Edward Dmytryk’s cheap, fast thriller says out loud what American films in 1947 would not, and Robert Ryan makes the saying frightening. It stops to lecture more than it should, but at 86 minutes it does not have time to waste much of yours.
Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire opens with a murder we do not quite see. Two shadows fight across the wall of a rented room, a lamp goes over, and a man is left dead on the carpet. What follows is a police investigation, but the film cares little about the mystery. It cares why the man was killed, and the answer is that he was Jewish. In 1947 that was a subject American studios did not touch, and Dmytryk, producer Adrian Scott and screenwriter John Paxton made a film about it in 86 minutes on sets that cost almost nothing. It is blunt, it moves, and it is still good.
Richard Brooks’s novel, The Brick Foxhole, was about the murder of a homosexual man; the film changed the victim to a Jew, because one prejudice could be named on screen and the other could not. What it keeps is the mood: a city full of soldiers with nothing to do, drinking through the evenings. Sam Levene plays Samuels, the dead man, in a single flashback, and he gets one speech, about men who have fought for years and do not know what to do with a quiet night. It is the best-written thing in it. It moved us more than we expected, because Levene delivers it kindly, to a stranger, and we already know what is going to happen to him.
Robert Ryan plays Montgomery, the loudest of the soldiers, who says what he thinks and smiles while he does it. Ryan does not play a villain. He plays a man who believes he is being reasonable and cannot understand why people go quiet when he talks. We wanted him off the screen, and then realised that was the point: this is what it is like to share a bar with him. Robert Young’s Captain Finlay is the film’s conscience, and he is fine until the script gives him a lecture about hatred that runs long enough for us to start looking at the furniture. Robert Mitchum, as Sergeant Keeley, has the least to do of the three, and does it with the sleepy watchfulness that would keep him in work for decades.
J. Roy Hunt shoots almost everything in the dark. Faces are lit from one side by a single lamp and everything else is allowed to vanish, which hides how small the sets were. When Finlay switches on a light, it is a plot point. Roy Webb’s score stays out of the way, rightly. Harry Gerstad’s editing handles the flashbacks so that we always know whose account we are watching, and the same evening is told from more than one angle without confusion.
The strangest and best scene has almost nothing to do with the case. Gloria Grahame plays Ginny, the dance-hall girl, tired, in a dressing gown, with no interest in helping anyone. Then Paul Kelly walks in as a man who says he is her husband, then says he is not, then says he might be, and the film lets him talk for three minutes and never explains him. It is the one place where Paxton’s script stops making its argument and simply watches two damaged people. We would have taken another reel of it.
The mystery is not much of one. The film gives away who did it earlier than a whodunit would, and Dmytryk plainly does not care; neither did we. What we did mind was the talking. The point about hatred is made in speeches more than once, and the film gets a little worse each time. The women are thin: Jacqueline White’s Mary Mitchell gets one scene and wants only to be told her husband is a good man. Set beside Gentleman’s Agreement, the glossier film on the same subject, this one is uglier, quicker and more honest about the men saying these things, who wear the same uniform as everyone else.
The reviews so far are warm and we are with them. Watch it after dark, in one sitting, with the lamp off. Nobody in it ever turns on more than one light, and by the end you will understand why.
