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Apr 12, 2021 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

In the wake of World War II and the revelations regarding the full extent of the Holocaust, Hollywood rushed to tackle the issue of anti-Semitism. The best known of these attempts is the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement. Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Gregory Peck, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won three, including the trophy for Best Picture. Although it remains a consequential and watchable film, Gentleman’s Agreement is well within the lineage of self-congratulatory Oscar bait that persists to this day. Societal ills are almost always more interesting when viewed through the lens of genre, something that director Edward Dmytryk and RKO knew when they released Crossfire the same year.

The commentary of Crossfire runs deeper than anything you’ll see in the finished film. Based on a 1945 novel by Richard Brooks entitled The Brick Foxhole, the original story deals with homophobia rather than anti-Semitism. In order to circumnavigate the censors, screenwriter John Paxton changed the motivating incident of the plot; instead of a man being murdered for being a homosexual, he’s murdered for being Jewish. The film’s pivot toward acknowledging a then recent global trauma in the form of murderous anti-Semitism fits well with the cycle of noir that was being popularized in the wake of the war. Crossfire draws a further link between itself and World War II, making both the suspects of the murder soldiers on leave in Washington DC. Adrift and uncertain after years of war, the plight of the returned soldier was a common theme in late 40s noir, but rarely was it as central to the plot as it is here.

Crossfire is somewhat unconventionally structured for a murder mystery; there are two investigators at odds with each other, and two suspects. The truth of who killed Joseph Samuels is all but obvious from the get-go but the film is less interested in being a whodunit than it is in motivation and guilt. George Cooper’s Corporal Mitchell spends much of the film as the prime suspect, unable to remember the drunken events of the night Samuels was killed, and conflating his PTSD and anxiety regarding his newly resumed marriage with potential guilt regarding the murder. Robert Mitchum’s Sergeant Keeley is a typical noir protagonist, conducting a personal investigation of the murder in order to clear Cooper, who he believes is innocent. Robert Young is Captain Finlay, a DC detective just trying to figure out what happened.

1947 was the year Mitchum would begin to be associated with the genre for which he is best remembered. Several months after the release of Crossfire, he would appear in Out of the Past, one of the purest examples of the noir form. Mitchum’s laconic delivery and blank, impassive visage made him an ideal actor for the era, playing world-weary PIs and violent gangsters. But the performance that garnered the most attention in Crossfire was that of Robert Ryan as Montgomery, the other main suspect and the clear villain of the piece. Ryan was nominated for an Oscar for his performance (one of five nominations received by the film) and would go on to play variations on the character of Montgomery for over 20 years in noirs, westerns and crime films. A conniving and vicious sociopath, Montgomery is the dark side of the American victory in World War II, a man who learned to kill too well and now finds himself returned to civilian society with his existing bigotries inflamed to the point of action.

Also of note is Gloria Grahame as Ginny, the prostit- - I mean, uh waitress that may be the only person capable of clearing Mitchell’s name. Grahame was also nominated for an Oscar for this film - she would eventually win one for 1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful - and her performance as Ginny is symbolic of the persona she would forge over the next decade as one of the all-time great noir femme fatales. She only appears in three scenes but in them manages to convey a lifetime of regrets, anger and sadness with her trademark lisp and thousand yard stare. Her performance in Crossfire is its own little gem within a gem.