Crossfire: Works Progress Cinema

Busy week and brief write-up. Over on the Criterion Channel, I glimpsed a Robert Mitchum noir, Crossfire (1947), that gave me more than I bargained for. I just wanted to watch Mitchum do his thing. Lurid late-40s shadows and a gritty story appeared as two (semi-expected) pluses.

But Crossfire offers more than typical noir fare. We remember these films for their post-war cynicism. They form a set of grim reflections indicative of an easily forgotten window between the Depression and the post-war boom. Color me shocked, then, when Crossfire proved a touching propaganda piece about the centrality of respect, diversity, and human kindness in American society.

Are these actually our core values? From a strict perspective, we’ve, at best, failed in the attempt. Seen more dourly, these are bromides to which we pay lip service while spreading bigotry and prejudice.

That’s not, however, what I was thinking about while taking in Crossfire. I was merely impressed by the just post-FDR-era (and FDR’s portrait is prominent in the film) vision of an inclusive United States. It made me nostalgic for a utopia that never existed, a sentiment addressed to the American people precisely because it didn’t obtain. I wish I could say more. But that would give too much away about the narrative.

By the by, the movie concerns US troops at the end of World War Two. It’s an odd time, just when the war ended, one we rarely think about. How did we reintegrate so many men, recently returned from industrial-scale carnage? Where did they go? What did they do? If nothing else, Crossfire offers a glance at an under-analyzed moment in US history.

Check it out. Come for Mitchum. Stay for Henry Wallace.