A Film Canon

Like The Best Years Of Our Lives, Crossfire envisages the returned soldier's mileu as a meandering, melancholy nightlife, fusing a professed inability to do anything other than 'crawl' with an emergent cityscape that is both extended horizontally and compressed vertically, via a peculiarly metonymic narrative, whose dialogue tends to take the form of repetitive, obfuscating, circuitous vagaries, and a near-replacement of overhanging light with low lamps, cigarettes and headlights, such that virtually every space is crushed by blackness. This, in turn, reduces bar, floor and gutter to an abject common denominator, of which the central hate crime is a mere symptom, softening the slightly awkward transition from Richard Brooks' original novel, which dealt with homosexuality, and problematising 'location', to the extent that tension doesn't arise from uncertainty about the culprit, nor even from the investigative procedure in itself, but from the twin attempts to map the trajectory of the (wrongfully accused) suspect, and the subsequent trajectory of the culprit. That said, Robert Ryan's portrait of the insecure, chummy bigot is surprisingly three- dimensional, while the rapport between policeman (Robert Young) and sergeant (Robert Mitchum) helps mitigate the inclination towards heavy-handedness, as do a series of memorable bit parts opened up by the sprawling ambit, most notably the dynamic between a brittle nightclub waitress (Gloria Grahame) and her partner's compulsive self-reinvention.