Crossfire

This ultra-low-budget thriller did what all great B movies do: it broached a subject that 'respectable' movies wouldn't touch. In this case, the racist murder of a Jew (although it was a homosexual in Richard Brooks' source novel, The Brick Foxhole), and the exposure of the murderer's fanatical anti-Semitism. Dmytryk exploits the poverty-row sets for their claustrophobic quality, and introduces 'expressionist' lighting and distorted angles to dramatise the tensions that simmer and finally explode between the characters, GIs back from the war in Europe but not yet discharged. This was the kind of movie that provoked the McCarthy witch-hunt in Hollywood.