Boy, Yvonne De Carlo really managed to pull it off here. For the entire picture you believe Anna Dundee is in love with Burt Lancaster's character Steve Thompson. Then, when Steve shows up at Palos Verdes, she throws him over in favor of the stolen loot from the Bliss Company payroll heist. What a low down, dirty, double dealing dame.But then again, that's what cool film noir is all about. Like many viewers who only ever saw De Carlo as Lily Munster, this was an eye opener. She looked sultry and seductive and had a way of wrapping Steve right around her little finger, even with gangster Steve Dundee (Dan Duryea) in the same room. Told in limited flashback style, the picture catches the viewer up to real time about half way through, at which point Steve makes his out of left field proposal to play inside man on the armored truck heist. Man, this guy was so blinded by love/lust he couldn't get out of his own way.You know, I couldn't get over the conversation between a couple of Herton security guards when they began discussing their wives' shopping habits. I realize it's all relative, but could it really have broken the guy's budget to buy the soap powder for forty three cents instead of thirty seven at the Great Western? Or the couple cans of tomato juice for a quarter and save another six cents there? Boy, it really makes you think how things were, going back a half dozen decades.This one ought to appeal to fans of film noir and gangster flicks, but you will have to pay attention. The business with the hood at the hospital looking in on Steve was a clever hook. For a while I couldn't figure why he would have been there on the pretext that his wife had an accident, but heck, lying would have been part of his repertoire. Same thing with Anna having the money from the hold-up, but during the planning, all the participants agreed that she would pay off the split with Steve. That's probably the one concession you have to make to suspending disbelief; knowing Slim Dundee, why would he agree to that knowing his wife's past with Steve.Keep a sharp eye out during the scene with the rhumba band. Dancing with Anna is a sharply dressed Latin looking guy who turns out to be Tony Curtis. Don't blink or you'll miss it.

Sure, you've seen it all before: the snarling villain (Dan Duryea), the black widow babe (Yvonne DeCarlo), and the hapless fall guy who just can't help himself (Burt Lancaster). But this is vintage noir from the golden age, done with real style and conviction. What stays with me are those scenes that have since worked their way into the textbook. There's the nightclub scene, where Lancaster gazes longingly at lost love DeCarlo, while she sambas with new honey boy Tony Curtis. Meanwhile there's this pulsating Latin beat that keeps going and going and everybody's shaking it except poor Lancaster. You feel the doom in the air and know this has to end badly. Then there's that nervous scene in the hospital where Lancaster's all laid up. But who's this new guy. He looks like Joe Average, but is he. Director Siodmak really knows how to shift gears and make these quiet moments creepy. Everybody's been waiting for the robbery, but it seems like a cloudy dream, the kind you only half remember and wish you could forget. Ghostly figures drift in and out of focus, yet which one's Lancaster and who's got the money. Hollywood's fog machines were really working overtime on this one. Of course, it all leads up to the final scene, which is about as good as noir gets. The moment of reckoning when everything comes together, this time with a good view of eternity and in the moonlight, no less. The feeling that it all had to happen from the beginning is so thick you can cut it with the proverbial knife.Sure, the D-cup DeCarlo's not quite up to the acting challenge, and the great Duryea doesn't get enough scenes, but consider the screen time given to two deserving foot soldiers of the golden era. Once you've seen him, you never forget him: that raspy-voiced gnome Percy Helton as the bartender. There's been no one like him before or since, a sly little troll who's escaped from the pages of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Yet I've never seen him give anything less than an A-grade performance that lifted many a B-movie above the forgettable. On the other hand, there's the completely ordinary Robert Osterloh as the mysterious stranger. His face is sort of familiar. Maybe he's the guy who fixes your car or fills your prescription or on a really bad night, shoves a gun in your gut. But like Helton, he too never gave anything less than an expert performance. Too bad his little Hollywood star never glowed, but he sure made a lot of others brighter than they were.It's all there and in the kind of irreplaceable black and white that Hollywood's been trying to remake in Technicolor for years. So catch up with this original and find out why.

Tony Curtis always claimed this was his first movie appearance. He said he was walking around Universal's lot late one afternoon when he literally bumped into Robert Siodmak who asked him, "Can you dance?" When Curtis replied in the affirmative, Siodmak took down his details and later phoned Universal's casting director. When Curtis arrived on the set, he had no idea what he was supposed to do and was amazed to find himself dancing with Yvonne De Carlo. When De Carlo leaves him flat on the floor, Curtis actually continued dancing by himself, earning applause from the crew, but this "solo" was deleted from release prints. In other respects, "Criss Cross" was a typical Siodmak film noir, masterfully directed by Siodmak and superbly photographed by Franz Planer. The screenplay by Daniel Fuchs, based on the 1948 novel of the same title by Don Tracy, still manages to work up almost constant edge-of-the-seat suspense.

Criss Cross is directed by Robert Siodmak and adapted by Daniel Fuchs from Don Tracy's novel. It stars Burt Lancaster, Yvonne de Carlo, Dan Duryea and Stephen McNally. Music is scored by Miklós Rózsa and cinematography is by Franz Planer.Steve Thompson (Lancaster) and old flame Anna (de Carlo) begin to rekindle their love, much to the dismay of those closest to Steve. She's now unhappily married to mobster Slim Dundee (Duryea), they plan to run away together but Slim is apparently getting wise to their affair. When the two are caught together by Slim, Steve quickly concocts a story that they were plotting an armoured-truck robbery that he wants Dundee to be involved in. Slim notes it's near impossible, but with Steve working for the armoured-truck company it opens the way for inside man possibilities. It deviates suspicion on the lovers, but this is only the start of their problems, for nothing is as it seems.Criss Cross has come to be a favourite of many a film noir purist, a picture often held forward as one of the shining lights of the 1940's noir universe. But it so easily could have been so different given that the film's original producer, Mark Hellinger, suddenly died of a heart attack. The film under Hellinger's guidance was to be based around a racetrack heist, but with Hellinger's passing the project dropped into limbo and was sold off to Universal along with Lancaster and Siodmak as part of the deal. Although Lancaster was unhappy with the rewritten plot, his relationship with Siodmak had already been cemented three years earlier when they made The Killers, another of film noir's greatest triumphs. For Criss Cross, Siodmak, Fuchs and producer Michael Kraike took Tracy's novel and combined it with elements of The Killers (an Ernest Hemmingway short story). Ava Gardner wasn't on hand to reprise her Killers femme fatale performance, while Shelley Winters was considered but not offered the role that eventually went to de Carlo, who had worked with Lancaster previously on tough as nails prison movie, Brute Force (1947). Rounding out the link between the three protagonists comes with Duryea, he and de Carlo had made Black Bart & River Lady in 1948.Alls well that ends well, figuratively speaking, because Criss Cross is a superb movie, one that begs to be re-watched whenever possible. All the classic traits of film noir are evident, both technically and narratively. The film begins with a portentous swirl of music from Rózsa, which in turn leads us into a dramatic aerial view of night time Los Angeles. From there we descend towards a parking lot and become witness to an illicit romance between Steve & Anna. At the film's finale we again will be the only witness' to their coupling, only this time it has a kicker, out shot being that Criss Cross is bookended by sheer brilliance. Obsession, betrayal and inescapable fate pervade the narrative from the moment we the audience are clued in to the history of Steve, Anna and Slim. As the tale unfolds in flashback there is a constant sense of feverish doom lingering in the air, aided considerably by Planer's evocative lighting set-ups and Siodmak's wonderful gliding camera and clinical framing compositions of the characters. Even the perky action high point of the robbery comes laced with smoggy gloom, the chaotic sequence only serving as a precursor to the present, where a hospital and a mirror shift us tonally back to the world of unease. And then the finale, one of the most bleakest, and therefore essential, ending in film noir history.Cast are excellent, Lancaster, all square jawed and square shouldered, plays obsessed loser better than most, thanks in no small part to Siodmak's direction of him. Duryea does what he does best, playing a villain with oily verve and smirky menace, while de Carlo looks great and offers up a nice blend of sweet and rough, a different kind of femme fatale, the actress earning her acting stripes during "that" finale. In the main support slot, McNally impacts well with what he's given to do, and there's good value in the criminal ranks where Alan Napier lurks as the mastermind behind the robbery. Look out. Too, for Tony Curtis, who is seen in a cameo dancing seductively with de Carlo at the Round-Up Bar. Also worth mentioning are the Los Angeles locales used for the shoot, mostly at night we get Bunker Hill, Angels Flight and Union Station. It's sad to report that Bunker Hill, a favourite spot for noir directors, was raised to the ground in the 60'sAn obvious bedfellow to The Killers for sure, but even on its own terms it's essential film noir viewing for those of that persuasion. 9/10