Window card printed on rectangular, cream-colored paper with images for the film, “Crossfire.” There is a narrow, white border on three sides, and a wide margin at the top. Pasted over the top margin is a rectangular sheet of white paper, with printed blue text stating the theater and days of the film showings. The central portion of the card consists of a large rectangle with a wide, yellow bar down the right side, which overlays narrow, red borders along the top and bottom. The remaining background is a dark blue, which cuts into the yellow section in the shape of a right curly bracket. In the upper left corner, and extending down the left side, are the illustrated faces of three men, one of whom is wearing a brimmed hat and has a pipe in the corner of his mouth. To their right, the names of the three principal actors are printed in large, yellow text. In the center of the poster, the film title is printed in a large, white-and-red script. In the bottom left corner is an illustration of a blonde woman, depicted from the waist up, wearing a pink dress and holding a cigarette in her raised hand. To her right, additional film credits are printed in yellow. Overlaying the yellow section is advertising copy printed in red directly above a blue-toned image of a man in a suit, laying on the floor with his eyes closed, and right arm extended. A small studio logo is printed in blue in the bottom right corner, and the copyright and printing information is in black in the bottom margin. The window card is adhered to a slightly larger piece of thin, light brown, cardboard with a horizontal band of pressure-sensitive tape across the back center. There are several blue ink handstamps and handwritten numbers on the back. The card is heavily creased and stained. Three of the four corners are torn, and a large portion of the top left corner has torn off. Depicted: Robert Young as Captain Finlay, Robert Mitchum as Sgt. Felix Keeley, Robert Ryan as Sgt. Montgomery, Gloria Grahame as Ginny Tremaine, Sam Levene as Joseph Samuels front, bottom right margin, handwritten, black ink : 47/439 back, center, handwritten, blue ink : 35.00 back, center, stamped twice, black ink : Chuck’s / Memory L[ane?]” / “Old Movie Posters” / P.O. Box / Katy, TX.
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The Cinema Judaica Collection consists of more than 1,200 objects relating to films about World War II and the Holocaust as well as Jewish, Israeli, and biblical subjects, from 1923 to 2000, from the United States, Europe, Israel, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina. The collection was amassed by film memorabilia collector Ken Sutak, to document Holocaust-and Jewish-themed movies of the World War II era and the postwar years. The collection includes posters, lobby and photo cards, scene stills, pressbooks, trade ads, programs, magazines, books, VHS tapes, DVDS, and 78 rpm records. Sutak organized these materials into two groups, “Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949” and “Cinema Judaica: The Epic Cycle, 1950–1972” and, in conjunction with the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum (now the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in New York), organized exhibitions on these two themes in 2007 and 2008. Sutak subsequently authored companion books with the same titles.
The window card was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2018 by Ken Sutak and Sherri Venokur.
Overall: Height: 21.875 inches (55.563 cm) | Width: 13.500 inches (34.29 cm)
Window card for the American feature film, “Crossfire,” released by RKO Radio Pictures in July 1947. Window cards were mass-produced promotional materials used until the mid-1980s. They included a blank section at the top for individual theaters to write in dates and show times, and placed in locations outside of the theaters. “Crossfire” was nominated for five Academy Awards, and won several others, including “Best Social Film” at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was based on the 1945 novel, The Brick Foxhole, by Richard Brooks. As part of the film noir genre, “Crossfire” depicts a murder investigation, focusing on a group of demobilized soldiers. In the novel, the victim was homosexual, however, depicting a homosexual on-screen was deemed unacceptable by the censors at the Production Code Administration. He was rewritten as a Jewish man for the film, making it a condemnation of antisemitism. Just a few months after the film’s release, the producer and director refused to answer questions about communist activities and affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee. They were indicted and convicted for contempt of Congress, and subsequently imprisoned and blacklisted from Hollywood. This object is one of more than 1,200 objects in the Cinema Judaica Collection of materials related to films about World War II and the Holocaust as well as Jewish, Israeli, and biblical themes.
Window card for the film “Crossfire” (1947)