Difference From The Novel
Richard Brooks wrote his novel whilst he was a Sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps making training films at Quantico, Virginia and Camp Pendleton, California. In the novel, 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. The book was published whilst Brooks was serving in the Marine Corps. A fellow Marine by the name of Robert Ryan met Brooks and told him he was determined to play in a version of the book on screen.
For a detailed account of adapting The Brick Foxhole for the screen and the producers' battles with the censors, please refer to pages 114-123 in More Than Night: Film Noir in its Context by James Naremore (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
Read more about this topic: Crossfire (film)
Famous quotes containing the word difference:
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)