TCM’s Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night, March 17, at Midnight ET (Sunday Morning), is Crossfire (1947)

 

 

By David in TN
Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 8:00:00 P.M. EDT
 

L to R: Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Young 

TCM’s Film Noir of the week for Saturday Night, March 17, at Midnight ET (Sunday morning), is Crossfire (1947). It stars RKO's two big guns, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, with Robert Young as a police detective.
 

 

Robert Ryan is a psychopathic bigot (a characterization he had a patent on) who beats a stranger to death because he was Jewish, and tries to pin it on a fellow soldier.
 

Gloria Grahame in a publicity shot for Crossfire 

Gloria Grahame is a taxi dancer who helps the innocent suspect.
 

 
Edward Dmytryk directs from a novel by Richard Brooks. In the novel, the victim was a homosexual.

Crossfire repeats at 10 a.m. ET Sunday, March 18.
 

 

On Sunday night, March 18, at 8 p.m. ET, TCM has Madigan (1968), starring Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda. Madigan was filmed, I read, in the summer of 1967 partly on location in Spanish Harlem. At times the crew was threatened by local street thugs.
 

Harry Guardino, L, and Richard Widmark 

Widmark and Harry Guardino are veteran detectives who lose a suspect in embarrassing fashion. Fonda is the NYPD Commissioner who disapproves of Madigan. Inger Stevens is Madigan's unhappy wife.
 

Henry Fonda, left, and James Whitmore 

Madigan is based on a novel, The Commissioner, in which Fonda's character is the major story line. In the novel, the psycho bad guy is a Puerto Rican. In the film, he's a Czech, played by Steven Inhat.

There is a subplot in which a black “community leader's” son is busted for sex with underage girls and claims “police brutality.” Sound familiar?
 

 

After Madigan at 10 p.m. ET, TCM shows Charley Varrick (1973). Walter Matthau plays a small-time robber who inadvertently heists a bank with mob money.