In the opening scene in Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949), Yvonne de Carlo is necking with Burt Lancaster between cars parked outside a nightclub. She breaks the clinch when a car approaches, apparently, fearful of being caught in this embrace. The actress says that she is very worried and wishes that some fearsome event in the immediate future could be avoided. Siodmak positions the camera directly in front of the actress as she declares her undying love for Lancaster, how "this time everything will be different" -- a direct address of this kind to the camera seems a warrant of sincerity (Ozu uses this effect often in his films), a display of simple and authentic affection. But Cross Cross is a film noir, indeed a classic example of the genre and, so, as we come to understand, there is reason to question both the truthfulness of the camera angle and the meaning of the words spoken.
Burt Lancaster plays a dim-witted truckdriver and laborer, Stevie Thompson. Yvonne de Carlo acts the part of Annie, formerly Stevie's wife, but now married to the sinister gangster, Slim Dundee (played by Dan Duryea who specialized in these sorts of roles). At a nightclub a few blocks from City Hall (a helicopter shot establishes the location), Stevie fights with Dundee. It seems as if the fight has been triggered by Stevie's affair with Annie, and, in fact, some real emotions leak into the fray so that a knife is drawn, but, in fact, we discover that the brawl has been contrived to provide the authorities with evidence that Stevie hates Dundee and, therefore, can't be complicit with him in an armored car heist that the men are planning. The fact that Stevie and Dundee do hate one another as a result of their rivalry over Annie improves the authenticity of the brawl. These kinds of complications are characteristic of the movie: people melodramatically "pretend" to emotions that, in fact, they really possess but, also, have to conceal. It's never clear whether declamations of love or hate are sincere, or just play-acting. Stevie, a blue-collar stiff, has found a job driving an armored car -- this is convenient because he is participating in a scheme masterminded by Slim Dundee (with the help of a dipsomaniac "professor") to rob the armored car when it brings it payroll to a big, bleak-looking industrial site. Dundee has apparently used Annie to lure Thompson into playing the crucial role (driver of the armored car and "inside man") in the heist scheme. None of this clear as events unfold -- the audience has to piece together the complicated motives that drive the film's action. Furthermore, in keeping with many Hollywood pictures of the era, the story is told by way of an elaborate flashback -- we see the armored car driven by Stevie hastening to its date with destiny and, then, by voice-over Lancaster's character narrates an introduction to an extended flashback providing the backstory to the heist and occupying the better part of the 88 minute movie. Stevie was previously married to Annie but they divorced as a result of their constant acrimonious bickering. Stevie leaves town and knocks around the US for two years, unsuccessfully trying to forget Annie. But these measures are to no avail, and he returns to LA to live with his parents in the picturesque Bunker Hill neighborhood -- the same terrain in which the gangsters are plotting their crime involving the armored car. The flashback shows us Stevie's initial encounters with Annie, their marital problems, and, then, after Stevie has fled town for a few years, his return to the City and the renewal of his relationship with Annie, although this time covertly since she is married to Slim. We see the crooks plotting the heist. This brings us up to date and Siodmak, then, stages the attack on the armored car, an exciting, quickly cut sequence involve multiple shootings, foreboding camera angles, and lots of toxic gas and smoke. Stevie is betrayed in the gun battle and badly wounded. We next see him, helpless in the hospital. It's obvious that Slim intends to send assassins to murder him. Annie has fled to a remote cottage on the ocean, always filmed in impressive day-for-night with the black shadow of the building looming over the glittering sunset sea. Stevie is kidnaped but escapes. However, inadvertently, he leads pursuers to the secret cottage and the film's bloody denouement.
Siodmak's management of violence and suspense sequences is excellent and, in some scenes, he's not inferior to Hitchcock -- although his effects are simpler and more luridly melodramatic. (The scenes in which the wounded Stevie strung up with skeletal traction awaits the assassins sent by Slim Dundee are similar in effect to Hitchcock's work with the immobilized detective played by Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.) Siodmak's management of the locations where the film was shot is superlative and memorable. The Bunker Hill neighborhood with its seedy boarding houses and vertical terrain (we see the Angel's Flight funicular gliding up and down the hillside in the background) is wonderfully evocative. The Latin-themed night club where much of the action takes place has a curious physiognomy. It's L-shaped with one long narrow room serving as a sort of low-rent bar frequented by drunks and derelicts. But this grim space with its deeply plunging perspective opens out onto a dance-hall that's a little bit sordid but more glamorous than the seedy-looking utilitarian tavern full of sad drunks (or completely empty except for the bartender and a female alcoholic during the day). Siodmak's sense for landscape, city terrain, and the way figures can be deployed against these rotting LA backgrounds is intense and contributes immensely to the action. The movie is full of strange undercurrents and details. Thompson's mother denounces Annie. Thompson rages against his mother but, then, plants a wet kiss on her lips. Thompson's brother Slade threatens to beat his fiancee who seems to approve of his violence. Burt Lancaster plays Thompson as a hapless moron -- his eyes are dull and dead-looking and his mouth gapes open idiotically. Nonetheless, he's verbally abusive and there are long, unpleasant scenes in which Lancaster's character mercilessly hectors Annie, although she seems to enjoy fighting with him as well and gives as good as she gets. A show-stopping dance scene early in the film features Annie jumping up and down frenetically to percolating jungle music, a barbaric melange of bird cries and warbling flutes played by Esy Morales and his Rhumba band. Although we can only see him for a few seconds, Annie's dance partner is an uncredited Tony Curtis. The film is pretty literate with a lot of tough-guy and -gal speeches and, despite its formulaic plot, the movie is full of surprising and unexpected details. Just about every exterior features a long shot of the brooding downtown Hall of Justice, the big building looming over everything as if to embody the dire fates of the characters in this picture.
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