There's a place I think of often, where we're still twenty-three in Boston

I dreamed twice that it was snowing too hard for me to make it out to Roxbury for the March for Our Lives, but I am awake now and it merely looks chilly and overcast. I can walk in that. So, I hope, will many other people. To buses.

[edit] I marched with gaudior and Fox and we picked up choco_frosh along the way. We were surrounded by signs and teens and children and families and drums and the industrial glitter-pink banner of Gays Against Guns, which we wound up marching near for much of the route from Roxbury Crossing to Boston Common. The Globe estimated about 50,000 attendees, but my mother is hearing higher numbers. Perhaps as many as a million in D.C. Fox was not the youngest person we saw at the march, but they were the youngest we saw consistently on foot rather than stroller or baby-sling, often running back and forth along the sidewalks to make friends with dogs or cars. And it did snow, but only around three o'clock when we were safely sitting down in a very crowded Panera on Boylston Street. I am home now and sitting down with cats. A man who looked like Frank Morgan just rang our doorbell by mistake. There were a lot of people in the streets today saying lives are worth more than guns. This was worth doing.

They don't teach it in schools, but it's real American history just the same

Watching Crossfire (1947) with advance knowledge of the social angle is a little like watching Dracula if you have ever once heard of a vampire: while the police in postwar D.C. puzzle over the senselessness of a man beaten to death in his own living room by apparent strangers with no obvious motive and the demobbed young soldier who is at present both the key witness and the prime suspect stumbles deeper into the off-kilter demi-monde all cities in film noir become after dark, long before Robert Young's shrewd briar-chewing police captain muses that "the motive had to be inside the killer himself . . . the killer had to be someone who could hate Samuels without knowing him" the viewer may have found themselves shouting LIKE IF IT WAS A HATE CRIME MAYBE?

So, yes. Adapted by John Paxton from Richard Brooks' The Brick Foxhole (1945) and directed by Edward Dmytryk for RKO, the B-movie Crossfire is considered the groundbreaking Hollywood treatment of anti-Semitism, having beaten the much more prestigious Gentleman's Agreement (1947) to the box office by a matter of months. I don't think that claim can be entirely correct, since I've seen Mr. Skeffington (1944) and that's got the Holocaust, but even adjusting for the differing weight accorded men's and women's genres, I have to admit the earlier movie's emulsified mix of one-third social message to two-thirds soap does not really work. Crossfire is noir all through and therefore gets to handle its social message—however gingerly—without shifting gears, as just another part of the peeling veneer of the American dream. Our brave boys are home from Europe and are they smiling for the cameras, kissing babies, embracing their faithful wives and generally making like plaster saints? They're holed up in the Stewart Hotel, aimless and itchy, playing cards and bitching until they can't stand the liberty anymore and hit the bars. "Soldiers don't have anywhere to go unless you tell them," Robert Mitchum's Sergeant Keeley explains, not excluding himself. "When they're off duty, they go crawling or they go crazy." They get drunk, they get into fights. They're home in only the most technical, geographical sense. Keeley wasn't part of the particular bar crawl that ended in the death of civilian Joseph Samuels, played with man-to-man sensitivity by Sam Levene (me to spatch, horrified: "You can't beat Nathan Detroit to death!"), but he's mostly surprised to hear his buddy Corporal "Mitch" Mitchell fingered for the crime. Keeley has done his share of murder and admits it modestly: "Where you get medals for it." But despite the Army's best efforts, he swears Mitch wasn't the killing type. The audience is inclined to agree as soon as we get a look at George Cooper in the part, a former WPA artist with a big-eyed, knit-browed, boyishly anxious face, like a less hopeless Elisha Cook Jr. Going by Hollywood physiognomy, we might then suspect Robert Ryan's Sergeant Montgomery just because he looks like someone knocked him out of granite and sandpaper and he leans hard on his past as a St. Louis cop in his innocently chummy interview with the police. Actually we suspect him because all unasked he opens up a mouth about "guys that played it safe during the war. Scrounged around keeping themselves in civvies, got swell apartments, swell dames. You know the kind . . . Some of them are named Samuels. Some of them got funnier names," this last remark especially offered in the dogwhistle confidence that Young's Captain Finlay will agree. The older man doesn't alter so much as the angle of his pipe, his sharp face that was so often a trickster's absolutely deadpan. I can't say this film doesn't pull its punches, but at least it doesn't play coy.

As a noir, Crossfire is unimpeachable. The better part of the movie takes place at night, in an estranging version of our nation's capitol rendered by cinematographer J. Roy Hunt as a succession of enclosed, anonymous spaces, full of too much empty darkness and too little glaring light. Hotel bars, walk-up apartments, after-hours police stations, and all-night cinemas are all starkly, weirdly underlit—you can give yourself the third degree in this movie by just reaching for a lightbulb's chain, but take two steps out of its radioactive circle and the void where the walls meet might eat you alive. Probably the budget determined the limited range of props in each scene, but it produces an eerily theatrical impression, as if each skyless street or ceilingless interior is daring you to call Verfremdungseffekt on it. Nowhere looks safe or homely, least of all people's homes. The movie opened with Samuels being murdered in his. When Mitch wakes in the darkened bedroom belonging to Gloria Grahame's Ginny, the brittle, footsore B-girl who lent him her key in a moment of sympathy, he can't even tell what time it is, only that it's still night, or maybe it's night again, the eternal wrong man down the rabbit hole. Her apartment is shared or perhaps haunted by Paul Kelly's maybe-husband, maybe-john, maybe-pimp, as ambiguous and unnerving a figure as ever loitered in a kitchenette; while the coffee perks, he freely offers and just as readily recants multiple contradictory versions of his relationship with Ginny, his war service, his own identity. Like a presiding spirit of noir's unknowability, he's credited only as "The Man." The least unsettling explanation is that he's a pathological liar. In this nocturnal rogue's gallery, Jacqueline White's Mary Mitchell doesn't look like a lifeline of domesticity, she looks like one of those ghosts in Vergil you can't touch for trying, appearing to her husband as if out of the projector's smoke-thickened flicker, as dreamy and insubstantial as the silver screen. Even Captain Finlay, the script's official representative of authority and order, looks mostly like a man who'd really like it if his fellow citizens would give him a break and stop bumping each other off: more disaffected than paternal, more cynical than crusading. It is almost too apt to have the sun rise on the belated breakthrough of the killer's bigotry, illuminating the Capitol over Finlay's shoulder and the portrait of FDR like an ikon on his wall, but the corn is kept in check by the thin brightness of this all-nighter dawn, equally illuminating Finlay who just finished shaving at his desk and Keeley whose languorous eyes look genuinely ready to hit the hay. The story will find its proper end in the murky, mazy streets, not the scouring light of reason. Noir is not a genre content to condemn one bad apple. It tells you to look more closely at the tree of your world.

As a social message picture—okay, there's some history here. Brooks' original novel famously featured a fatal gay-bashing instead of a murdered "Jewboy" and while James Agee believed (and therefore I read first) that the substitution had been made solely in order to preempt Gentleman's Agreement and its equally highbrow, never-produced competitor Earth and High Heaven, in fact the PCA would never have condoned even a qualified denunciation of homophobia when it had same-sex relations down as the perversion that damn well better not speak its name. Joseph Breen was a virulent anti-Semite, but he must have hated queers more: having categorically refused to approve The Brick Foxhole, he permitted the Crossfire rewrite on condition that it watch its language, steer clear of Jewish "special pleading," and avoid any hint that Samuels the sacrificial Jew might also be a "pansy."

The results are consistently interesting, sometimes very effective and sometimes a mess. However carefully calibrated to the tolerance of white audiences and gatekeepers, Finlay's crucially persuasive story about his grandfather who escaped the famine in Ireland only to get beaten to death in America for being "a dirty Irish Mick—a priest-lover, a spy from Rome—a foreigner trying to rob men of jobs" still hits home and Young delivers it with anger and irony, a real-life Irish immigrant's son. That it's personal history for the captain makes it clear he's no rote or disinterested do-gooder: he's got skin in this game. Less felicitously, because the censors methodically expunged every mention of anti-Black racism from the original screenplay, Finlay's story can leave the impression that the Irish had it just about the worst of anyone when it came to prejudice in America, except maybe recently the Jews. A similar vagueness hovers around the script's ostensible theme, the predictable result of Breen's admonition against racial slurs and his damned-if-you-do concern-trolling about marginalized interests. Anti-Semitism according to Crossfire might be just the day's flavor of prejudice, no different in presentation or effect than any other form of hatred: "One day it kills Irish Catholics, the next day Jews . . . It can end up killing people who wear striped neckties," Finlay concludes to his diegetic audience of one young Southerner, "or men from Tennessee." The film's silence on recent events in Europe is so thunderous, and the irony of a G.I. coming home from punching Nazis to kill a Jew so profound, I have to wonder if they were another casualty of the censor's red pen. That the film achieves any of the nastiness inherent in its premise is a tribute more to the mise-en-scène and the acting than the script's uphill battles with the Production Code. But it does achieve it, and while Crossfire didn't win a single one of its nominated Oscars, Ryan's performance at least deserved its nod. Monty never gets a grandstanding moment of blood-and-soil rhetoric or any such villainous underscore; we have to pick it up from his sneering remarks about draft-dodging and money and names—Jews as clever parasites, phony Americans—and from the taunting ferocity with which he turns on a comrade who had the absence of mind to stick up for the murder victim: "Well, I don't like Jews. And I don't like nobody who likes Jews!" That's bald but to me believable. The character is aggressively jovial in the way that is always borderline to bullying; he uses punching down as a form of social bonding and becomes nonplussed and hostile if it misses its mark or backfires. Even in his own unreliable flashback, in which he figures as Mitch's concerned C.O. and "Sammy" is alive and well when Monty leaves him, we watch him humiliate one of his supposed buddies to make nice with Samuels. That kind of restless, jockeying meanness requires no dramatic exaggeration: just give it something to focus on and you'll have violence. I am not the only viewer to feel, incidentally, that Breen succeeded only partly on the no-homo front. Samuels has a girlfriend and his wrists are as firm as you please, but in the more truthful version of events relayed by Mitchell, he sure looks like he—sympathetically, not creepily—cruises the younger soldier.

Because Samuels is the only Jewish character in the movie and because he's alive for so little screen time relative to his influence on the plot, I appreciate that he feels as close to an ordinary person as it's possible for the blameless victim of unfounded bigotry in a message picture to be. He's a nice man but not saintly, with wry brows and rough-cut New York in his voice, and an attentive viewer can deduce even before Finlay hears back from the War Department that Samuels too is a veteran for all his civilian clothes, honorably invalided out from Okinawa in '45; this last detail doesn't even feel patronizing—see, Jews can too fight!—because one, no shit, and two, it clues in the audience how Monty can't see straight for stereotyping. The sergeant's always belittling William Phipps' Leroy for being a "dumb hillbilly," but that blithe conviction that no one with a Tennessee drawl could rub two brain cells together even well enough to lie will come back to bite him before the finale. Samuels doesn't get the chance to prove his killer wrong in life, but the script ultimately, acidly endorses his observation that a society unites when it has something to hate more than the different parts of itself and splinters in the absence of a common enemy. "Now we start looking at each other again . . . A whole lot of fight and hate that doesn't know where to go." History agreed with him, too. Within a month of Crossfire's commercially and critically successful release, both director Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott would be counted among the Hollywood Ten, charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted as Communists by their own studios. Dmytryk got his career back by naming names, Scott's included. Samuels' hope that "one of these days . . . maybe we'll stop hating and start liking things again, huh?" sounds even more ruefully wistful in hindsight.

Lastly, Crossfire contains one of the greatest screen goofs I have seen in my life: in a low-lit hotel room, the reflection of a cameraman or boom operator is clearly visible in a mirror. Since the screen at that point primarily contained Robert Mitchum, I thought I was looking at some kind of fancy two shot until everyone on the appropriate visual axis left the scene and the silhouette in the mirror remained. That would make a great horror effect if deployed deliberately, but I'm pretty sure it was just accidental immortality for a member of the crew. It did not detract from the experience. The picture isn't perfect, but it's shadowy and angry and didn't leave me feeling insulted as either a film noir fan or a Jew, which is probably the best I could have hoped for, considering. This motive brought to you by my liking backers at Patreon.