It was while watching 1947 noir Crossfire that I realized it would be strange to be in a bar or restaurant in someplace like New York City and see Military Police at the door of every such place. We see a lot of that in this movie, as police and MP’s together try to find a serviceman wanted for murder.
That man is George Cooper, and he is in a daze, unaware for the longest time that anybody is even looking for him. The last thing he can remember is being in the apartment of Sam Levene, a civilian. All he can recall is a lot of drinking, and then stumbling out for air. He only learns later that Levene has been beaten to death.
We will see a scene in the deceased’s apartment, as well as one in a bar preceding it, from two different perspectives, making this a bit like Rashomon. The other version is from Robert Ryan, who is looking for Cooper when he arrives at the crime scene in that apartment.
On the scene is detective Robert Young. He had already found Cooper’s wallet in the sofa cushions, so he has some questions about Ryan’s army buddy. There is an interesting conversation between Ryan and the detective, as both give terse answers to questions, responses which are so limited as to not actually convey any information. This is the interesting manner in which most of the characters in this picture communicate (or fail to communicate) with each other. For a genre which normally has snappy dialogue, this is a script which places an emphasis less on what is said than what isn’t said. Silence is used to great effect in many scenes.
If you judge a movie by the number of Roberts in the cast, then you should be over the moon to have Robert Mitchum appear alongside Young and Ryan. He is a fellow soldier, one who doesn’t trust Ryan and is especially concerned for Cooper. Mitchum and Ryan both emphasize to Young how sensitive Cooper is, except one of them seems intent on using this to paint the man as being unstable.
The picture deftly juggles different timelines and perspectives. It is also effortless to follow the different characters as they go on separate missions with different objectives. We also have the police searching for Cooper, the servicemen trying to protect one of their own and the MP’s somewhere in the middle.
Cooper’s wandering journey into the dark corners of the night has a particularly odd tangent when he wakes up in the apartment of Gloria Grahame. A tense and cagey Paul Kelly enters, first claiming to be her husband, then changing his story twice over. It is an uncomfortable scene, with a character so cryptic he is billed only as “The Man”. At one point, he steps into pure darkness, like a moment in a Lynch film. Turning on the light, it is revealed this is a small kitchenette. He even offers to make Cooper a cup of coffee. This scene, and this character’s arc, feel unresolved, and are all the more intriguing for being so.
There is some great chiaroscuro photography in this, which should have genre fans drooling. For a surprising amount of the runtime, Cooper will be in the back row of a movie theatre, with the beam of light from the projector catching the smoke in the air. Another moment has two characters arguing while standing close to a lamp underneath them, the stark upward shadows turning faces into masks, heat waves from the bulb curling and twisting in the air between them. One shot manages to put two men in the same static frame by putting them on the opposite sides of a row of washbasins, the face of one of the men reflected in the mirror facing us.
The performances are largely fascinating in this. Young is surprisingly hard-edged as the detective. Mitchum and Ryan play what I consider to be their stock roles. Cooper is especially good, and I can’t recall ever having seen him in anything before. One curious misstep is Grahame, who should be perfect as what they would have called a “low woman” back then, but whom I found to be not entirely believable. Reinforcing that opinion is the two main scenes with her in them are too long, and feel like nothing more than an attempt to maximize her screentime.
For only appearing in the flashbacks, Levene makes for an interesting character, a guy who talks to Cooper in a bar only because he can see the man is experiencing an internal struggle. They have an interesting conversation about how the war had such a clearly defined separation of good and evil, only for the end of it to leave everybody confused. Levene says, “I think it’s suddenly not having any enemies to hate anymore”, which I think says even more about the twenty-first century that it did the twentieth, as everybody seems to be looking for a million tiny divisions on which to draw sides.
Levene’s statement is the first indicator of where the movie’s heart lies, and that is a stinging indictment of racism. Young has a great soliloquy near the end where he patiently tries to explain to somebody why racial hatred is wrong, using antisemitism as an example. The person he’s talking to asks how they would know whether Young isn’t Jewish himself. The reply: “You don’t. Would it make any difference?”
Crossfire has a message which was important then, and it still is today. Social media has inexplicably spread racial hatred more than it has furthered empathy. Not helping things are National Guard troops placed in one city after another, which is even more unnerving than it had to be seeing MPs all around NYC in the movie’s time. There is something unfortunate about human nature that we are always looking for new reasons to hate another. Whether then or now, one can always say rage is all the rage these days.
Dir: Edward Dmytryk
Starring Robert Young, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray