Universal’s Criss Cross, a textbook example of film noir, features the familiar noir trappings: it revolves around a good Joe who risks everything for a beautiful woman; has an elaborate crime scheme and a sadistic villain; uses narration and flashbacks as storytelling devices; and unfolds with an air of pervasive doom. Criss Cross was directed by Robert Siodmak, a film-noir pioneer with Phantom Lady (1944) and The Killers (1946), the latter an enduring noir benchmark that made names of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Siodmak used Lancaster again for Criss Cross, and, though it’s not as renowned as The Killers, it surpasses it. The films are equals in propulsive plotting, directorial dazzle, and black-and-white beauty, but Criss Cross is superior in its more complex characters. It’s also leaner, less convoluted, and features a more accomplished Lancaster performance. Both films follow his undoing by a femme fatale, but this noir plot was routine fare by 1949, so Criss Cross didn’t generate the kind of excitement that greeted The Killers, yet it’s just about perfect. Criss Cross derives its power from its sobering and inexorable portrait of what people are capable of doing when in the grip of an obsessive, self-destructive love.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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