Crossfire

I’ll admit I was drowsy but this supposed classic sure didn’t wake me up. More interesting for political implications than as a film per se. This beat Gentleman’s Agreement to the punch for postwar investigation of anti-Semitism, following a hate crime by recently-demobbed soldiers. Interestingly, the victim was changed from novel to film, from homosexual to Jew -- movie tolerance seems to follow disaster, whether Holocaust or AIDS. And this film got its makers, including director Edward Dmytryk, in trouble with HUAC during the Hollywood witch-hunt and blacklist. After growing up with “Father Knows Best,” I had a hard time accepting Robert Young as the pipe-smoking detective, and Robert Mitchum and Gloria Grahame are wasted in ancillary roles, though Robert Ryan establishes himself as the heavy. Surprisingly, this low-budget expressionist noir received a slew of Oscar nominations, but lost them all to Elia Kazan’s more polished production on the same theme. (1947, TCM/T, n.) *6-*