![]() ![]() With Crossfire, Scott was determined to make a film in which the political message was not incidental and would not be lost in either the narrative conventions of the investigative thriller or the visual style of noir. His antagonists could just as well have been jewel thieves or coffee planters. It is therefore incidental that he brings to justice a Nazi band. ![]() The pursuit is by a man seeking revenge for the woman he loved. Though both films suggest that the investigative narrative and the visual style of noir held great potential for dramatizing the politics of antifascism, Scott was also aware of the limitations of these devices, and was stung by comments such as these, which were part of the Hollywood Reporter's review of Cornered: If a post-war warning is the purpose of this picture, a very round-about way is chosen to give it importance. In Murder, My Sweet the search for a jade necklace opens the door to an exploration of the collision of the criminal underworld and a corrupt upper class in Cornered, a soldier's search for revenge opens the door to exploration of the persistence of fascism in the postwar world. As a writer-producer, Scott took three stabs at the noir oeuvre, and with each film the political agenda embedded in the investigative narrative became more defined, focused, and hard-hitting. 2 Indeed, I would argue that the historical significance of Crossfire and the other films by this creative trio lies in the melding of noir style and antifascist politics. ![]() It was Scott who chose the hard-boiled, politically inflected literary material, and Scott, along with writing partner John Paxton, who was responsible for the film's "rapid-fire brutal narrative" and its "edgy, terse dialogue." Even more important, I think, these critics' privileging of noir style over social content underestimates the ways in which film noir was itself rooted in resistance-resistance to the Production Code and to the limitations of the studio system resistance to a Hollywood style and mode of production that embraced "entertainment" over "art" resistance to the glossy Hollywood vision that skated over the violence inherent in capitalist America, the discontent and instability that simmered below the prosperous, complacent, self-congratulatory surface of the American Way of Life.ģIn the noir films produced by Adrian Scott, this resistance is fundamentally rooted in the politics of the Popular Front. 1ĢBorde and Chaumenton's auteurist privileging of the noir visual style and the role of Dmytryk as director in Crossfire, however, masks the critical contributions-creative and political-of writer-producer Adrian Scott. For them, Crossfire stands out for its narrative and visual style-clearly linked to Murder, My Sweet, the original Scott-Paxton-Dmytryk noir-which for them sets Crossfire definitely apart from a "stodgy" social problem film like The Best Years of Our Lives (though Gentleman's Agreement is probably the more appropriate comparison). 1Though numerous critics have since struggled with how best to categorize Crossfire-is it film noir? Is it a social problem film?-here, in one of the originating texts on film noir, French critics Borde and Chaumeton, argue for Crossfire's inclusion in the noir canon. ![]()
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