Crossfire

One of the lesser niors of the decade, but still effective. It avoids all the normal elements of a femme fetal, a hard boiled detective, heists, etc. Instead it experiements with cagey characters where the dishonesty borders on surreal. No one seems able to give a straight answer and none of the straight answers are to be trusted. There is no twist. You know who the murderer is pretty early on. The real mystery is watching how people react. The culprit is a dishonest narcissist which nobody likes, but he is a bully and everyone is afraid. So when things start to go south, you watch as people clam up and let bad things happen in hopes that they can slink out of the picture. It is a good study of the nature of people. It is also interesting how it covers the seldom talked about issues of solder's after the war. Normally they are all heros returned home. Crossfire presents a more realistic view of thousands of troops hastily returned, no place to settle down, no immediate jobs available, and all of a sudden live-or-die is replaced with sit-and-wait. The speech delivered by the detective is just as relevant today as it was then. People who learn to hate are like loaded guns just walking around society.