In 1947’s swift noirish crime drama Crossfire a bunch of Army guys in the process of being demobbed meet a guy in a bar. By the end of the evening the guy is dead. But who did it and why?
Director Edward Dmytryk opens with the death happening in shadowplay against a wall, as the unfortunate Samuels (Sam Levene) is worked over in a room by two assailants we never see. Samuels goes down, the men flee, the cops arrive.
The questioning starts, and it’s a strange affair, with no names being asked for by the cop, and the guy he’s questioning not surrendering any either, it’s just “this man”, “this fella”, “two other guys” and so on.
However odd that might be, soon the cops reckon they have a suspect – Mitchell (George Cooper), who has gone AWOL and cannot be found. But what was his motive, assuming he did it?
Paranoid doubt is the prevailing mood and confusion is the theme of Crossfire, which appropriately (but surely accidentally) has three Roberts in its key roles. Robert Mitchum plays the upright army guy fairly certain Mitchell isn’t the perp, on account of him just not being that sort of guy. Robert Young plays the cop on the case, who eventually comes to a fairly similar conclusion. And Robert Ryan plays one of the last men to see Mitchell, a boorish, recently demobbed soldier with a lot of time on his hands and a liking for liquor.
In the original book by Richard Brooks, homophobia lay behind the murder, and though John Paxton’s rewrite has swapped that out for anti-semitism, there is still a waft of that original idea on screen – the way Mitchell is represented as being a sensitive, artistic and unmanly man, the way he strikes up an easy relationship with Samuels in a bar, the way the two men quickly leave together.
Eventually Dmytryk and co have to drop this, since they have other fish to fry, the racialised rage of one of the guys for someone he’s never met before, but they work the sexual angle for as long as they can, long after we have worked out who is the murderer and what the real motivation is.
Young plays the cop as the avuncular pipe-smoking sage who might be wisdom and justice itself. Mitchum didn’t like his role. Anyone could have played it, he said. He’s right. It’s a nothing character and there’s not much Mitchum can do with it, but nor does he try very much. The acting props go to Ryan, who is sensationally good, making “Monty” Montgomery a forceful character to remember. Young, Mitchum and Ryan represent superego, ego and id, if you’re being Freudian about it.

But the key character in this movie is none of these men and is only on screen for a few minutes. He’s billed just as The Man, and is played by Paul Kelly as an enigmatic nobody, who never says what he is, doesn’t quite know what he’s doing and explains things one way only to explain them in an entirely different way seconds later. The fugitive Mitchell meets him while on the run, in the apartment of a goodtime girl called Ginny (Gloria Grahame) he met in a bar. The Man is Ginny’s husband, he says, only to flatly contradict himself moments later.
He’s representative of the movie’s general tone, which is all a bit opaque, confused, Kafkaesque. There is many a conversation at cross purposes – which is what the title is slightly spamhandedly hinting at. The fact that the men are all in the process of being demobbed seems appropriate too – one minute they’re being praised for killing people, the next it’s a crime.
It’s moodily lit, by J Roy Hunt, who did I Walked with a Zombie, with geometric shadows and sharp, clear looks that helped the film get five Oscar nominations (Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Actress and Screenplay). It won none. Instead another film on the same theme, Gentleman’s Agreement, stole its lunch.
For all its brief running time of 86 minutes, there is something slightly laboured about Crossfire, especially towards the end when Young’s Inspector Finlay starts offering insistent homilies on the evils of racism. But it’s a fascinating film, not least on account of it ostensibly being about one thing, while, in a whisper, it’s talking about something else.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024