sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote 2018-03-26 06:18 am (UTC)

Samuels feels very real to me--ordinary, as you say.

I really like him. I usually see Levene in bit parts, so it was nice to have him significantly onstage, if not for long.

I didn't know they excised references to anti-Black bigotry from the script, which is super unfortunate.

Wikipedia mentioned the Breen Office blocking the story in its original form, so I went looking for confirmation and found it along with other details in James Naremore's More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (1998/2008), a non-contiguous but illuminating chunk of which can be read on Google Books. Breen himself being an extremely conservative Irish Catholic, I am not surprised that he was much more sympathetic to an illustration of historical Irish persecution than a head-on confrontation with ongoing American anti-Blackness.

The first time I saw Crossfire, I thought that the mere fact they'd cast Robert Ryan in the film made it obvious he was the villain--but probably in 1947 that wouldn't have been so readily apparent!

It was his breakout role! I imagine he just looked like some guy.

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