Since Hollywood usually offers nothing more thematic than the problems of young love, a picture about racial bigotry is bound to be released amid the discouraging year of a press agent's sixteen gun salute. But, mirabile dietu, "Crossfire" presents prejudicial problems frankly and smoothly, even though one or two seenes keep the audience aware of the picture's birth in stereotyped storyland.

After meeting Samuels in a bar, three soldiers go to his room and one of them, in a drunken rage, kills the 'Jew boy." Thus far, the story is nothing more than another Philo Vance tale, but original elements begin to appear when Robert Young, like any enterprising detective, looks for a motive. After a few false starts the sleuth realizes that Montgomery--Robert Ryan--harbors a mania against the people who stayed home during the war, especially Jews. While the remainder of the plot is not especially original in itself, the story benefits from excellent acting and a couple of well-done, anti-prejudicial speeches by Robert the First. These things make the picture novel and worth-while entertainment, but its producers could actually have gone much further with the social idea and left out some of the unnecessary, dramatic flairs. Minor complications arise at the outset for the audience and the detective when a harmless soldier, who is first suspected of the crime, bemoans the absence of his wife. He eventually ends up very happily with her, to the greater glory of the institution of marriage and the lesser glory of plot continuity.

Unfortunately, the picture also builds up too much sympathy for Samuels as an individual at the expense of a better understanding of Samuels as a type. For instance, it is revealed toward the end of the story that he, contrary to the belief of the murderer, was in the army, overseas, and even wounded on Okinawa.

Perhaps the screen-theater has finally discovered, as the legitimate theater did a century ago, that audiences eventually sicken of the modern romance and prefer something a bit more tangible and certainly more useful.