roles but the film belongs to Meeker, allowing him to glide deftly from a boyish sweetness to white knuckle psychopathy. Though he enjoyed another Broadway triumph as the star of Picnic in 1953 and stamped the terra as private eye Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Meeker soon found himself stereotyped as bullies and bad guys. Late life performances in such low budget fare as The Food of the Gods (1976) and The Alpha Incident (1978) showed none of the promise with which Meeker was bursting in only his fourth feature film.

By Richard Harland Smith