Crossfire [Blu-ray] (1947)

Crossfire At Noir City, D.C.

very year, I eagerly attend the Noir City, D.C. film festival sponsored by the Film Noir Foundation and hosted by the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring. The theme for this year's festival is "They Tried to Warn Us". Many of the films feature social issues that still are with us today. Eddie Muller, the "Czar of Noir" and founder of the Film Noir Foundation selected the films and offered perceptive introductions during the first weekend of the festival.

The films today included "Crossfire" (1947), directed by Edward Dymtryk and Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, and Robert Ryan. The film is set during a single evening in Washington, D.C., but it was shot on a studio set rather than in the city. Still, it has a shadowy, dark noir feel of city streets, hotels, and seedy places. The film is a noir murder mystery as well as a work with a message -- in this case an exploration of antisemitism. It was released in the same year as the Academy Award winning movie "Gentleman's Agreement" which also had a theme of antisemitism. "Crossfire" is an important movie in its own right and was nominated for five Academy Awards in addition to receiving the Cannes Film Festival's 1948 award for Best Social Film among other honors.

The film involves a group of demobilized soldiers in Washington, D.C. At the outset of the film, in a shadowy scene, a Jewish man is beaten to death in a hotel room. He had earlier in the evening been keeping company with a group of soldiers and a young woman. The redoubtable Captain Finley (Robert Young) investigates the killings, including working around the false leads and information from some of the soldiers. It soon becomes apparent to Finley that the sole motive for the killing was hatred for Jewish people. The film slowly develops the nature of this senseless hatred. In the process, it offers a noir view of the underside of Washington, D.C. during the 1940s. A pair of secondary characters, a bar girl named Ginny (Gloria Grahame) and her doofus husband (Paul Kelly) do not steal the show, but they add a great deal of color.

The plot shows many twists and turns. The film includes sharp dialogue and towards the end a substantial amount of preaching on antisemitism and other forms of race hatred. The message of the film remains, unfortunately, pertinent, and the point comes through well in its setting of noir crime drama.

I was fortunate to be able to see "Crossfire" at the D.C. Noir Film festival in the company of other lovers of film noir.

Robin Friedman