United States

By 1947, when Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire appeared, Hollywood thought the world was ready for some of the serious themes that the 'escapist' war-time entertainment had avoided. Chief of these proved to be anti-Semitism. In this brilliant thriller, located in that midnight-to-dawn time-belt in which the best films noirs belong, Dmytryk and his screenwriter John Paxton turn what could have been a self-conscious sermon on racial prejudice into a superbly constructed and played crime story. It opens with a man's brutal murder - seen in shadows on his apartment wall. Then, exposing the callous underside of big-city life, the movie shows us who killed him and, more important, why. The suspects include four Army buddies on lease, a bar-room floosie and her lover; and the police finally link up with the Army to set a trap and catch the killer. Dmytryk was one of those directors who 'slung the lights low' - an ambience well-suited to the methods of police interrogation and cumulative paranoia. The film has an intense and tough-willed momentum - apart from one preachy scene on the racial theme - and the ensemble playing of Robert Young, Steve Brodie, Robert Mitchum and Gloria Grahame at her most rasping and sardonic, shows how well the post-war peak of the Hollywood cinema's acting talent survives against today's more casually naturalistic players. But the films revelation is Robert Ryan. Playing the part of a suppressed psychopath, simmering with tense prejudices that boil over into sadistic acts, Ryan established his screen image all too effectively in Crossfire, and later regretted a type-casting that he strove to break. For Dmytryk and his producer Adrian Scott, the movie had tragic ironies. Shortly afterwards, both became part of the original 'Hollywood Ten', martyrs to the witch-hunts and blacklisting of 'disloyal' Americans - makers of one of the finest indictments of intolerance fell victims to the 'crossfire' of the nation's own paranoia and prejudice. ALEXANDER WALKER