Criss Cross: Siodmak's Armoured-Car Doom

Criss Cross opens with a camera drifting down over a nightclub car park at night to find a man and a woman in an embrace, saying goodbye, arranging something. It is the most romantic image Robert Siodmak ever composed, and by the time the film loops back to it ninety minutes later you understand it is a photograph of two people agreeing to destroy each other. That is the whole method of this picture: it shows you the beautiful thing first and then spends its running time explaining what you were actually looking at.

Made at Universal in 1949, it reunited the exact team behind The Killers — Siodmak directing, Burt Lancaster starring, Miklós Rózsa scoring, the same studio, the same producer sensibility. It is the tighter and crueller of the two. The Killers is an investigation into a doom; Criss Cross is the doom itself, and there is no insurance man on hand to make sense of it afterwards.

Steve, Anna, and the worst idea in Los Angeles

Steve Thompson (Lancaster) has come back to Los Angeles after a spell away, to his mother’s house, to a job driving an armoured car. He tells everyone — his mother, his old friend the police detective Pete Ramirez, and most insistently himself — that he is home to settle down. What he is actually doing is standing in the doorway of a nightclub he used to go to with his ex-wife.

Anna (Yvonne De Carlo) is there, and she has married Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), a local racketeer, in the interval. Everyone in Steve’s life can see what is happening. Pete tells him plainly and repeatedly to get out of town. The film’s structure gives Steve every warning a man could want, delivered by people who love him, and he processes each one as an obstacle to be got around.

The catastrophe is the improvisation. Caught by Slim in a room where he has no business being, Steve blurts out a cover story: he is not here about Anna, he is here to propose a job — his own armoured car, the payroll run, inside knowledge. He invents a robbery on the spot to explain his presence, and then has to commit it. That is one of the most elegant plot engines in the genre, because it is not a scheme at all. It is a lie told in a panic by a man who cannot admit what he is doing in the room, and the rest of the film is the invoice.

Daniel Fuchs’s screenplay, adapting Don Tracy’s novel, is fastidious about this. Steve is not seduced into crime by a femme fatale with a plan. He talks himself into it, in one sentence, to avoid an embarrassing conversation. The film’s cold view of him is that his real weakness is not lust; it is the inability to say a true thing out loud in a room with other people in it.

Why it works: the tear gas, and the city that is no longer there

The robbery itself is one of the great noir set pieces, and its brilliance is that Siodmak takes away your vision at the exact moment you most want it. The job goes off under tear gas — the plan involves smoke, and once the canisters go, the sequence plays out in a churning white fog through which figures loom, shoot, and disappear. You cannot tell who is who. You cannot tell what has gone wrong, or when, or whether it has gone wrong at all. Steve is in the middle of a crime he devised and he cannot see it either, which is the film’s thesis rendered as weather.

Compare that with the heist in The Killers, staged as a single distant crane shot with a narrator reading the facts over the top: cold documentation, total clarity, no participation. Three years later Siodmak does the opposite — total participation, no clarity. Both are the right answer for their film, and a director who can make both choices this well is not stumbling into style.

The second thing that makes Criss Cross durable has nothing to do with its plot. Siodmak shot substantially on location in Bunker Hill, the hillside district of downtown Los Angeles, and the film is now an accidental documentary of a neighbourhood that no longer exists. The Angels Flight funicular, the tenements, the steep streets, the whole vertical working-class quarter was demolished in the redevelopment that followed. Franz Planer’s photography catches it at dusk with real people in the frame. Watching it now, the noir fatalism acquires a second layer the makers could not have intended: everything you are looking at, including the buildings, is already gone.

Rózsa’s score runs a habanera under the nightclub scenes — the film gives Anna a dance sequence with a young unbilled Tony Curtis, his first appearance on screen, which is the sort of detail that ought to be trivia and instead tells you something about what the club is: a place where the beautiful and the doomed are constantly being replaced by newer models.

The real ancestor, and the heirs

The direct ancestor is The Killers, and the two should be watched in order. Siodmak, having spent 1946 building an elaborate structure to explain why a man lay down and waited to die, spent 1949 removing the structure and simply showing you a man doing it in real time. The refinement is the point — this is a director working a single obsession twice and getting closer the second time.

Further back sits Double Indemnity, which established the confession-first architecture that Criss Cross borrows for its car-park frame. And in the family of heist pictures it belongs beside The Asphalt Jungle and, later, Rififi, whose famous half-hour of silence is the exact inverse of Siodmak’s fog: Dassin gives you perfect visual information and no sound, Siodmak gives you sound and no visual information, and both are getting at the way a robbery removes a man’s senses. The desk’s argument that the heist film is really about process finds its limit case here — Criss Cross is a heist film whose heist was never a process at all, only an alibi that got out of hand.

Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) took Siodmak’s fatalism and rebuilt it as a machine of timetables. Soderbergh remade Criss Cross directly as The Underneath in 1995, cooler and more distanced, and the remake’s relative failure is instructive: the story only works at Lancaster’s temperature, from inside a man who is lying to himself while you watch.

The honest case against

Anna is the film’s compromise. De Carlo plays her with real intelligence — there is a scene where she lays out, with total clarity, the economics of being a woman with no money and two bad options, and for a moment the picture opens up into something genuinely radical about who has choices. Then the plot needs her to be unreadable, and the film retreats into ambiguity that is closer to evasion than mystery. It wants her both to be a person and to be the weather, and it cannot quite hold both.

Duryea’s Slim is superb and slightly on rails; he had played variations of this snickering sadist often enough that the performance arrives pre-assembled. And the film’s coincidences — the encounters, the timing, the man who happens to be in the right doorway — are audible in the second act, more so than in The Killers, where the flashback structure hides the joins.

Where to find it: it is on disc in a decent restoration and circulates in noir seasons. Bunker Hill obsessives and Los Angeles historians programme it for reasons that have nothing to do with Lancaster, which is a fate the film has earned twice over.

Spoilers below

The double-cross is the film’s title, and the film is generous enough to let you see it coming and cruel enough to make that no help at all.

The robbery goes wrong in the gas. Steve, doing the one honest thing in the picture, defends the payroll — a reflex, not a decision — and is shot up badly; Slim’s plan had been to leave him there dead, which was always the plan, and which Anna knew. Steve wakes in a hospital bed a hero, decorated in the newspapers as the guard who fought back, and this is the film’s most sardonic movement: the man who conceived the crime is being celebrated for resisting it, and he is too badly hurt to explain and too compromised to want to.

Then a man arrives at his bedside offering to take him somewhere safe, and Steve, who has spent the whole film unable to say the true thing, goes with him. Of course the man is Slim’s. He is bought and paid for, and he drives Steve out to a beach house at the coast where Anna is waiting with the money, packing.

The last scene is the finest thing Siodmak did. Anna does not weep or repent. She explains, with perfect practicality, that she is leaving — that she cannot carry a wrecked man out of this, that nobody would, that Steve should understand because he would do the same. She is not being monstrous. She is being accurate, and Steve knows it, and the horror on his face is the horror of a man recognising his own logic in someone else’s mouth. He talked himself into a robbery to avoid an awkward conversation; she is talking herself out of a rescue for the identical reason.

And then the headlights come across the sand, because Slim has followed the man who was paid to bring Steve here, and none of the three of them get to finish the conversation. The film loops back to the car park — the embrace, the two beautiful people arranging something in the dark — and you finally read the image correctly. They were not saying goodbye. They were agreeing to the terms.