If film noir is about men in the thrall of women being tossed about by cruel fate, Criss Cross is prime noir. Made in 1949, in black and white, and starring Burt Lancaster in his first, noirish iteration, it’s directed by Robert Siodmak, a dab hand at punchy, pitiless drama.
The story is told in a strange semi-flashback style. Half of it in the present, where Steve (Lancaster) is a driver of an armoured car working as an inside man for a weaselly criminal about to pull a big heist. The other half back in the past, where we discover why the suburban, mother-loving Steve ended up on the wrong side of the law.
The answer is a woman. Yvonne De Carlo plays Anna, a woman with a sexual allure so powerful it bewitches not only the men around her but Anna herself. Anna is one of those “girl can’t help it” creatures. At one point she explains why she is incapable of being a decent human using the words “I wasn’t born that way” (a line cartoon femme fatale Jessica Rabbit will much later re-work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit).
Back in the past Anna enters Steve’s life, they fall in love and get married. Almost as suddenly she’s left him for gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), causing Steve to leave Los Angeles for some months to clear his head and put Anna and the past behind him.
He returns, silly man, and it starts all over again, Anna making the big eyes at him and beginning a relationship behind the back of her new husband, with Steve, who doesn’t know which way to turn. Nor, it must be said, does Anna, who is in the grip of whatever it is she’s giving off as much as Steve… as is Slim.
And so we come to the heist, a job set up by Steve with the explicit intention of removing Slim from the scene, so he can have Anna to himself. This cannot succeed. Because fate in noir movies doesn’t work like that, and because the Production Code at the time would never allow a man to profit from crime while simultaneously stealing another man’s wife, even if she was his wife first.
There are many double-crosses going on in this movie and at times it’s difficult to work out who is on the level, with Anna a permanent question mark. No one in this film quite adds up to a full human being but of all of them Anna is the least substantial. She’s really more an idea – the monstrous feminine, you could say (to borrow a term from feminist theory). But De Carlo is impressive, doesn’t overdo the sexual vamping and roots Anna as a woman who can’t quite get her head around herself.
The film would not work if Burt Lancaster weren’t such a tall and strapping example of manhood. He’d look like a weakling – which essentially is what Steve is – and a thing to be scorned rather than pitied, a decent, daytime guy who has wandered off his pitch by accident and is undone by night-time forces represented by Anna.
Slim also is more an idea than a fully formed character but Duryea does what he can with his handful of lines and makes Slim someone whose future is fascinating, because as far as Steve and Anna are concerned Slim will not have one.
With a Miklós Rósza score, it barrels along, particularly in the opening and closing thirds, when Siodmak and the brilliant cinematographer Franz Planer seem most at home – fast, beautifully lit scenes edited together so slickly that the whole thing glides. It’s in the middle where things bog down a touch, the bit where characters are usually developed. The problem is that Anna in particular cannot be developed. She isn’t a character, she’s a force. And so we get repeated scenes where the Anna/Steve dynamic is stated and restated. Which might explain the inclusion of Lieutenant Ramirez (Stephen McNally) in this roster of characters, a cop who seems to have no job other than keeping Steve on the straight and narrow, always arriving on the scene at precisely the moment he’s needed.
There is something unsatisfying but also brilliant about it all. Only three years into his long and varied career, and with his own production company up and running, Lancaster is in the driving seat and beginning to stretch out with films that are both urgent and interesting.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
