Homicide Capt. Finlay finds evidence that one or more of a group of demobilized soldiers is involved in the death of Joseph Samuels. In flashbacks, we see the night’s events from different viewpoints as Sergeant Keeley investigates on his own, trying to clear his friend Mitchell, to whom circumstantial evidence points. Then the real, ugly motive for the killing begins to dawn on both Finlay and Keeley. –IMDb
A messenger boy at Paramount in the mid 1920s, Edward Dmytryk became an editor in the 1930s and began directing in 1935. By the mid ‘40s he had such impressive credits as The Devil Commands (1941) with Boris Karloff; the anti-fascist Hitler’s Children (1943); the noirs Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), starring Dick Powell; and Crossfire (1947), one of the first Hollywood films to confront anti-Semitism. In 1948 Dmytryk became one of the “Hollywood Ten” when he was accused of having ties to the communist party and was sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress. Following his imprisonment, Dmytryk was blacklisted in the U.S., so he directed three films in England, but returned to the States in 1951. Upon his return he went before the House Un-American Activities Committee again, this time as a “friendly” witness, and his name was dropped from the blacklist. He then resumed his American career and directed four films for producer Stanley Kramer, most notably The… read more
Pretty entertaining film with a nice twist at the end...still it's a little too didactic to enjoy on a regular basis
As we all know (or at least should know), didactic movies don't make masterpieces. At best, they're entertaining. So is CROSSFIRE. Thanks to Gloria GRAHAME, to Paul Kelly's (The Man) scenes, to Robert Young and his more than weary attitude and to Robert Ryan, one of the most underrated American actors. Recommended.
An appreciation of the great American actor Robert Ryan on the occasion of a New York retrospective.
Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake is always going to divide opinion, those who see it as a conceptual art statement being able to argue, quite reasonably
