Crossfire (1947) is a good movie, but it takes some tenacity to stay with it. In a sense, there are three plots in a row. Who murdered the Jewish man: We figure out who the murderer is before half way. Then the principal plot element is whether the innocent artist, Mitchell, will escape false accusation. Then when the police investigator figures out who the murderer is, the question becomes how to prove the murderer actually did it.
Besides these three substantial plot shifts, the film may confuse or disappoint viewers who expect a classic film noir but get instead a film that has many elements of noir that do not try to coalesce into a film noir. The detective (Robert Young), instead of being outside the action and/or corrupt (as are traditional in noir), is central to the movie and an usual fact-oriented father figure. There is no femme fatale, although Gloria Graham appears as a gin-hall dance girl showing a flicker of interest in the good looking artist. There is no noir protagonist; rather four actors split the limelight. Robert Young, methodical and level-headed; Robert Mitchem, a together and responsible military man who helps solve the crime; Robert Ryan, a seemingly respectable ex-soldier who is violently anti-Semitic; and, the closest to a noir protagonist, the lesser known George Cooper, who is disoriented by his return to civilian life and unable to cope when accusations of murder are levelled against him. Even the ground-breaking theme of anti-Semitism is not something you’d expect in a film noir.
The film is probably better considered as simply a drama. Noir hangs over it because it was shot at RKO studios, the house of B noirs, in only 20 days with a tight budget of $250,000 (a little bit more than some of the pictures got). And Edward Dmytryk, a famous noir director, made the picture. The black and white photography is noir style but not particularly good. The mediocre cinematography could be because the film was shot on studio lots in order to save money, and because essentially no new sets were constructed for the picture.
The strength of the movie is the acting. Although Mitchem is flat and uninteresting, nearly every other character is interesting and well-portrayed. Two actors were nominated for Academy Awards. I particularly liked Robert Young, in his only noir-style movie, because he was so matter-of-fact and relied on facts and deduction rather than toughness to crack the case. In a minor role, Paul Kelley is wonderfully pathetic as the unwanted husband of the Gloria Grahame character. And the seldom-seen Jacqueline White has several scenes in the middle of the movie that show what a good actress she was and argue again for her to be nominated as most beautiful woman in film noir.
The weakness of the movie is that the film does not do what Edward Dmytryk said it was meant to do: Show why the murderer would kill someone simply because they were Jewish. The answer is hatred. But we get no idea where that hatred came from.