Pun Salad

Gosh, another critical favorite I thought was just barely OK. But this 1947 movie has Robert Young, way before he was the Father who Knew Best. Also Robert Mitchum. And Robert Ryan. And someone not named Robert, the endlessly watchable Gloria Grahame. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. So the pieces were in place, enough of them for it to be nominated for five Oscars. But…

Young plays a jaded police detective investigating a brutal homicide of a Jewish civilian; Suspicion falls on a group of soldiers, eventually settling on a hapless youngster who can't account for his activities. But Mitchum is skeptical, and eventually so is Young. Helping them along is the occasional antisemitic outburst from Ryan. This causes Young to become less jaded, and he switches from smoking a ubiquitous pipe to ubiquitous cigarettes.

It eventually drops into a preachy and unsubtle melodrama about antisemitism. (Not that antisemitism's a bad thing to be preachy about, probably even more so in 1947.) Interestingly, according to Wikipedia:

In the novel [on which the movie was based], the victim was homosexual. As told in the film The Celluloid Closet and in the documentary included on the DVD edition of the Crossfire film, the Hollywood Hays Code prohibited any mention of homosexuality because it was seen as a sexual perversion. Hence, the book's theme of homophobia was changed to one about racism and antisemitism.