Expecting the worse, a 1940's film noir with a lot of touchy feely stuff about antisemitism, Crossfire as it turns out is a pretty good film. The death of a man who is Jewish starts an investigation of some demobilized army soldiers who had some interaction with the man. The film features a rather preachy detective played by Robert Young who is there as the conscience of the audience. Surprisingly this actually kind of works as part of the film's plot line.
Robert Mitchum is one of the soldiers helping the police to understand how the murder happened, Robert Ryan in another of his bad guy roles is the bigot who the police focus on.
Crossfire is considered a film noir, lots of shadows and expressive lighting. The studio was RKO who was quite good at putting together these types of films. This time the subject of antisemitism was an interesting approach to what could have been yet another standard film noir.
John Paxton wrote the screenplay from Richard Brook's novel, the running time is an efficient 86 minutes.
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