Plot
After he's called in to investigate the brutal killing of Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene), who was found dead at his home, police investigator Finlay (Robert Young) discovers there may be a murderer among a group of demobilized soldiers, who had been seen with Samuels and his female friend at a hotel bar that night.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Keeley (Robert Mitchum), concerned that his friend Mitch (George Cooper) may be the prime suspect, decides to investigate the murder to clear his friend's name. To both investigators, each suspected soldier relays their version of that night through a flashback. The first to step up is Montgomery (Robert Ryan) and the rest are Floyd (Steve Brodie), Mitch, and a possible witness Ginny (Gloria Grahame).
As Finlay and Keeley slowly piece together the fragments of that night, they realize there is one possible motive that may have driven the killer to beat an innocent to death, which prompts Finlay to set up a trap to expose the killer.
Read more about this topic: Crossfire (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)