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CRISS CROSS
1949
Director
Robert Siodmak
Starring
Burt Lancaster
Yvonne De Carlo
Dan Duryea
Runtime
88 minutes
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Burt Lancaster spends CRISS CROSS making a series of decisions so visibly catastrophic that the suspense comes from wondering how much worse it can possibly get. The answer is: considerably.
Robert Siodmak's second collaboration with Lancaster begins when drifter Steve Thompson returns to Los Angeles and makes the mistake at the heart of nearly every great noir—he goes looking for a girl. He finds old flame Yvonne De Carlo and the situation deteriorates immediately. Before long Steve is entangled with gangsters, armored-car robbery plans, double-crosses, triple-crosses, and a romance that operates entirely on poor judgment.
Siodmak’s decision to have the film unravel as a long flashback instills Steve’s story with a sharp sense of pathos, each wistful line of voice-over ringing with mulled-over heartache until it doesn’t, at which point it aches with regret and transforms the entire film into a treatise on deception—both self-induced and imposed. CRISS CROSS, though full of twists and turns, is a film of predetermined ends, and it’s the latter rather than the former that makes it so exciting to watch, as each narrative surprise, each suggestion its protagonist could live out another life, only makes the inevitable nature of its ending all the more painful to experience. CRISS CROSS now stands as perhaps the most darkly poetic rendering of amour fou in all film noir.
Robert Siodmak's second collaboration with Lancaster begins when drifter Steve Thompson returns to Los Angeles and makes the mistake at the heart of nearly every great noir—he goes looking for a girl. He finds old flame Yvonne De Carlo and the situation deteriorates immediately. Before long Steve is entangled with gangsters, armored-car robbery plans, double-crosses, triple-crosses, and a romance that operates entirely on poor judgment.
Siodmak’s decision to have the film unravel as a long flashback instills Steve’s story with a sharp sense of pathos, each wistful line of voice-over ringing with mulled-over heartache until it doesn’t, at which point it aches with regret and transforms the entire film into a treatise on deception—both self-induced and imposed. CRISS CROSS, though full of twists and turns, is a film of predetermined ends, and it’s the latter rather than the former that makes it so exciting to watch, as each narrative surprise, each suggestion its protagonist could live out another life, only makes the inevitable nature of its ending all the more painful to experience. CRISS CROSS now stands as perhaps the most darkly poetic rendering of amour fou in all film noir.