BRIAN LIBBY

Edward Dmytryk's "Crossfire"

Last night I finished watching this very thought-provoking noir with an interesting combination of social message and traditional pot-boiler: 1947's Crossfire.

The story, set in Washington, DC just after the end of World War II concerns the murder of a Jewish man by a hate-filled American soldier and the ensuing investigation. But the film is really about transitioning from the violence of wartime to the justice and peaceful society of back home. The subtext actually makes an otherwise rote drama into something exceptionally resonant and powerful, aided especially by the acting. The great Robert Ryan earned his only Oscar nomination here as the bigoted killer, and it was his first movie role. Robert Mitchum and a young Gloria Graehme are also standouts in their supporting roles.

I believe it was Jean-Luc Godard who called Crossfire the best American film noir. I think that's a huge overstatement. The same director, European expatriate Edward Dmytryk, made a far greater film - a masterpiece even - with the noir Murder, My Sweet. And the Mitchum-starring Out of the Past also easily trumps this picture.

Yet Crossfire snuck up on me as something very compelling in an unexpected way: like a mediocre work of architecture and construction that wound up looking gorgeous.

Lonnie Johnson's "Four Hands Are Better Than Two"

 

Listening to the radio a few weeks ago, I heard for the first time the pioneering 1920s African-American jazz/blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson. I was stunned by the virtuosity and style. It seemed to me like an odd but incredible fusion of Robert Johnson (raw and bluesish) guitar playing with Django Reinhart (jazzy and swinging). And as it happens, Lonnie Johnson was a big influence on Reinhart, and also played with jazz titans like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Now I feel silly to have not known him.

In listening to his music in the days since that initial radio introduction, I've become particularly transfixed by the song "Four Hands Are Better Than Two" because of its combination of Johnson's guitar with an accompanying piano that has, because of the way that it was recorded, a strange, almost ethereal presence - almost like the piano player is playing loud and hard, but doing so in the next room from where Johnson's guitar solo is front and center. That said, it's only fitting that this virtuoso of a guitarist is the focus of the song, which zooms along with a rapid but nimble tempo that for me is at once frenetic and, more indefinably, even gentle like a lullaby.