James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

On the level of overt politics rather than style, Crossfire is a much less unusual film, which may explain why the studio was able to publicize it as a hard-hitting exposé and an important "message" picture. The theatrical trailer featured Dore Schary, who spoke about Crossfires unconventional theme without saying exactly what the theme might be. Schary claimed that RKO was working in the tradition of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and The Grapes of Wrath, and he quoted rave notices from a sneak preview in California, where audiences made similar comparisons. (The preview cards were indeed overwhelmingly favorable, containing only a few objections that the film was "too talkative" or that it amounted to "Jewish propaganda.") By this means, he tried to situate a potentially controversial production within an easily recognizable and mostly liberal genre: the Hollywood social-problem film, which was reaching its apex of respectability at that very moment, in the postwar work of Elia Kazan.

Paul Kelly in Crossfire (1947).

The key feature of the social-problem film (except in such early Depression cases as Chain Gang or the protofascist Gabriel over the White House) is that its problems never appear systemic. And this is exactly the case in Crossfire, which prominently displays a photograph of FDR and a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the walls behind Captain Finlay when he makes his speech against racism. (Outside the window, as the dawn of Enlightenment breaks, we also see the U.S. Capitol for the first time.) Here and elsewhere, the film suggests that hatred of minorities is contrary to American ideals and to the very foundations of the government. Unfortunately and perhaps unintentionally, it also implies that bigots come chiefly from the ignorant, impoverished, and mentally disturbed lower orders. In his somewhat patronizing speech to Leroy, Finlay says that racism takes different forms, including the "you-can't-join-our-Country-Club" type described in Gentleman's Agreement; nevertheless, Crossfire repeatedly uses codes of social class or educational background to distinguish between the good and bad characters (including the two women). Robert Ryan, wearing a khaki uniform shorn of insignia, makes the villain seem like the United States equivalent of the petit bourgeois Europeans who had worn black and brown shirts before the wara crude bully, ill educated and transparently deceitful, who can temporarily influence southern farm-boys like Floyd and Leroy (Steve Brodie and William Phipps), but who is no match for more polished fellows like Finlay and Keely (Robert Young and Robert Mitchum).

Robert Ryan in Crossfire.

If Scott, Dmytryk, and Paxton were indeed communist propagandists, as the United States Congress later claimed, then the studio must have been holding them to a relatively conservative vision of the proletariat. Meanwhile, the War Department and the conventional wisdom of Hollywood may have affected the way Crossfire ended. In Scott's final draft of the script, when Monty tries to escape down a dark alley, a military policeman with a tommy gun advances methodically, "slowly chewing gum, expressionless," and shoots him down. For the released picture, Captain Finlay shoots Monty from the window of the police station. The new ending was improvised by Schary and Dmytryk, in order to avoid what Schary called a "storm trooper" attack on Monty. Paxton told film scholars Keith Kelly and Clay Steinman that the film's conclusion was "dramatically crude, in lousy taste and improbable marksmanship," but that "for the idiom of the time, I think it was obligatory to conclude this sort of melodrama in action" (126). Whatever its purpose, the revision causes at least two ideological problems: first, it transforms the New Deal detective into a kind of cowboy; and second, in a quite different way, it undercuts the film's benign rationality, making Monty seem a helpless rat in a maze who is executed from on high by an all-seeing authority. Partly because of the closing sequences,

Crossfire's Kafkaesque mise-en-scene overpowers the qualified optimism of its social message. In fact, the last image is similar to the one in The Blue Dahlia: two unlikely companions of war, Keely and Leroy, walk off together (this time in search of coffee), but the streets still look grimly shadowed.

It seems important to emphasize that the dark city in the closing shots was intended to evoke social rather than metaphysical anxieties. FDR had been dead for two years when Crossfire was made; the film was not merely an expression of angst or alienation, but a partisan statement on behalf of the beleaguered American Left, which viewed the Truman administration and the Republican opposition in especially dark fashion. A month after Crossfire was released, John Paxton made this very point in a guest column for the Los Angeles Daily News, in which he discussed the future of the country; films like Crossfire, he said, were being produced in the hope that "audiences, conditioned by the reality of war, would rise up against the old glittering fairy tales" (27 August 1947). Some of those old fairy tales may have remained in Crossfire, but Paxton and his collaborators had certainly not offered a "glittering" view of the world. Despite its many compromises and concessions to censorship, Crossfire mounted a strong attack on domestic fascism (a term it never used), and, contrary to what might have been expected, it earned significant profits at the box office. Scott, Dmytryk, and Paxton were nominated for Academy Awards, along with Robert Ryan and Gloria Grahame, and Dore Schary received a special award for "social drama" at the Cannes festival.

After the censors and the studio had modified Crossfire to the point where it could be released and awarded, social scientists attempted to measure its effect on audiences. At that very moment, however, the staff of HUAC was also screening the film, which was mentioned during the notorious 1947 investigations into Hollywood communism. On the heels of their greatest critical and commercial success, Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk became members of the "Hollywood Ten" and were ultimately imprisoned for contempt of Congress. To make matters worse, they and other members of their group were attacked by their bosses. The 1947 "Waldorf Declaration," a document authored by the most powerful men in Hollywood (including Dore Schary), announced that people like Scott and Dmytryk had performed a "disservice to their employers" and had "impaired their usefulness to the industry" (Schwartz, 279). The balance of political power in American culture was about to shift and bring an end to the mixture of expressionist theater, popular melodrama, and left-wing politics that had been nourished during the Roosevelt administration. Crossfire was certainly not the last nor even the best socialproblem movie, but it marked the close of a distinctive phase in the national history.

The purge of Hollywood leftists was part of a larger right-wing campaign to rid the country of industrial unions and Roosevelt-style socialisma campaign conducted against the background of internal struggles within the Democratic Party and of growing economic insecurity within the movie colony. 26After the war, the Truman administration adopted an increasingly conservative foreign and domestic policy, and in 1946 the Republicans captured both houses of Congress. That same year, Hollywood experienced some of the worst labor problems in its history, most of which were unfairly blamed on communists. The widely publicized HUAC hearings, filled with celebrities of the Left and the Right, were paradoxically useful to the Hollywood moguls, who faced not only picket lines but also antitrust proceedings and increased competition from television. In this environment, which was filled with bitter personal animosities that had been growing over the past decade, it was easy for studio administrators to exploit the fear of communism and thereby defeat the formation of an industrywide union. The political, cultural, and economic structure that had sustained Hollywood during the war was on the verge of collapse; the studios needed to shrink and reorganize themselves, and their executives must have thought: why not use the blacklist to rid ourselves of troublemakers?