This exciting caper is film noir on the cusp of two decades. A worthy descendant of The Asphalt Jungle, shot at night in black-and-white and set to a gritty jazz track, it delves into the depths of human greed and self-destruction that laced the fifties crime melodrama with despair. But it also plays the odds on tomorrow by predicting the intensified brutality of the sixties films, and the socially conscious variants on the crime drama that the decade would produce--films about racial conflicts, psychopathic killers, and homosexual bank robbers. Robert Ryan, one of film noir's dark giants, for better or for worse is often at his best when playing the bigot (as in Crossfire). Here, he is a Southern drifter whose hatred of blacks is focused on his partner-in-crime, Harry Belafonte, a Harlem musician. Shelley Winters is in her element as Ryan's girlfriend, but it is Gloria Grahame, in a brief appearance, who culminates a decade of fatalistic femmes when she asks Ryan to excite her by describing what it's like to kill a man.