- Police Captain Finley (Robert Young) has a real puzzle on his hands. A man named Samuels (Sam Levene) lies dead on the floor of an apartment. None of the three military men seen in a bar with Samuels earlier that day knew the dead man previously, but they're also the only suspects. So why would one of them kill Samuels without a good reason? The garrulous Sgt. Montgomery (Robert Ryan) explains that he and fellow soldier Floyd Bowers (Steve Brodie) briefly dropped by Samuels' place, but left worried about young Cpl. Mitchell (George Cooper), who wandered off from the apartment completely drunk. Of the three men, Bowers and Mitchell are still missing while Montgomery keeps showing up, whether or not he's invited.
- Before long, the military police bring in Sgt. Keeley (Robert Mitchum), who knows Mitchell better than anyone. Sure, Mitchell has some personal problems, but he couldn't even kill a man in war, "where you get medals for it." Naturally, Keeley wants to locate Mitchell before the police do, all of which is further complicated by the imminent arrival of Mitchell's wife (Jacqueline White) and the fact that his alibi depends upon a call girl named Ginny (Gloria Grahame). Eventually, Keeley gets a hold of Mitchell and stows him in an all-night movie theater where he'll be safe. Montgomery finds Bowers, too, but doesn't keep him safe. Now there's two dead bodies and no motive.
- As we delve deeper into the case, pieces suddenly start to fall into place. The murderer had to be "someone who could hate Samuels without knowing him." The captain has a pretty good idea who that is, based on one character's disparaging comments about how "some of 'em are named Samuels" while "some of 'em have funnier names." Could Samuels really have been killed just because he was Jewish? As the captain patiently explains to a naive young cadet (Steve Brodie), "hating is always insane, always senseless." Now they just need a way of catching a man who can seemingly talk his way out of, or in to, just about anything.
- Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire is a welcome reminder that it was once possible for films to treat intolerance without resorting to melodrama. That's a bit unfair to excellent movies like Do the Right Thing and Schindler's List, but I have trouble naming any other recent films in which bigotry played an important role without painting the bigot as a cartoonish villain. The film's important themes aside, Crossfire also holds up as a very impressive film noir that opens with murder in silhouette and traps men like Mitchell and Bowers in smoky, shadowy rooms that mirror their troubled psyches. Factor in excellent performances by the always reliable Ryan, Mitchum, and Grahame, and surprisingly good turns by Young and Paul Kelly, the latter of whom plays Ginny's mysterious "husband," and you have a film that stretched the definition of B-picture into an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
- Based on a book by Richard Brooks that actually dealt with homophobia rather than anti-Semitism.
