The film was directed by Edward Dmytryk[7] and the screenplay was written by John Paxton, based on the 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole by screenwriter and director Richard Brooks.

After hearing a knock at the door, Mitch met an odd man, who offered to make him coffee, and claimed he was waiting for Ginny too.

Monty tells Floyd to stay out of sight and to keep their stories straight, that they had no argument with Samuels and left his apartment shortly after Mitch.

After Keeley leaves, Monty – the actual killer – kills Floyd for refusing to stay out of sight, and then stages a hanging suicide.

At this point, the odd man appears from a back room and tells Finlay that he remembers Mitch, thereby providing a partial alibi, but not for the estimated time of the murder.

Back at the police station, Finlay questions Monty a second time, hoping to uncover the motive for Samuels' murder, but sends him on his way.

Finlay delivers a personal antiracist message to Keeley and a naive soldier named Leroy, who was in Monty's unit, by recalling the death of his Irish grandfather during earlier historical bigotry.

A fellow Marine, the politically-active actor Robert Ryan, met Brooks and told him he was determined to play in a version of the book on screen.

[12] A few months later producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), becoming part of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.

Here is a hard-hitting film [based on Richard Brooks' novel, The Brick Foxhole] whose whodunit aspects are fundamentally incidental to the overall thesis of bigotry and race prejudice... Director Edward Dmytryk has drawn gripping portraitures.

Robert Young gives a fine taut performance as the patiently questioning police lieutenant, whose mind and sensibilities are revolted—and eloquently expressed—by what he finds.

Sam Levene is affectingly gentle in his brief bit as the Jewish victim, and Gloria Grahame is believably brazen and pathetic as a girl of the streets.

"[15] In an essay published in 1977, the Scottish writer Colin McArthur challenged the social reading of Crossfire by several Anglo-American critics, arguing that thematically and stylistically it was a film noir, and that it reflected that genre in being less concerned with the problems of a particular society, such as antisemitism, than with angst and loneliness as essential elements of the human condition.