This is an old Gregory Peck movie that sounds like and looks at the beginning like some boring white collar drama. However, there is much more to this movie on several levels. Gregory Peck is a business man with a wife and three kids, who needs more money to keep his wife happy. She's not happy with their house, and she's the kind that makes plans, proposes them to her husband, then expects him to make it happen. She's not happy with Peck, thinks he's too conservative. Actually, she accuses him of being afraid. She also says there's something different about him since the war. At this point in the movie, her words seem like empty argument-winners, perhaps even manipulation, but her words point to something true about Peck, and that is what the movie is about - cover-up, truth, the past, and escaping that past.
On the train to work the next day, a leather coat of a passenger in front of Peck makes him remember an event from the war. He killed a teenage German soldier to get his coat and to keep from freezing to death. Later, he remembers how he accidentally killed his best friend with a grenade. Now we know why his wife might see a lack of courage and initiative in him; those qualities resulted in those kind of memories. "A guilty conscience doth make cowards of us all." But that's not all.
To make his wife happy, Peck goes to a job interview where he's given an hour to write the most significant thing about himself. The opportunity to think causes him to think back to the war again and of the girl he met in Italy. She has nothing and wants a child, and he gives her the opportunity to have one, if she conceives. He has to leave the next day and doesn't see or hear from her for the next ten years. Oh, and he ends up getting the job, and thus begins the subplot, that of the executive of the corporation which has newly hired him. His life, mostly past at this point, is something of a reflection of Peck's.
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