Criss
Cross – as perfect a title for a film noir as there ever was, beaten only,
perhaps by Kiss Me Deadly – is rife with paranoia, double and triple
crosses, and a grim fatalism in its story of an armored truck heist and its
aftermath. The film opens with a nighttime aerial shot cruising low over L.A.
with a doomy Miklós Rózsa score coming in from the first frame. Eventually we
focus on a non-descript parking lot by a nightclub and the action moves down to
the ground, where we find a cheating wife Anna (Yvonne De Carlo) in a
passionate embrace with her boyfriend Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) and them
trying to find a way to get away from her husband, the dangerous gang leader
Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea). Thompson takes a hike after she warns him how
dangerous Dundee is and they enter the club separately, where Dundee has been
waiting impatiently for her. A tense, jealous exchange follows between husband
and wife and Thompson enters the club, getting into it immediately with Dundee.
The smart, tight script sets its plot and a thicket of character motivations
and relationships in motion within ten minutes, jumps immediately on to setting
up the heist our main characters are engaged in, then jumps to flashback to
give us the back story that lead everyone here. Turns out Steve and Anna used
to be married, but now she’s married to Dundee, only Thompson doesn’t get over
things so readily – he’s still head over heels for Anna, despite the warnings
from his detective best friend Pete Ramirez that she’s bad news and to steer
clear of her.
The film is
helmed by Robert Siodmak, known for a great batch of noirs and other crime
films, and also for discovering Burt Lancaster who had his first Hollywood role
in Siodmak’s earlier The Killers. In his earlier work in Europe before
emigrating to the States and in Hollywood since, Siodmak had refined his
technique to the point where he knew how to construct an airtight thriller.
There’s an episode in the flashback part of the film when Lancaster’s character
goes back to the club he and his ex-wife used to frequent and in an amazing,
dialogue-free scene in that’s all smoky ambience, shadows thrown on the wall,
and the intense, driving rumba of the band playing, he sets up everything we
need to know about how obsessed he still is with her just from his body
language and longing looks across the club, highlighted by the ever-tightening
intensity of the editing in line with the music’s rhythms. And as we get back
to “real time” and the heist, it’s again a masterful display of technique as
the gang’s robbery is executed in a haze of smoke, and afterward as paranoia
sets in deeply with more and more skewed angles and shadows making the most
mundane settings feel fraught with peril. The film is also rife with references
to being ruled by fate, by circumstances rather than their own wills guiding
the characters, and this too is echoed in the film’s visuals, with many shots
of frames within frames (doorways, windows, stairwells, etc.), suggesting that
the characters are trapped in their circumstances. But it’s not as arty as all
that; that’s just a film student admiring the work of a master. Despite the web
of conflicting motivations and desires, there’s never a moment when the art of
what Siodmak is doing overwhelms the story, which is always at the forefront.
Fans of
film noir will readily recognize this is a great one, those unfamiliar with the
genre are in for a treat – and also probably about to go on a long road down
the seemingly endless path of film noir. It’s a pleasurable road to travel for
sure, and one that all film fans find their way to at some point. And it’s a
lot safer to view from the sidelines than it is for the people in the films
themselves.
- Patrick
Brown
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