Although in the noir style, Crossfire is often referred to by film historians as a ‘social problem film’ in that it tackles the subject of antisemitism within American society. The film’s plot revolves around the murder of a Jewish man and the hunt for the suspected murderer Corporal Mitchell (George Cooper), on a drunken night of leave with two other soldiers, Floyd (Steve Brodie) and Montgomery (Robert Ryan), the actual killer. The problem of antisemitism is treated with some heavy-handed moralising that is not the film’s strong point. The film fairs better in its depiction of a fragile, disillusioned post-war American masculinity, really the main concern of the film. Every male character seems damaged––the army sergeant Peter Keely (Robert Mitchum), who’s been roped in by the police to try and find Mitchell, mentions a malady he’s observed amongst his men he calls ‘the snakes’. In an early flashback to a bar we see Brodie, Montgomery and Mitchell drinking with the murder victim, each displaying their own variation of ‘the snakes’; Brodie is a fantasist, always dreaming his dream of magically attaining enough money to go to Mexico. Montgomery is a restless bully harbouring murderous hatred in his broken psychology. Saddest of all is Mitchell, a sensitive soul clearly traumatised by war and pining for his wife. He drifts through the early part of the film lost in a world of his own, only half aware of what’s going on around him. He gets separated from his buddies just before the murder, and somehow finds himself talking to a hostess called Ginny (Gloria Graham) in a dive bar. Ginny seems tough but she is clearly lonely too and responds to the sensitive Mitchell’s advances, giving him keys to her apartment and telling him to wait for her there once she finishes work.
We next see Mitchell awakened by knocking inside Ginny’s apartment, still disorientated, he answers the door. A man stands at the door (Paul Kelly), a man whom we never learn the name of. A man whom we never get close to knowing at all, because for the next four minutes he will do nothing but contradict himself in a bizarre and confusing monologue that leaves Mitchell and the audience utterly disorientated. The man knows Ginny in some capacity, but what that capacity is never becomes clear. He does concede that he is a man and that he is, indeed, waiting for Ginny. From here on in it’s a litany of pointless lies. He tells Mitchell he’s her husband, that he was a soldier but that he couldn’t wait to get back to his wife, even though he knew she was a tramp. He stalls for a moment, then confesses that story was a lie, then he tells another version, then says that’s a lie too, then denies even loving Ginny, then changes direction completely and asks for some money, then enthusiastically asks if Mitchell thinks he could join the army, then immediately dismisses the idea and scornfully asks Mitchell ‘Why would I want to be a soldier?’, as if it was Mitch’s idea in the first place!
Finally, he slumps in a chair and says, ‘I don’t know what I want’. Even Mitchell, who so far has been the most fragile and damaged man in the film, looks concerned. The man’s identity is hopelessly adrift, we don’t know who he is, and we never will. The suspicion being that neither will he. Kelly’s performance is extraordinary, the series of personas and moods he goes through in this short period of time is breath-taking. He performs it all with a quiet intensity that gives the whole thing a surreal quality which places the scene outside the rest of the film, or perhaps at its heart. The film critic Chuck Stephens once described Kelly’s face as: ‘more comical than creepy, really, but never exactly funny’. This serves well as a description of his performance too, there is something almost amusing about his pathetic confusion, but he somehow undercuts it with an ambivalent quality that stops you from laughing and has you keeping one eye on the door. When he asks Mitch if he has any money, there is a flash of genuine threat, but it’s gone as soon as it came and he’s back to maudlin reminiscences.
Kelly had lived a fraught life by the time he made Crossfire, surviving a scandal in the 1920’s (he’d beaten a love rival to death and served time for it) he went on to have a varied and successful career. He would have undoubtedly been a familiar face to an audience in 1947 but what that audience would have made of the Paul Kelly they were presented with here is anyone’s guess. John Paxton, the writer of the screenplay, clearly wanted ‘The Man’ (as Kelly’s character is referred to in the script) to represent the crisis of masculinity which the other men in the film display at various points. His role is that of a metaphorical everyman, a personification of something broken at the heart of mid-20th century American life. Later in the film The Man appears again, helping police with their enquires. He begins to ramble to the police captain about himself and Ginny but the Captain has long since switched off and is walking away from him. The Man is left alone at the top of the stairs outside his apartment uttering the line: ‘We made a lot of plans, but they all fell through’. It’s a line that seems to sum up much more than just his relationship, feeling more like a statement for a generation of post-war Americans wondering where they found themselves and what would happen next. He may only be on the screen for a few minutes but it’s a credit to his performance that Kelly manages to pull off the role and deliver something equal to the significance the writer intended for it.
Sandy Milroy.
View Movie: https://archive.org/details/crossfire-1947
