Alex da Silva .a little more action please" sang Elvis Presley. Obviously, no-one had listened to this song before making this film. If only they had, we might have had a little more action. It's a very talky affair and whilst the message is strong, the overall experience is laborious. The film is way too dark – can we have some light, please? – which gives it a film-noir feel and fits with the dark subject matter. But, how about some light once in a while? We also get all the dialogue delivered by every character in a gloomy low-key manner. It reminded me of Eastenders. Who knows, the cast may well have been using this film as an audition piece for that crass soap opera? The actors are all good but the tone of the film never changes and this makes it a ploddingly dull affair and scenes drag on. Soldier Robert Ryan (Montgomery) is a great bigot, he is a scary bully and is the standout in the cast. The film almost gets interesting at the end but at the final denouement slips back into more talking and then things end very conveniently and quickly. It's a film that is way over-rated by people who think a film is good if the message is sound. They forget that the primary purpose of a film is to be entertaining. Hail the wisdom of Elvis.

LeonLouisRicci You can Insert any Class of People into the Open Ended Sentence...I hate ____. Because that is Really what the Movie is about Hate or Bigotry. The Film's Source Material was Homosexuality, the Film Inserted Jews into that Blank Above.When Robert Young's Detective gives His now Famous Speech, He says it All, even Ending with, "...once You Continue Hating, where will it Go, "...to people with striped neckties." This is a Daring and Dark Excursion, via Film-Noir into the Twisted Mind of a Hater, a Bigot that Loses Control and Murders in a Drunken Rage.There is a an Off-Kilter Ambiance to the Whole Film with Distortions and Dream-Like (drunken) Sequences Shot with Odd Lenses and Sharp Shadows and Soft, Out of Focus Scenes, and High-Contrast and Low Lighting. It Really is Film-Noir, not Only in the Look but with the Returning and Confused Soldiers Hastily Re-inserted into Public-Life, some Faring Better than Others.Paul Kelly makes an Odd Appearance as a Completely Whacked Ex-Lover of B-Girl Ginny and it is Another Example of just How out of Sync Things were at War's End. It Becomes Slightly Surreal and He and Ginny are a Civilian-Military Counterpoint to Film-Noir's Take on an Out of Orbit Society that had yet to Settle into a Superficial, but Embraced, Post-War America.It is a Powerful Film and One of the Few Noirs to get Recognition from the Academy. It didn't Win any but had Several Nominations Including, Picture, Director, Script, Robert Ryan, and Gloria Grahame.

Dalbert Pringle (Movie quote) - "Hate is like a loaded gun." Released in 1947 - Crossfire stars the 3 "Roberts" - That's Mitchum, Ryan & Young.Crossfire was probably the first Hollywood picture to actually explore racial bigotry - This time in the form of anti-Semitism.Crossfire also addresses post-WW2 issues of soldiers being released from military duty with no other training besides that of being servicemen.Set in Washington, DC - A kindly, soft-spoken man named Joseph Samuels is savagely beaten to death (in his own apartment) by a drunken, recently demobilized American soldier simply because he was Jewish.Due to some incriminating evidence, an innocent soldier is mistakenly blamed for the murder. When this soldier disappears, Detective Finlay, who's investigating the case, must carefully piece together all of the clues to establish the motive behind all of the apparent senselessness.In a series of well-timed flashbacks the whole truth behind the story finally unfolds, escalating to a most brilliant climax.Crossfire is an intelligent, well-crafted film with an excellent script and wonderful performances from a real top-notch cast, especially that of Robert Mitchum as Sargeant Keeley.

chaos-rampant This starts like it always happens, bunch of people in a bar. There is a woman involved. Later in the apartment, the husband turns up dead and the suspect is one of a group of soldiers.I will recommend this to you as an unfairly neglected gem, especially to seasoned noir fans who appreciate how film noir is all about a narrator succumbing to hallucination. Its reputation - tense but obvious - is a little tarnished because the main thrust against racial prejudice is overstated, so it's easy to contend yourself that you know so have the upper hand and nothing beyond the hardboiled mystery is worth paying serious attention to. Not so, not so by a mile my friends.The Jewish angle was introduced to make this pose as a serious postwar lesson, you will know it is plain tacky from how quickly the police captain can suss it out as the root of evil. And nothing more patronizing than the captain lecturing about it a young hick from Tennessee, playing up the same stereotype it warns against. You may appreciate this a little more, anyway, when you learn that it was changed from homosexuality in the originating text. Traces are cleverly preserved in the film so be on the lookout.So the bulk of the film is male hierarchy between soldiers, so people in transit, inbetween lives, inbetween shifting of identities. One of them used to be a cop in that other life, another an artist so a sensitive man. Now they're all in the same uniform stationed in the same limbo and all sorts of wounds from the war have not healed.So here's a film that, already by '47, can elucidate what noir is all about and why it feels the way it does; it's about men returned from the certainty of killing, chaos that was nevertheless safety because ordered from above, to open life where you, it had to be you now, had to be someone again and responsible for your own story. So it was a stressful thing, because it could turn out that you are no one at all and have no story, hence the dissolution of self so common in noir, hence the hallucinations, the world conspiring against you, the feeling of dazed powerlessness disguised as fate from above. One option you have is to read everything with repressed male sexuality in mind, that is fine, Beau Travail. But let me point you at something else, what I call layered dreaming. Our artist was out at night dreaming but has no recollection what about, except it started with stress and thinking about his wife that he misses. Mitchum smoothly talks him into all gradually coming back to him, and sure enough; he was with this other woman, and sure enough a woman that reminds him of his wife, and wants him home to wait for her.But something weird happens there. He has fallen asleep and wakes up to find a second man, a really puzzling figure.This guy is the key to the whole mystery. He holds together several layers, by shifting stories that shift identities that shift the gears of knowing and dreaming what this is all about.He says he's just a man waiting for her. He is the husband back home, to a wife he enlisted and couldn't wait to get back to, but once he did she didn't want him.He's not the husband, and just met her at the same joint. He wants to marry her but she won't have him. That's a lie too.If you have no imagination, and why would you dream about him if you don't, he's just the pimp a little wobbly from the war himself. Boring. You will know him as our guy, remember he is telling the story and the story is about waking up, so our guy hallucinating different selves and each self has a life out there and comes back home, maybe an empty home, maybe waiting for a woman who is not there, maybe she could be the wife, maybe it isn't even a home, at any rate it is him in that place he comes back to at nights and mutters to himself echoes from that maybe-life out there.If I had to pick a single favorite moment in film noir, this would be it. Not even Welles touches it. As a metaphor about the mind, it's worthy of being in Blowup.