Film Noir 2018
Screening Dates
  • August 18, 2018 6:30
  • August 23, 2018 8:30

“One of the most daring thrillers of the 1940s … Dmytryk’s portrait of postwar America is as dank and wayward as a drugged nightmare.”

Richard Armstrong, The Rough Guide to Film

Noir icons Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, and Gloria Grahame headline Edward Dmytryk’s Oscar-nominated mix of noir thriller and message movie, one of the first studio pictures to address antisemitism. After a man is murdered while socializing with a group of drunken soldiers, a police detective (Robert Young) and an army sergeant (Mitchum) conduct separate investigations into the crime. Richard Brooks’s source novel dealt not with antisemitism but homophobia, a topic too taboo for Hollywood at the time. BC-born Dmytryk also directed the 1944 noir classic Murder, My Sweet. Shortly after completing Crossfire, he was one of the ​“Hollywood Ten” blacklisted and jailed during the era’s anti-Communist purges.