by Lee Server
Paxton developed his adaptation with producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk, his creative teammates from Murder, My Sweet, the acclaimed film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. In The Brick Foxhole, which the three agreed was lacking in focus, Brooks’s villain did not discriminate in his hatred. “He hated everyone and everything,” said Paxton, “officers, fags, Jews; he hated period.” The first third of the novel was excised and the screenplay began with the murder. Early on the three made the decision to change the victim from a homosexual to a Jew. “It was a simple, practical matter,” said Dmytryk. “In those days we had the Code and you simply could not mention or even imply that a character was homosexual. There were people like Franklin Pangborn who played what we called sissies, and if you were a little sophisticated you might suspect something there, but that was as much as you could get away with. So we didn’t even attempt it. The picture would never have been made. And how many people could you get interested, in those days, in something about the death of a homosexual? So we decided to make him a Jew, which made it a much more interesting picture, right then after the war. And anyway, it didn’t make any difference—it was still a picture against prejudice.”
Cradle of Fear, retitled Crossfire during its third week in production, was a hard-boiled murder mystery on the face of it. A man named Joseph Samuels is brutally slain in his apartment after being visited by some drunken soldiers. One of them, Mitchell, gone missing, is implicated in the crime; but Finley, the police detective investigating, begins to suspect his army buddy, the unpleasant and rabidly bigoted Montgomery. With the help of a reluctant Sergeant Keeley and another more naive soldier on leave, the detective lays a trap for the killer. Montgomery, who murdered Samuels merely out of a hatred for Jews, tries to escape and is shot down in the street.
Paxton set the compressed story almost entirely at night, in a series of nondescript, urban warrens. Isolated in the screenplay for the benefit of the production department, the list of settings read like a little poem of noir seediness:
Int. Cheap Rooming House
Ext. Police Station
Int. Hotel Washroom
Ext. Park Bench
Int. Hamburger Joint
Int. Moviehouse Balcony
Int. Bar
Int. Ginny’s Bedroom
Ext. Street of Cheap Rooming Houses
It was a good, taut script, and there remained a potentially first-rate, sordid film noir for the making, even if they were forced to eliminate the controversial aspects of the story. But Dore Schary wanted it as Paxton wrote it, believed in the material, and saw it as the kind of bold, adult project that would put his new regime on the map.
The subject matter played into one of Schary’s personal interests. “For years,” he said, “I had worked in the fetid field of combating anti-Semitism and I knew something about the steamy current of hatred.” During the war he had given lectures on the causes of racial and religious intolerance and had heard first-hand reports about the violent bigotry in the armed services. He believed that a film dramatically revealing of such behavior would serve a very worthy purpose. Few in the executive circle agreed. Peter Rathvon, president of RKO, and even an outsider like Jack Warner, who had heard of the story line, tried to get Schary to drop it. Everybody knew there were people like that, Warner told him—Jew-haters, racists—but that didn’t mean you had to make a fucking picture about the schmucks. Schary considered his instincts correct, though, when Darryl Zanuck, boss at 20th Century-Fox, called him to announce that he had bought the screen rights to a new novel on the same subject, Gentleman’s Agreement, and did not appreciate the competition. Schary told him he was sure there was enough anti-Semitism around for two movies at least.
Still, the new production head conceded it was a financially risky proposition. The studio had taken one of its so-called Want to See polls measuring public response to upcoming titles and stories and found that almost no one wanted to see such a picture. Edward Dmytryk made it easier on Schary, proposing what was a B picture schedule and budget: twenty days and $250,000. Dmytryk: “It was no hardship. I was pleased to do it at that pace. On a schedule like that, everyone is at a creative peak and you never get the chance to get paranoid. A long shoot and you begin to worry who has their knives out for you. You get worried, question what you’re doing. You get tired, want to go home, for Chrissake. It’s a terrible strain. But this picture was one of the most pleasant experiences I ever had.”
Crossfire would have three stars: Robert Young (as Detective Finley, the story’s conscience, in a salt-and-pepper toupee that lent him a distinct resemblance to director Dmytryk), Robert Mitchum as the cynical sergeant, and Robert Ryan as the murderous bigot—”the three Bobs” as they came to be called. Ryan was a favorite of Dmytryk’s. The director laid claim to putting him in his first film, Golden Gloves, in 1940. Ryan had worked steadily since then, but in underwhelming leading man parts. In casting him as the despicable Montgomery, Dmytryk would unleash the actor’s powerful capacity for conveying evil and launch him on the most memorable phase of his career, brilliantly playing neurotic antiheroes and ruthless villains. The other featured role went to Gloria Grahame, Mitchum’s brother’s sister-in-law, borrowed from MGM to play the sweet-and-sour platinum blonde bar girl Ginny.
Production began on February 21. Things had moved so rapidly that Mitchum had to be brought back from a vacation in Miami. He was reluctant to go, but Adrian Scott and Dore Schary pleaded, telling him how great the film was going to be and what a wonderful part they had waiting for him. He didn’t get to read the script until the day before his first scene and then realized it was smaller than he had been led to believe and could easily have been done by another actor on the lot.
“Why did you lie to me?” he asked Scott.
“We needed your name on the marquee,” the producer told him.
The filming was fast and furious. To maximize his chances of making a creditable film with a programmer shooting schedule, the director and his venerable cameraman J. Roy Hunt attempted to reverse the usual production ratio of 80 percent preparation—getting the camera and lights ready—and 20 percent actual shooting. “There were people working then,” said Dmytryk, “like Charlie Lang when he was at Paramount, would take two days to light a single scene. Everything with its own key light, back light. Two days!” Dmytryk used some of the techniques he had learned churning out B horror and action pictures and experimented with new ideas for streamlined production. “How do you light quickly? You light the actors and the background, just throw a dash of light on each and that’s it. Shadows work for you. You don’t have to worry about the things you can’t see on screen.” The director staged a number of scenes in long, uninterrupted takes, dollying in for close shots instead of cutting, and generally restricted himself to the absolute minimum of “coverage” for each scene. There was barely a frame exposed that wasn’t used in the final edit. “I only had 147 setups on that entire picture,” said Dmytryk.
Saving more time and money, everything in the film was shot on standing sets—offices, bedrooms, and staircases that had been used before in a hundred B movies and looked it.
There was a feeling of common cause among many of the people making Crossfire, pleased to be part of a film attacking bigotry and, in the metaphoric big-picture political sense, skewering right-wing intolerance. (Screenwriter Paxton would note that “a character like Monty would qualify brilliantly for the leadership of the Belsen concentration camp. Fascism hates weakness in people. . . .”) Dmytryk and Scott were left-wingers and at least briefly “card-carrying Communists”; Schary, Paxton, Bob Ryan, and Young all FDR liberals. Mitchum, like Groucho Marx, professed to be wary of any club that would have him as a member. And in light of subsequent ugly accusations hurled at him in years to come—charges of making anti-Semitic and variously “insensitive” statements—his very participation in the film would come to be viewed by some as ironic. Dmytryk, though—who would observe
changes in the actor’s attitudes in the 1960s—here found him to be sympathetic and in synch with the movie’s humane theme. “Very much so. He hated bullies and spoke very much in favor of the working man. He had seen a lot of things done to people who were down and out by people with a little power to back them in his hobo days, and that stayed with him. I once heard him talking to a reporter on the set. She asked him why he was doing this picture and he told her, ’Because I hate cops.’ What a thing to say. I don’t know if she printed it or not, but what a thing to say to a reporter!”*
However much Mitchum may or may not have endorsed the film’s noble mission, it did not affect his desire to make a little mischief. Everything was so grim and dimly lit on the set that Mitchum perhaps thought it his duty to lighten things up. He had a new toy, an air-powered BB gun, and occasionally stalked the sets and dressing rooms, firing off rounds at his coworkers. Steve Brodie, who played Floyd Bowers in the film, got shot in the leg. It gave him a huge bruise that he said lasted forever. Dmytryk’s status didn’t exempt him from becoming another target. “I was sitting on the set and it hit me right in the fanny. Shot by a BB gun. I looked around and caught Bob standing on the sidelines pretending not to be there.” Brodie, a practical joker himself, would later get revenge, sneaking into Bob’s dressing room and coating his clothing with a toxic powder that made a person do a kind of Saint Vitus’ dance when it touched the skin.
There was another stalker on the Crossfire set, Gloria Grahame’s creepy and abusive husband, actor Stanley “Stash” Clements, a diminutive figure with a snarling Brooklyn accent who got movie roles as jockeys and young toughs. As Grahame’s career was taking off toward stardom and his sputtered nowhere, Clements took out his frustrations by beating her, threatening to shoot her with a shotgun, attempting to kill her mother with a knife, that sort of thing. After each incident Gloria would forgive him and they would have a long, violent, sexual reunion. Bob would hear from brother, John, how he would be called well after midnight to run over to their apartment when the situation got dangerous and disarm Stanley and knock him out. Bob thought Gloria sweet and talented but wacky, and he kept away from her private life. Grahame had lately been trying to dump Clements permanently but without much success. The way he hung around the Crossfire set pestering and intimidating his wife, and her ambivalent feelings, were strangely similar to the situation Gloria’s character was going through in the movie. Perhaps the parallels added something to her great performance as Ginny, the caustic, disappointed bar girl. It took just three days to complete and earned her an Oscar nomination.
Three weeks after filming began, just ten weeks after Dore Schary had first agreed to make it, Crossfire was in the can, a tough, uncompromising movie, bluntly revealing an ugly American underbelly. There had been nothing quite so raw made in Hollywood since the uninhibited pre-Code days of the early talkies. The economizing, the stripped-down mise-en-scene, the secondhand sets, the speed with which it was shot, far from compromising the project, all seemed to work in its favor. The dark, depopulated look of the film evoked a bleary, hungover, four-in-the-morning world. The compressed story line and no-nonsense staging produced a rare immediacy—it played as if in real time, as if it had all been filmed in one clammy all-night session.
Each one of the three Bobs performed memorably. Robert Young, always an undervalued movie actor, projected a probing intelligence and moral fortitude as the tough but humane police detective. As the designated messenger for the film’s explicit political and moral stand against racial hatred, he did his best to underplay the explicitly message-laden portions of the dialogue. Mitchum’s world-weary sergeant perfectly fit his persona—a smart, cynical, hard-boiled former newspaperman, sleepy but sharp-tongued, reluctant to get involved, wary of authority. Keeley is spokesman for the film’s existential and poetic currents, seeing the nightmarish events in noirishly fatalistic terms as part of a general uncertainty and malignity that has infected them all.
“What’s happened?” the hunted Mitchum asks in the dark back row of a theater balcony. “Has everything suddenly gone crazy? I don’t just mean this; I mean everything. Or is it just me?”
“No,” Keeley says, “it’s not just you. The snakes are loose. Anybody can get them. I get them myself. But they’re friends of mine.”
Whatever his marquee value, the studio chose to give Mitchum second billing to Robert Young, a man at the end of his career as a movie lead. It didn’t matter. Mitchum knew that in terms of impact, the picture belonged to the guy billed third, Robert Ryan: his Montgomery, seething, unctuous, animalistic—like a rat suddenly exposed beneath a rock—was a fantastic, daring piece of work. That was the way to do it when you played the bad guy, Mitchum thought: no compromise, take it all the way down the line.
The film was a spectacular success. Earning $1,270,000 in profits, it was RKO’s biggest hit of the year and one of the most acclaimed films in the studio’s history. Reviewers in near unanimity hailed it as a benchmark for Hollywood’s supposedly growing maturity, raved over the filmmakers’ skilled mingling of strong message and riveting entertainment. It was awarded a Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, topped most publications’ Ten Best lists for the year, and received five Academy Award nominations, for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Supporting Actor and Actress (Ryan and Grahame). It won no Oscars, as it turned out, but this probably reflected external circumstances affecting the final vote. The Best Picture award went to that rival message picture with the similar theme, Darryl Zanuck’s Gentleman’s Agreement—it was the year of anti-anti-Semitism.
And it was the year of anti-anti-Americanism. The death of the invincible President Roosevelt had unleashed the dogs of reaction in the nation’s capital, and the growing “Cold War” had done the rest. The anxiety felt by Americans in regard to world events, such as the encroachments of the Soviet Union and Mao’s Red Army and the rising tide of anticolonial revolution in Africa and Asia, was to be ruthlessly exploited by big business interests, anti-Communist zealots, and right-wing politicians on the make to create a long-lasting, poisonous atmosphere of paranoia, suspicion, and hate. A Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee had been charged with rooting out subversive influences in U.S. society. In search of publicity for their efforts, the committee set their sights on the glamorous motion picture industry, and in the autumn of 1947 the assault on Hollywood began. At the studios there had always been an ebb and flow of political tensions between the ranks, occasionally flaring into bitter civil wars, as in the various fights to establish the screen guilds and unions. Overall the big studios had tended to operate as relatively forgiving, laissez-faire kingdoms where the talent of the employees ultimately counted for more than their particular crackpot ideology. On some level the moguls realized that it took all kinds to make hit movies, and in the peculiar assembly line artists’ colony that was Hollywood there had always been room for right-wing crazies and limousine Leninists alike. Until now.
As the HUAC hearings began in Washington, ten of an initial nineteen so-called unfriendly witnesses were subpoenaed to give testimony. Of the ten, only two were not screenwriters—producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk, the producer and director of a current hit film some of the committee members regarded with particular contempt. Said Joan LaCoeur, future wife of Adrian Scott, “Adrian . . . and Eddie Dmytryk were subpoenaed not because they were important in the Party or because they were big names but because of Crossfire. Two or three weeks before the subpoenas came out, federal agents came to the studio and demanded to see Crossfire. It was totally because of the content that they were subpoenaed.”
A kind of unified approach had been agreed upon by the ten—a decision that was subsequently considered a disastrous mistake. They would stonewall the committee’s prying and—they believed—unconstitutional questions about their political beliefs, and each would read a speech extolling their version of American patriotism and decrying the evils of the HUAC. They were not allowed to
read the speeches; after a few sentences the gavel sounded. Some of the witnesses were obstreperous, hard to silence, and had to be dragged away. Dalton Trumbo shouted, “This is the beginning of the American concentration camp!” Scott and Dmytryk remained relatively composed, Dmytryk in particular grimly fatalistic as he saw his place in the world crumbling. When asked if he was now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party, Adrian Scott said, “I believe that I could not engage in any conspiracy with you to invade the First Amendment.” Dmytryk also refused to answer the questions posed. In turn the committee did not permit him to read his statement about the attempt being made to censor a screen that had just begun to express its “responsibilities to the people of this nation and of this world.” Even as Dmytryk was being silenced by a pounding gavel, citizens across the country were buying tickets to see Crossfire. The film seemed to hover over the proceedings as a kind of rebuke to the congressmen, some of whom no doubt thought the Robert Ryan character had gotten a raw deal. Screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, another of the ten, invoked the film in his prepared speech: “I wish to address this Committee as a Jew, because one of its leading members is the outstanding anti-Semite in the Congress and revels in this fact. I refer to John E. Rankin. . . . I am struck forcibly by the fact that this committee has subpoenaed the men who made Crossfire, a powerful attack on anti-Semitism. . . .”