Crossfire (1947)

Crossfire (1947) is a classic film noir returning veteran anti-Semitic military procedural Hollywood Ten produced and directed murder chase thriller with Roberts Ryan, Young and Mitchum, in a night-long low-budget detection and paranoia drama.

Known and loved as a classic of its kind, Crossfire (1947) is best known as being a fore-runner to the justices of HUAC and features many heavily Communised individuals including actors, writer, director and producers, and in fact bearing that in mind it is not surprising that this red-fest of socialist freedom and civic principles in the face of any kind of incipient fascism was always going to be a McCarthy favourite. The film in fact premiered at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City on July 22, 1947 and only a few months later producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), becoming part of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.

The postwar American cinema did not merely reflect the anxieties of its age—it became their battleground. Few films exemplify this confluence as precisely as Crossfire (RKO, 1947). Directed by Edward Dmytryk and produced by Adrian Scott, the film was released into a maelstrom. Three months before the opening volleys of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) assault on Hollywood, Crossfire premiered. It should have failed. It did not. This anomaly demands attention.

Traditional historiography has long assumed a causal link: HUAC accused, the public recoiled, the studios capitulated. According to Robert Sklar, Hollywood feared the "vocal minority." Audiences, he suggests, punished “subversive” content at the box office. Studio executives, thus frightened, disavowed controversial films and their makers. Yet Crossfire defies this logic.

What happened?

Crossfire succeeded. It earned. It was praised. It was nominated. And it endured. Despite its association with two of the eventual Hollywood Ten, despite its ideological “suspicion,” despite its depiction of anti-Semitism in postwar America, it thrived. The reasons are manifold.

First, the film itself. Noir in palette and purpose. A murder. Low-key lighting. A detective. No motive—until the motive is revealed: hate. Racial, ethnic, unreasoned. The killer, Monty, murders Samuels because Samuels is Jewish. "No Jew is going to tell me how to drink his stinking liquor," he snarls. It is not subtle. Nor is it safe. America, still clutching its myth of moral victory in World War II, was not prepared to admit that anti-Semitism survived Hitler. And yet here was a film that said: it lives. Here. Among our own. In uniform.

Second, the military. Crossfire is not kind. Bureaucratic. Alienating. Purple ink and meaningless medals. The army is portrayed not as heroic but dehumanizing. A mechanism that drains purpose. It fosters hate, or, worse, is indifferent to it. This, in 1947, was heresy.

Crossfire thus affronted two sacred cows. It exposed domestic anti-Semitism and deflated the valorized image of the American military. It did both before a national audience. It did not hide. And yet—no backlash?

HUAC did not ignore the film’s creators. Scott and Dmytryk were subpoenaed. They appeared in October 1947. They refused to name names. They were cited for contempt. But their film was scarcely mentioned. HUAC preferred insinuation to evidence. Gary Cooper claimed to sense “Communist word-of-mouth” but could name no films. Sam Wood decried “dishonest senators” in scripts. Lela Rogers found subversion in “share and share alike.” Ayn Rand condemned smiling Russians in Song of Russia as Bolshevik trickery.

This was not evidence. It was theater.

HUAC’s inquiry was saturated with bigotry. Samuel Ornitz and Adrian Scott accused the committee of veiled anti-Semitism. The case of Congressman John E. Rankin confirms it. Rankin outed Hollywood petitioners by their Jewish names—Kaminsky, Bliedung, Iskowitz—and called them “that crowd.” Walter Goodman characterized Rankin’s ideology as one that fused racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia into a grotesque Americanism.

HUAC’s chair, J. Parnell Thomas, was no better. A Roosevelt-hater, he equated the New Deal with Stalinism. He despised liberals. He found menace in any film that dared to discuss social justice. For Thomas and Rankin, films like Crossfire were dangerous not because they were Communist, but because they were conscious.

Despite the hostility, Crossfire escaped unscathed. This is remarkable.

Why?

Several reasons. The first: timing. The film’s release preceded the hearings. The stain of "Communism" had not yet set. The second: public ambivalence. A Gallup poll from late November 1947 showed no consensus. Only 37% approved of HUAC’s conduct. 36% disapproved. 27% were indifferent. The “backlash” was neither unified nor universal.

Third: press support. Several editorials condemned the hearings. Violations of the First Amendment were noted. Skepticism, not solidarity, greeted HUAC’s moral crusade.

Fourth: box office success. Crossfire premiered at New York’s Rivoli Theatre on July 22. It ran twelve weeks. Reviews were effusive. Critics called it “courageous.” Audiences came. Its budget was modest: $550,000. By October, it had surpassed $2 million in returns. It amortized within three months. This is not failure. It is triumph.

The reception was national. Boston. Chicago. Los Angeles. Strong openings. Strong holds. Even where controversy existed—Louisville, army bases overseas—the setbacks were minor.

Fifth: star power. Crossfire boasted Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, and Robert Ryan. A triple-R of male leads, popular and bankable. They drew audiences. Whatever “red taint” might have lingered around the production was neutralized by celebrity. Robert Ryan alone accepted over 100 civic awards for his role. The film was not underground; it was celebrated.

Awards followed. Cannes. Look Magazine. The Philadelphia Masons. Crossfire was nominated for five Academy Awards. Its cultural legitimacy was reinforced. It was not subversion. It was conscience.

The sixth factor: strategy. RKO did not panic. It maneuvered. Dore Schary, head of production, held private screenings for civic leaders. These included rabbis, professors, PTA members, and bishops. The aim was clear. Preemptive endorsement. If social leaders approved, audiences would follow. The strategy worked. In Cincinnati, one such screening led to 10,000 letters promoting the film.

Seventh: advertising. RKO sold Crossfire two ways. In trade journals, it was bold. “The most courageous film ever made,” the ads declared. In the press, it was more cautious. The film was marketed as a whodunit. Anti-Semitism was mentioned obliquely—only as “hate.” In New York, The Times ran character sketches: Young as the relentless detective, Mitchum the enigmatic sergeant, Ryan the hard-nosed mystery. No mention of race or creed. In Chicago, “MURDER WITHOUT MOTIVE” was the catchphrase. In Los Angeles, a shift: the “most-discussed picture of the year,” a “blistering” drama. Slightly more open. But never polemical.

This dual strategy—courageous to the industry, ambiguous to the public—enabled RKO to thread the needle. It captured acclaim without inviting ire.

Dore Schary, meanwhile, waged a rhetorical campaign. In Commentary and National Jewish Monthly, he argued for cinema as a social weapon. Crossfire, he wrote, would not change the bigot. But it might awaken the blind. It had “integrity.” It had “dignity.” It had “guts.”

When critics charged the film with weakness—Elliot E. Cohen claimed it made the Jew appear meek—Schary responded. The film’s goal, he said, was to start a conversation. Conversion was never the aim. Consciousness was.

RKO had led “with the chin.” And the public, remarkably, did not strike back.

The hearings had effects. Yes. Careers were destroyed. Lives upended. Fear reigned. But the assumption that the audience rejected subversive films on ideological grounds—this cannot be universally sustained.

Crossfire complicates the narrative. It was the film HUAC feared—and it succeeded. Its success owed much to careful management, yes. To timing, yes. But also to the limits of HUAC’s power and the public’s apathy.

This should not be forgotten.

If more films from that moment are studied, a pattern may emerge. If Crossfire is not the exception, but the exemplar, then our understanding of HUAC must change. Perhaps it was not the will of the people that destroyed Hollywood dissent. Perhaps it was the cowardice of executives, the opportunism of politicians, the cynicism of press agents.

A final irony remains. Gentleman’s Agreement (Fox, 1947) won the Oscar. It was another film about anti-Semitism. Its depiction was softer, more palatable. It did not indict the military. It did not accuse America. It had Elia Kazan, not Adrian Scott. It had Gregory Peck, not Robert Ryan. It was the acceptable face of social justice.

Crossfire lost.

But in losing, it proved something far more dangerous.

That the truth, artfully rendered, need not fear repression.

That even in the shadow of the blacklist, courage could be profitable.

That the cinema, at its best, is subversive because it is honest.

And that no committee, however loud, can silence a film whose time has come.

Yet and yet, how many times in film productions from the 1930s to the 2030s do we see villains receiving due process? Something to consider when looking at the aspects of American justice you don't quite follow. The deportees received little or no due process, from Donald Trump's administration, and lawyers for the immigrants have argued that some of them have no gang ties at all.

For the audience however, we always see in the privacy of the cinema, the bad guys committing their bad acts. More than that we see their motives and we see their thinking, we see them getting away with it.

This is why Hollywood movies which feature a villainous act, a murder usually, do not end with arrest, but with extra-judicial murder, and why that extra-judicial process is considered satisfactory as justice, all very well programmed by the 'wood.

1947 bore witness to a curious artefact in Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire, a work of taut austerity whose noir-inflected aesthetics coalesced with a fervid moral preoccupation: the virulence of antisemitism. 

Adapted from Richard Brooks' novel The Brick Foxhole, the film transposes the book's condemnation of homophobia into a more studio-palatable attack on racial and religious bigotry. The result is a film whose shadows harbour both the palpable unease of post-war America and a sombre indictment of its social maladies.

The narrative pivots on the murder of Joseph Samuels, a gentle and unassuming Jewish man, whose life is extinguished in a moment of xenophobic wrath. The act of violence, presented obliquely in silhouette, becomes an inciting mystery for Captain Finlay (Robert Young), whose slow, deliberate unravelling of events substitutes the typical detective urgency with a meditative psychological excavation. The murder weapon is not merely brute force; it is ignorance, misdirected rage, and the festering residue of wartime hatred.

The trio of Roberts—Young, Mitchum, and Ryan—anchor the film with striking tonal contrasts. Young's Finlay is all restraint and measured authority, the embodiment of a liberal rationalism that insists on procedural justice and introspection. Mitchum, in a subdued and weary register, lends Sergeant Keeley a languid dignity, his torpor masking a keen observational acuity. Robert Ryan, however, explodes from the screen in a blistering portrayal of "Monty" Montgomery, the anti-Semitic ex-soldier whose savagery emerges as a grim counterpoint to the American ideal.

There is a deal of camera and shot focusing issues in Cross fire (1947) a common intentional blurring achieved when one person is usually close to the camera, while another is framed in the distance.

Dmytryk bathes the film in an expressionist chiaroscuro that conjures the psychic claustrophobia of its characters. Interiors are cloistered, oppressively lit from singular sources that exaggerate the angular features of the actors and stretch their shadows across walls like phantasms. There is no comfort in this world; the visual grammar echoes the moral vertigo of postwar disillusionment. Soldiers back from the front find themselves suspended in moral vacuums, their sense of purpose dissipated, their camaraderie frayed into suspicion.

The film's plot, though ostensibly a whodunit, reveals the identity of the killer relatively early, shifting attention from the mechanics of mystery to the pathology of hatred. This inversion of the genre's typical structure marks Crossfire as something altogether more discursive. It is less interested in resolving a crime than in diagnosing a cultural malaise.

The year of the film's release, 1947, was not merely a temporal backdrop but an ideological crucible. The world had only recently emerged from the cataclysm of the Second World War. The Nuremberg trials were concluding; revelations of the Holocaust's scope were fresh wounds in the global conscience. America was simultaneously grappling with its role as moral arbiter on the world stage and its entrenched domestic prejudices. That Crossfire emerged during such a moment and dared to interrogate antisemitism on American soil is a testament to its ideological boldness.

The House Un-American Activities Committee, a grotesque inversion of the justice it purported to serve, was also gaining momentum. That both Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott were soon to be ensnared in its dragnet imbues the film with a retrospective irony: a cinematic denouncement of one form of bigotry by artists soon to be victimized by another.

The substitution of antisemitism for the novel's original homophobia remains a vexing yet revealing compromise. Hollywood, in thrall to the Production Code's repressive pieties, could not abide open discourse on homosexuality. Yet traces of the original subtext haunt the film. The initial encounter between Samuels and Mitchell, suffused with a kind of tender melancholy, gestures toward a deeper emotional register, one suppressed by the script but not entirely effaced. 

The performance of Sam Levene as Samuels is delicate to the point of sanctification, but it never descends into caricature. He is not merely a symbol of the persecuted other; he is a fully realized human being, and his death is rendered all the more tragic by its senselessness.

Crossfire provides a haunting portrait of marginalized femininity through the figure of Ginny Tremaine, embodied with bruised veracity by Gloria Grahame. A working girl adrift in the city's underbelly, Ginny is no mere femme fatale; she is a woman whose vitality has been commodified, whose kindness is transactional, and whose agency is hemmed in by social contempt.

Her apartment, a drab hovel haunted by Paul Kelly's eerie interloper, becomes a kind of purgatory, a space where the American dream has decayed into listlessness and entrapment. Ginny's refusal to corroborate Mitchell's alibi speaks less to duplicity than to a survival instinct honed by systemic dismissal.

Within the arc of American history, Crossfire assumes the role of a mirror—distorted, perhaps, but unflinching. It reflects a nation in transition, teetering between postwar triumphalism and the recognition of its moral failings. The soldiers in the film, rather than embodying heroic stoicism, are shown as fractured, volatile, and spiritually disoriented. They return home not to ticker-tape parades but to suspicion and alienation. Keeley's attempt to shield his friend from a murder charge is not driven by loyalty alone but by a desperate bid to reclaim some sense of moral coherence in a world unraveling.

Noir is often mischaracterized as a genre of style over substance, but Crossfire refutes this simplification. It is noir in both atmosphere and ethos. The low-key lighting, the jaded dialogue, the moral ambiguity—these are not aesthetic flourishes but existential conditions.

The world of Crossfire is one where light barely holds back the darkness, where virtue is fragile, and where the social contract has been breached. The narrative's progression toward a form of justice does not undo the larger tragedy; it merely cordons it off, like yellow tape around a crime scene.

Paul Kelly as 'the man', not a husband and not a pimp, and not a client either, just a long faced hang dogged misery of a failure of a man, hooked one one specific line, a character type for the ages, the soft spotted underside of the worst kind of men, as illustrated around the kind of dives where poor Gloria Graham's character has washed up.

Robert Ryan's performance deserves particular scrutiny. His Montgomery is not a cartoon bigot, but a psychologically coherent construct. His hatred simmers beneath a veneer of bonhomie; his rage is camouflaged by conviviality until it erupts with lethal consequence. Ryan, a committed progressive off-screen, imbues the character with a chilling authenticity that transcends typecasting. His eventual comeuppance, though satisfying in its dramaturgy, does not erase the systemic roots of his animus.

The dialogue, often sharp and laconic, occasionally yields to moments of overt didacticism. Captain Finlay's monologue about his Irish grandfather's murder may seem heavy-handed by contemporary standards, yet within its historical context, it constitutes a radical gesture. 

To draw parallels between antisemitism and anti-Catholic prejudice, and to do so through a law enforcement figure, was to challenge the complacency of postwar American exceptionalism. 

The jazz interludes featuring Kid Ory's Creole Jazz Band add a further layer of cultural texture. Heard in the nightclub scenes and again on the radio in Ginny's apartment, this music is both ambient and allegorical. It speaks to an undercurrent of African American expression that exists on the film's periphery, suggesting that bigotry, though addressed here in the guise of antisemitism, has a broader, more pervasive reach.

Critics at the time were divided on the film's effectiveness. While Variety lauded its "frank spotlight on antisemitism," and The New York Times praised the performances, some contemporary viewers found the social message obtrusive. 

Gloria Grahame in Crossfire (1947)

Later critics such as Colin McArthur have argued that the film is less a social tract than a metaphysical inquiry cloaked in noir garb. Such readings find resonance in the film's emphasis on alienation, the fluidity of truth, and the moral erosion engendered by violence.

And yet, for all its occasional lapses into the pedantic, Crossfire remains a bracing and necessary work. Its limitations are those of its time, but its ambitions are timeless. It dares to look squarely at the mechanisms of hatred and to indict not only the individual who pulls the trigger but the society that loads the gun. 

It understands that murder, in such contexts, is not merely an act of pathology but an eruption of cultural failure.

The film's closing moments, wherein Finlay exits the narrative with bureaucratic finality and Keeley extends a gesture of humane solidarity to young Leroy, are deliberately understated. There is no triumphant swell of music, no resolution that restores equilibrium. There is only coffee, the sacrament of working-class America, offered not as comfort but as acknowledgment. The night has passed, but the dawn is uncertain.

In the canon of American film noir, Crossfire holds a singular place. It marries the visual syntax of the genre to a moral urgency seldom attempted within its confines. It strips away the myth of American innocence and lays bare the fault lines of its democracy. It is a film whose darkness is not merely visual but ideological, and whose light, when it appears, flickers uncertainly in the eyes of those who choose to see.

The 1947 film "Crossfire," directed by Edward Dmytryk and adapted by John Paxton from Richard Brooks' novel The Brick Foxhole, represents a vital intervention in postwar American cinema. At once an exposé of bigotry and a noir-inflected mystery, the film occupies a singular space as both a moral treatise and a formal exercise in stylistic minimalism. 

Produced on a meagre budget and emerging from the B-picture tradition, "Crossfire" nevertheless broke through cultural inertia and censure to speak, however obliquely, of systemic hate within the very institutions it otherwise valorises.

The Year's most Outspoken Picture

Murder Without Motive!

Whose were the hands that killed this man... what was the motive?

"Some people carry blind, ugly HATE inside of them...like a loaded gun. And when they carry it around too long, it goes off AND KILLS...the way it killed a stranger last night!"

Sensational? No, it's dynamite!

Hate Is Like A Loaded Gun!

"Crossfire" was conceived in a moment of complex historical transition. The United States in 1947 was adjusting to peacetime, the triumphant conclusion of World War II having given way to economic uncertainty, psychological alienation among returning veterans, and the nascent Cold War. The same year witnessed the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, which formalized U.S. opposition to Soviet expansion and accelerated the polarization of global ideologies. 

The boiling-over coffee pot of film noir indecision with George Cooper in Crossfire (1947)

Domestically, 1947 also marked the ascendancy of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which would entangle both Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott in its net. It is within this anxious and fraught environment that "Crossfire" found itself launched into the public imagination.

The film opens without preamble or exposition: a man lies beaten to death in a darkened room. There is no dialogue, only shadow and action. This scene, in its blunt visual clarity, establishes the tenor of the film’s sensibility—one in which violence erupts from the margins, seemingly spontaneous, though steeped in unspoken prejudice. We soon learn that the victim is Joseph Samuels, a Jewish man, whose murder will become the fulcrum around which a murky tale of deception, loyalty, and loathing unfolds.

Captain Finlay (Robert Young), tasked with solving the murder, becomes the vessel through which the film negotiates its moral argument. Unlike the hardboiled detectives populating more cynical noirs, Finlay operates with methodical detachment and emotional restraint. He listens, gathers, and deduces. His every word is carefully chosen, every movement deliberate. Yet he is not removed from moral engagement; he is, rather, its stoic executor.

Finlay's counterpart is Sergeant Keeley (Robert Mitchum), whose laconic strength and protective instincts provide a kind of existential ballast to the film's otherwise amorphous ethical terrain. Keeley believes in Corporal Mitchell (George Cooper), a sensitive soul and a reluctant artist who becomes the primary suspect in Samuels' murder. Drunk and disoriented on the night of the crime, Mitchell is emblematic of the noir “wrong man,” a figure at once implicated and innocent, entangled in a web not of his making.

The true culprit, however, is Robert Ryan’s Montgomery, a demobilized soldier whose smiling contempt barely masks a volcano of racial animus. Ryan’s performance is extraordinary—a study in charismatic menace. His Montgomery is a brute disguised in the veneer of civility, a man whose rage is sourced not from personal injury but from a pathological need to establish superiority. When confronted with Samuels' Jewishness, Montgomery sees not a man, but an idea, an abstraction against which he can unleash his impotent fury.

Paul Kelly as 'The Man' in Crossfire (1947)

Montgomery’s pathology is made manifest not only through Ryan’s taut physicality but also through J. Roy Hunt’s cinematography, which drenches his face in darkness and shadow. The film, shot almost entirely at night, uses light sparingly and surgically, allowing glimmers of illumination to fall upon those least corrupt. This chiaroscuro technique, long associated with the visual vocabulary of noir, finds in "Crossfire" a thematic correlative: moral clarity is elusive, and truth flickers in the crevices.

Gloria Grahame's Ginny is a small but incendiary presence. As a dancehall girl whose association with Mitchell offers a possible alibi, she oscillates between coquettish indifference and buried sorrow. Grahame imbues her character with a wounded sensuality, suggesting a life lived on the periphery of male use and disdain. 

Her relationship with "The Man" (Paul Kelly), whose identity and connection to her remain ambiguous and fluid, further complicates her narrative function. Here is a woman reduced by society, yet resolute in her emotional opacity.

Ginny serves as a lamentation for the disposability of women in patriarchal structures. While noir frequently traffics in the femme fatale archetype, Grahame's character lacks the agency or guile to manipulate events in her favor. Instead, she is a ghostly presence, desired yet maligned, pivotal yet powerless. Her struggle is not one of dominance but of mere survival, and in this sense, she embodies a more authentic and tragic feminine reality than the hyper-stylized vamps of other noir outings.

The American dilemma at the heart of "Crossfire" is the persistence of intolerance despite the recent cataclysm of war. Having ostensibly fought to extinguish fascism abroad, the U.S. must confront its own undercurrents of hate at home. 

Finlay, in his climactic monologue, recalls his grandfather's death at the hands of an anti-Catholic mob—a narrative that places anti-Semitism within a longer American tradition of nativist violence. This contextual layering lifts the film from mere procedural to national allegory. The crime is not only an individual act of violence but a symptom of a deeper cultural sickness.

The film's noir identity is secure not merely through its visual strategies but through its structural ambiguities and psychological murk. There is the classic flashback device, the blurred timelines, the unreliable narrators. 

Characters exist in a liminal space—soldiers who are no longer at war, yet not quite returned to domestic normalcy. The cityscapes are claustrophobic, composed of hotel lobbies, dimly lit streets, and anonymous bars. The urban setting is less a place than a state of mind, a noir no-man's land.

What separates Crossfire from the more stylized noir fare of the era is its almost documentary approach to human behavior. The film does not delight in its darkness, nor does it romanticize its alienated men. Rather, it observes, dissects, and laments. Its villain is not an underworld figure or criminal mastermind, but a man bred by society to hate those who differ. This is noir as realism, stripped of flourish, devoid of glamour.

And yet, for all its seriousness, Crossfire was not beyond the reach of censorship. The original novel was a searing indictment of homophobia, a subject the Breen Office refused to permit. The shift to anti-Semitism, while still controversial, was evidently more palatable in the wake of the Holocaust's revelations. 

This substitution, while diluting the novel’s radical intent, retains its power by exposing another layer of American bigotry. That the film succeeded despite these constraints is a testament to the deftness of Dmytryk and Paxton.

Its cultural impact is measurable. Not only was Crossfire nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, it also precipitated congressional scrutiny. Scott and Dmytryk, the creative forces behind the film, were summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently blacklisted. That a film condemning intolerance led to its creators being persecuted for their political beliefs is an irony not lost on history.

The narrative trajectory of Montgomery’s downfall is orchestrated with noir elegance. Fooled by Leroy, the guileless Southern boy he presumed to dominate, Montgomery is lured into exposing himself. The climactic confrontation, in which Finlay is forced to kill the unrepentant murderer, reaffirms the noir axiom that violence begets violence. Yet even here the film resists triumphalism. The streets remain dark, the coffee shops open but unwelcoming. The world has not been righted; the evil has merely been contained.

In its engagement with anti-Semitism, veteran alienation, and postwar disillusionment, Crossfire operates as both a social critique and a noir tragedy. It is an American film about American problems, unafraid to indict its own nation’s hypocrisies. The fact that it did so within the modest trappings of a B-movie makes its achievement all the more remarkable.

Jacqueline White in Crossfire (1947)

Within the larger history of the United States, "Crossfire" occupies a crucial junction between wartime idealism and Cold War paranoia. It reflects a fleeting moment when Hollywood dared to engage politically without obfuscation, before the red scare extinguished such ambitions. It is a relic of that lost moment, and a reminder of the costs of complicity.

The influence of noir upon "Crossfire" is not mere aesthetic; it is existential. The film's bleak moral landscape, its preference for psychological over procedural revelation, its emphasis on fatal coincidence and the instability of truth—all are hallmarks of the noir tradition. And in its insistence that evil resides not in deviance but in conformity, it aligns itself with the genre's most damning insights.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Crossfire within the canon of American cinema. It functions simultaneously as message film, noir artifact, and cultural litmus test. That it was born under the threat of censorship, executed with budgetary restraint, and still managed to incite public and critical discourse speaks to its enduring resonance. Crossfire (1947) is not merely a film about hate; it is a film about the structures that cultivate and sustain hate. And that, more than its murder mystery or chiaroscuro photography, is what makes it essential.

The initial working titles for the film that would ultimately be released as Crossfire were The Brick Foxhole and Cradle of Fear. These titles drew directly from the original 1945 source novel by Richard Brooks, a dark and provocative tale which broached subjects Hollywood was still largely unwilling to confront.

In Brooks’s novel, the murder at the narrative's center is motivated not by antisemitism but by homophobia: the character “Montgomery” kills “Samuels” because the latter is homosexual. This original premise was deemed far too controversial for cinematic adaptation under the Production Code Administration (PCA). 

Gloria Grahame in Crossfire (1947)

In a sharply worded letter dated July 17, 1945, PCA director Joseph I. Breen communicated his vehement disapproval of the book to RKO executive William Gordon. The letter, preserved in the MPAA/PCA files at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, characterized the novel as “thoroughly and completely unacceptable, on a dozen or more counts,” a judgment that effectively condemned any attempt at direct adaptation.

By early 1947, however, with screenwriter John Paxton having meticulously reworked the material to expunge all references to homosexuality, Breen gave conditional approval to the revised project. The substitution of antisemitism for homophobia not only rendered the film Code-compliant but also situated Crossfire within a rapidly shifting postwar cultural landscape. Yet Breen remained cautious. He stipulated that the character of “Samuels” must display no traits that could even vaguely be construed as effeminate. 

In his formal endorsement, Breen stressed that there must be “no suggestion of a ‘pansy’ characterization about Samuels or his relationship with the soldiers,” reflecting the era’s enduring taboos surrounding LGBTQ+ themes, even as antisemitism became a more publicly acknowledged social issue.

Production notes from the period offer further insight into the film’s evolution. In March 1946, Dick Powell, who had starred in two prior collaborations with director Edward Dmytryk, producer Adrian Scott, and screenwriter John Paxton—namely Murder, My Sweet and Cornered—was announced as the most likely choice for the lead role. However, the part ultimately went to Robert Young, who agreed to participate on the condition that the production be completed within a stringent twenty-four day schedule. 

This demand was met, further enhancing the film’s reputation for efficiency and low-budget innovation. RKO arranged to borrow Gloria Grahame from MGM for a pivotal supporting role, adding marquee value and lending the production an air of studio cooperation during a tense and uncertain moment in the industry.

An article published in The New York Times in March 1947 hailed Crossfire as among the first American films of the 1940s to tackle racial and religious prejudice with a notable degree of directness and courage—qualities not typically expected from Hollywood, especially during a period marked by cautious self-censorship. As Crossfire entered production, Twentieth Century-Fox was simultaneously working on Gentleman's Agreement, another prestige project addressing antisemitism. 

Cognizant of the overlapping themes and anxious to capitalize on the cultural moment, RKO rushed to beat the more lavishly promoted Fox film to market, managing to release Crossfire several months ahead of its competitor. The urgency proved strategic: RKO's release sparked immediate discussion and media interest.

Robert Ryan in Crossfire (1947)

In July 1947, prior to its general release, Crossfire was screened for interfaith and religious groups in Los Angeles, part of a calculated effort to preempt controversy and gauge the response of opinion leaders.

Concurrently, RKO commissioned multiple audience surveys to measure viewer attitudes both before and after screenings. These efforts were not purely promotional but formed part of a wider attempt to understand and influence public discourse surrounding antisemitism in postwar America. The film’s depiction of bigotry—deliberate and forceful though it was—elicited both commendation and concern. 

While many editorialists praised the picture’s social boldness, some Jewish leaders criticized the character of Montgomery as an extremist caricature, suggesting that such a virulent portrayal might allow audiences to disassociate themselves from more subtle, systemic forms of prejudice.

Zoom on night-stand cigarette in Crossfire (1947)

Crossfire would prove to be the final collaboration between Dmytryk and Scott at RKO. In October 1947, both men were subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and listed among a group of filmmakers known as the “unfriendly” witnesses. HUAC, which had shifted its focus toward Communist infiltration following the end of World War II, had begun targeting the motion picture industry with renewed intensity. 

Dmytryk and Scott were soon designated members of the now-infamous Hollywood Ten, a group of directors, screenwriters, and producers who refused to answer questions regarding their political affiliations. The other eight members included Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., Samuel Ornitz, Albert Maltz, and Herbert Biberman. All were held in contempt of Congress and, after a 1948 trial in Federal Court in Washington, D.C., were convicted and sentenced to prison. Upon their release, they were blacklisted, often forced to write under pseudonyms or leave the industry entirely.

In January 1948, following his dismissal from RKO in the wake of his indictment, Edward Dmytryk sued the studio for $1,783,425, citing emotional distress, reputational harm, and lost earnings. The outcome of the lawsuit remains undocumented. Dmytryk would later distinguish himself as the first of the Hollywood Ten to recant. 

In September 1950, while still incarcerated, he publicly acknowledged past membership in the Communist Party.

He was granted early release and, in 1951, reappeared before HUAC, this time as a cooperative witness. During his second testimony, he named several colleagues—including Adrian Scott—as Communists. This collaboration with the committee facilitated Dmytryk’s return to the industry. He would direct Mutiny in 1952, effectively rehabilitating his career. Scott, by contrast, remained blacklisted and never returned to film production, his career terminated by his refusal to name names.

Despite its modest budget of $589,000, Crossfire achieved critical and commercial success, becoming RKO’s highest-grossing picture of 1947 with a reported box office return of $1,270,000. Hailed as a sleeper hit, the film’s impact was further magnified by its awards recognition.

It was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Robert Ryan), Best Supporting Actress (Gloria Grahame), Best Director (Edward Dmytryk), and Best Screenplay (Adaptation, John Paxton). Though it ultimately lost Best Picture to Gentleman’s Agreement, Crossfire was celebrated for its social conscience and artistic daring. 

In September 1947, it won Best Social Film at the Cannes Film Festival, a rare international accolade for a film addressing American bigotry. 

Later that year, Ebony magazine awarded Crossfire its annual honour for contributions to interracial understanding—an acknowledgment that affirmed the film’s resonance beyond its original thematic focus and underscored its place in the broader civil rights discourse of postwar America.

FROM AFI CATALOG: The working titles of this film were The Brick Foxhole and Cradle of Fear. In Richard Brooks's novel, the character "Montgomery" kills "Samuels" not because he is a Jew, but because he is a homosexual. PCA director Joseph I. Breen described the novel in a 17 Jul 1945 letter to RKO executive William Gordon, contained in the MPAA/PCA files at the AMPAS Library, as "thoroughly and completely unacceptable, on a dozen or more counts." In Feb 1947, however, after screenwriter John Paxton had completely eliminated the homosexual plot line from the story, Breen endorsed the project, but cautioned that the final film should contain "no suggestion of a 'pansy' characterization about Samuels or his relationship with the soldiers."

Contemporary news items add the following information about the production: In Mar 1946, Dick Powell, who had previously starred in two successful Edward Dmytryk/Adrian Scott/John Paxton pictures, Murder My Sweet (See Entry) and Cornered (See Entry), was announced as the film's probable star. Robert Young eventually agreed to do the picture on condition that it be shot on a twenty-four day schedule, which it eventually was. RKO borrowed Gloria Grahame from M-G-M for the production.

 A Mar 1947 NYT article described Crossfire as one of the first Hollywood films of the 1940s to "face questions of racial and religious prejudice with more forthright courage than audiences have been accustomed to expect." While RKO was producing Crossfire, Twentieth Century-Fox was making Gentleman's Agreement (see below), another story about antisemitism. RKO raced to beat the much "ballyhooed" Fox picture to the theaters, releasing Crossfire several months before Gentleman's Agreement. In Jul 1947, RKO screened Crossfire for representatives of various Los Angeles religious groups. In addition, several surveys, which were designed to gauge the audience's prejudices, were conducted before and after screenings of the film. Crossfire received both praise and criticism for its depiction of antisemitism in America and was the subject of many editorials. Some Jewish leaders protested Montgomery's extreme brand of antisemitism, which they felt could be too easily dismissed by the audience.

Robert Young in Crossfire (1947)

 Crossfire was Dmytryk's and Scott's last film for RKO. In Oct 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) called the filmmakers as "unfriendly" witnesses before their Congressional hearings. HUAC, which was formed by Congress in 1938 to investigate a variety of political extremists, had dedicated itself solely to exposing Communist and left-wing activities after World War II, and, in late 1947, turned its attention specifically to the film industry. Scott and Dmytryk became the first two members of the infamous "Hollywood Ten," a group of producers, writers and directors who were indicted for contempt of Congress when they refused to state whether they were or had been Communists. Other members of the Hollywood Ten included screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., Samuel Ornitz and Albert Maltz and producer-director Herbert Biberman. In Apr 1948, the Hollywood Ten were tried at the Federal Court in Washington, D.C. and were convicted of contempt of Congress. All ten served prison terms and, for many years, were blacklisted from the film industry. Some, including others who were implicated in later years, continued to write using pseudonyms.

In Jan 1948, Dmytryk, whose contract at RKO was dropped after the indictment, sued the studio for $1,783,425, claiming anguish, loss of salary, screen fame and artistic reputation as well as personal humiliation due to his firing. The disposition of that lawsuit has not been discovered. In Sep 1950, however, the imprisoned Dmytryk broke his silence, stating that he was once a member of the Communist Party, and was released early from jail. When Dmytryk testified a second time for HUAC in 1951, he implicated others, including Scott, as Communists, and thereby removed himself from Hollywood's blacklist. His next American-made film was the 1952 picture Mutiny. Scott, however, continued to be blacklisted and never produced another picture.

 Because of its modest $589,000 budget, Crossfire was touted as a model "sleeper" hit. According to modern sources, it grossed $1,270,000 and was RKO's biggest hit of 1947. Crossfire received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, but lost to Gentleman's Agreement. It was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Ryan), Best Supporting Actress (Grahame), Best Director and Best Screenplay (Adaptation). In Sep 1947, Crossfire was named Best Social Film at Cannes. In Dec 1947, Ebony magazine, an African-American publication, gave the film its annual award for "improving interracial understanding."

Crossfire (1947)

Directed by Edward Dmytryk

Genres - Crime, Drama, Mystery-Suspense, Thriller  |   Sub-Genres - Detective Film, Film Noir  |   Release Date - Aug 15, 1947  |   Run Time - 86 min.  | Crossfire (1947) on Wikipedia