The standard works of film history and criticism in English (that is, those books whereby the cinema has been most usually represented on British and American library shelves) all, in one way or another, put Hollywood down. They do so from one or other of two premises: that Hollywood is a factory and you don't get art out of factories; or that Hollywood movies are escapist and fail to confront real situations. But, so a closely associated overarching argument runs, Hollywood from time to time redeems itself by producing the odd work which, like a European art movie, is formally perfect (such as Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941]), or which, more importantly in the Anglo-American critical tradition, is socially conscious. One movie is cited so often in this latter context that it becomes the touchstone of the socially conscious Hollywood film. That movie is Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947). Thus, Paul Rotha (1907–84) argues,

and he concludes that, ‘Despite all the opportunities of post-war human experience, Britain has yet to make a film that will measure up to the contemporary significance of a Crossfire’, a film ‘which dealt with the dynamite theme of antisemitism with more honesty and fearlessness than any other Hollywood film’. Similarly, Arthur Knight (1916–91) proposes that:

What is striking about the way the Anglo-American critical tradition describes Crossfire is, firstly, that the film's meaning is assumed to be unproblematic and transparent (that is, the film is unambiguously about a social problem, antisemitism); and, secondly, that the film's otherness, its difference from the normal run of Hollywood movies of the period, is insisted upon. This essay challenges both these assertions.