Edward Dmytryk (1947)

The subject of anti-Semitism featured strongly in two critically and commercially successful Hollywood films of 1947, Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement and Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire.  They were nominated for, respectively, eight and five Academy Awards and Gentleman’s Agreement won three (Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actress (Celeste Holm)).  Although Crossfire came away empty-handed, it earned a place in Oscar history (according to Wikipedia) as the first B-movie ever to receive a Best Picture nomination.  While anti-Semitism is crucial to the plot of both films, its appearance in Crossfire is more curious.  Gentleman’s Agreement is straightforwardly a moral drama, the story of a gentile journalist (Gregory Peck) who poses as a Jew in order to experience and expose anti-Jewish prejudice.  Crossfire, as well as being a B-picture, is a genre piece – a noir detective story.

The murder investigated in Crossfire by the police captain Finlay (Robert Young) is of a young Jewish man, Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene).  The suspects are a group of recently demobilised soldiers (an interesting choice in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when GI Joes who’d recently seen action were presumably held in high public esteem).  Samuels’s killer turns out to be the Jew-hating army sergeant Montgomery (Robert Ryan) but the motive for murder could have been a different kind of hate.  Indeed, in The Brick Foxhole, the 1945 novel by Richard Brooks on which Dmytryk’s film is based, the hate crime is different:  Brooks’s victim is not a Jew but a homosexual.  Crossfire was made by RKO in the same year that Dore Schary became the company’s head of production but a drama that explicitly deplored homophobia would, in the late 1940s, have been too hot even for the famously liberal Schary to handle, hence the major change in John Paxton’s screenplay.  The anti-Semitism in Crossfire is, nevertheless, presented as symptomatic of a wider malaise.  Captain Finlay feelingly recounts the murder of his grandfather, an Irish immigrant to America, in the mid-nineteenth century, and goes on to describe hate as ‘like a loaded gun’.  These words became the strapline on Crossfire‘s theatrical release poster.

Finlay’s verbose, homiletic outburst is as incongruous as it’s unexpected.  It stands out as a sore thumb because, before and after it occurs, Robert Young underplays the police investigator so well – Finlay is world-weary and shrewd and doesn’t waste words. The slow-burn malignity of Robert Ryan’s Montgomery is impressive too.  Ryan does his considerable best to be unpredictable although he faces an uphill struggle, since Montgomery is revealed as the culprit quite early on.  Another sergeant, Keeley (Robert Mitchum), in order to clear the name of his friend Mitchell (George Cooper), a prime suspect, carries out his own investigations in parallel with Finlay’s.  As the drily fatalistic Keeley, Robert Mitchum is Robert Mitchum.  (That, for many, is a term of high praise.)  In smaller roles, Gloria Grahame is sparky as Ginny, a potential key witness.  Grahame switches between insolence and insecurity at dizzying speed.  Paul Kelly is excellent in a cameo as Ginny’s nominal husband.  Elsewhere, there’s a fair amount of standard-issue noir acting – nervous short breaths and short-lived emoting to go with them.  Jacqueline White (Mitchell’s wife) and Steve Brodie (Montgomery’s ill-fated accomplice) are the standout exponents of this.

Once Crossfire has delivered its anti-intolerance sermon, it more or less reverts to taut thriller mode.  The timeframe for bringing Samuels’s killer to ‘justice’ is short and the film (86 minutes) is brisk too.  Edward Dmytryk brings off some fine moments, especially the opening murder-in-the-dark sequence and a scene in which we watch Robert Ryan’s face in a shaving mirror, as Montgomery takes the bait, via another soldier (William Phipps), that Finlay has cleverly prepared.  Although the climactic showdown between Finlay and Montgomery is tense and exciting, its immediate aftermath manages to be both bathetic and shocking, and it’s hard to see that either effect is fully intended.  Montgomery tries to escape, the police shoot and kill him.  When his colleague asks if Montgomery is dead, Finlay replies tonelessly, ‘He was dead for a long time.  He just didn’t know it’ – a summing-up that bizarrely combines the detective’s laconic disillusion and his hatred of hatred   The laughter in NFT2, admiring throughout much of Crossfire (especially in response to Robert Mitchum’s line readings), understandably turned incredulous at this point.

15 November 2017