Crossfire (1947) Review
Crossfire (1947) begins with a brutal murder. We only see the shadows of one man beating another to death in a hotel room. In due course we discover that a fascist has killed a Jewish man. Nothing new under the sun? Perhaps, but there’s a problem: we're in Washington D.C. two years after the military defeat of fascism. And that's the catch: military defeat of fascism does not mean its demise. They're here, amongst us. As Brecht put it: the bitch of fascism is always in heat.
The film proceeds as a whodunit for a brief while. Who killed Samuels and why? Mitchell (George Cooper) is the prime suspect; he’s just a guy Samuels met on a bar, alongside other army pals. One of them is Monty (Robert Ryan), a bully and an antisemite. He says to detective Finlay (Robert Young) about Samuels: "You know the type. You know... Some are called Samuels. Some have even funnier names".
Mitchell is helped throughout the film by his friend Keeley (Robert Mitchum). He is having the worst hangover a man could dream of: accused of murder, he has desperately to recall what happened before his blackout and find his alibi. And yet the film is not about a criminal investigation: it soon becomes clear that Monty did it. Rather, it is about what is to be done with fascism in peacetime. During the war it was clear: shoot them. Now the ordeal is subtler, diffuse, and an overwhelming angst seems to inhabit every character in the film.
Samuels, before being assassinated, tackles this angst in a bar conversation with Mitchell. How to go back to live in peace after the war? What to do with the enemy now? Peacetime is an art. As a jew, Samuels is well aware that the causes of the war won't simply go away with a mere announcement of victory on the radio and the raising of the flag.
Back home, soldiers are all adrift, "crawling" as Keeley says, frustrated and traumatized, not knowing how to settle in peace. Worse: they’re finding at home the very same incarnate ideas they were supposed to have destroyed at the war front, “where you get medals for killing”. Crossfire's message is clear: military defeat of fascism is not enough –– its spirit looms large and we're a long way from extinguishing it.
The bitch of fascism is always in heat. Winning the war was merely a military victory: the horrors which made fascism possible are quite loose at home, closer than one might expect. Monty is a nazi who salutes the American flag: after the war the practicality of identifying fascists easily by their uniforms is all but gone. Now they blend in, have jobs, carry guns sometimes, win elections. They do not come with a swastika on their foreheads.
Finally, at one time in the film one hillbilly soldier asks detective Finlay, who's asking his help to arrest Monty: "How do I know you're not a Jewish person yourself?" The detective answers: "You don't". It's a perfectly Zizekian answer. It's not a matter of fact, of knowing whether antisemites have a good case or not, if jews really do control, say, the financial system or not. The question itself must be rejected for it refers antisemitism to some kind of empirical knowledge and thus it is subject to relativism: there will always be rich and powerful Jewish people to support an antisemite's argument. Antisemitism must be wrong a priori, without any epistemic requirement, without an argument, however strange that sounds.
