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.

At times the plot got a little hard to follow, but at least it held my attention. I don't think there's anything special about the film,but its definitely not a bad one overall. Entertaining to see how the characters cross one another(hence the title) is somewhat suspenseful enough to make you wonder what is going to happen next. Was very interesting to see the female role kind of take on the lead as head bad guy and mastermind, which i would think would be very uncommon in films of that time. Anna, the female character, was extremely manipulative. It seemed to me that all she cared about was money. You actually come to feel bad for steve, because hes really just a man in love. One scene that was all too real for me and kind of freaked me out, the couple is running through a meat packing plant. And there's like cows, and parts of cows hanging everywhere.

This movie is certainly a very interesting movie. For one thing you don't know what's going to happen next because the characters are in a situation that can lead to a very nice and wealthy life, or death. The main male character in the movie came back home to see his family and he found the woman he loved and fell in love with her again. However, she was not for his to have because another man, who was a very dangerous man, had his hold on her. This only made him want her more and after finding out she was being abused he was angry and wanted her to come away with him. However the dangerous man has connections so in order for her to be free, the main lead character in the movie comes up with a plan to get close before having the chance to run off with him.There was only one way in which this movie could end, especially since the leading female only wanted the money and not really the love that the leading male character offered. Although this movie was interesting, if you do not like sad endings I would not recommend it to you.