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Really Surprised!

Memorable, crazy movie

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

A man is murdered, apparently by one of a group of soldiers just out of the army. But which one? And why? "Crossfire" received five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Supporting Actor and Gloria Grahame for Best Supporting Actress. It was the first B movie to receive a best picture nomination. This is remarkable on two counts: one, that a B movie got nominated, but also that it was deemed worthy. While not a bad film, it certainly has many qualities we think of with "B" pictures.The really unfortunate thing is the use of anti-Semitism rather than homosexuality as in the original novel. The idea of someone hating Jews (at least to the point of murder) seems dated, whereas a homosexuality film would have been revolutionary and still impressive today (especially if the Irish Catholic speech stayed in).

This fine film noir added social conscience to the usual panoply of a whodunit murder, flashbacks and atmospheric direction, to become one of the first, if not the first mainstream Hollywood movie to call out against anti-semitism in society, although I was interested to learn that in the source-novel, the "motivation" for the murder was actually homophobia.When it stays on-stereo, the film is great. Robert Ryan, a noted liberal in Hollywood, unflinchingly plays the part of the bullying ex-army commander Montgomery who in a cowardly act cold-bloodedly beats to death a Jewish man he and his small coterie of demobbed soldiers meet in a bar. He unsurprisingly then tries to cover up his vile deed by intimidating his companions as well as trying to mislead the local detective, the pipe- smoking Robert Young. Thankfully evil doesn't prosper in the end. but not before Ryan electrifies the screen with a display of boorish malevolence only accentuated by his formidable presence. I found the back-up story of the sensitive young soldier's disappearance and later hook-up with Gloria Grahame, in a memorable cameo as a dime-a-dance waitress in a local dive, to be unnecessary padding. Neither was I taken with slow-walking, slow-talking Young as the law's man-hunter and it's ridiculous to waste a star of the magnitude of Robert Mitchum in a relatively anonymous supporting role as another soldier. I was left wondering how well Mitchum might have played Ryan's part, certainly this film ain't big enough for the both of them.The film is brave enough to allow the word Jew to be used to avoid all doubt and also to show the villain of the piece as a returning army officer with director Tiomkin crafts many an effective scene, the best perhaps being when he puts the camera below Ryan's grim face as he towers over the young acolyte he's coercing into backing his story.For all its minor faults, this film gets it right on the big issue at stake here and deserved all the kudos it got at the time as ground-breaking film, although ironically its director and screenwriter themselves were subject to discrimination in the notorious anti-Communist Hollywood witch-hunt which followed soon after this particular film's release.

Because this movie has dark shadows and the action takes place at night many reviewers have classified this film as 'noir' but I'm not so sure.Here we have no protagonist caught up in an inexorable series of circumstances leading him towards his doom. Here we have no real femme fatale influencing the outcome. Instead we have a murder story, with a Columbo-type narrative where the detective has to provoke or trick the murderer into giving himself/herself away.Robert Ryan is the main man here, giving a very good performance as a two-faced bigot. Gloria Grahame is watchable as the bar girl. Other supporting characters have more to do than Robert Mitchum here but his role has its weight in the drama as a whole.Most memorable for me is the quirky character who appears at Grahame's flat and talks to the young soldier. The scriptwriters must have had fun working on his lines! He says stuff that you don't get much in mainstream films from this period but would be perfectly at home in those indie films of the seventies. In fact I could imagine Harry Dean Stanton playing that role.All in all an enjoyable crime story which I watched when I was very tired, which is my excuse why I didn't suss out where the detective's trick (with a very slow build-up) was leading until he finally played his trump card. It was a good example of 'softly softly catchee monkey'.

As most people know, CROSSFIRE was made the same year by Hollywood as Darryl Zanuck's Oscar-winning GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT. Both films depict the ugliness of anti-semitism (though CROSSFIRE's original story was about the killing of a gay man in the military). While the subject matter is similar, the tone (and overall effectiveness) of each story differs significantly. For one thing, I think GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT seems better to some because of its polished production values-- compared to CROSSFIRE which has much grittier staging.However, the main problem I have with GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT is that it lacks action. A film can still have a lot of thought-provoking dialogue, but exciting things need to happen. By comparison, CROSSFIRE is much more kinetic, explosive, powerful-- because we see things going on that illustrate the reality of anti-semitism. It is much less an experiment than GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT-- more the actuality, seeing anti-semitism play out before our eyes on screen.In the final analysis, Zanuck's Oscar winner seems like a long-winded sermon-- while Dore Schary's CROSSFIRE is a plot-driven indictment of one of society's great evils.