Criss Cross (Universal-International, 1948, released 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Killers TCM showed another film noir starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Robert Siodmak, Criss Cross (filmed 1948, released 1949), though according to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Lancaster was reluctant to do it. The reason was that Criss Cross was originally developed by the producer of The Killers, Mark Hellinger, but Hellinger died suddenly of a heart attack on December 21, 1947 at just 45. Lancaster didn’t like the producer Universal-International assigned to the project to replace Hellinger, who’d been born in New York City as “Michael Kraike” but had dropped the “a” from his first name and called himself “Michel Kraike” to make himself sound European. Apparently the biggest thing Lancaster didn’t like about Kraike was that he demanded that the story be changed to center around the robbery of an armored car instead of a racetrack, as it was in Don Tracy’s 1934 source novel of the same name. Once again Lancaster was cast as a down-and-out but not necessarily past-redemption man who drifts into a life of crime under the spell of a woman. He’s Steve Thompson, who briefly married a hot young babe named Anna (Yvonne De Carlo; it’s hard for me to think of her as anything other than Lily Munster but she’s quite good here as the sub-category of femme fatale who’s cynically decided that love and romance are luxuries she simply can’t afford), only she left him and married gambler Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea, who turns in the same kind of edgy performance he did as the villain in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street). The film opens with a long establishing shot of Los Angeles taken from the air, including the iconic Los Angeles City Hall, and then discovers Steve and Anna frantically necking among the parked cars outside a nightclub. They’re worried that Slim and/or one of his associates will spot them, but that doesn’t stop them even though the nightclub was one of their regular hangouts when they were still a legal couple and it’s also one of Slim’s favorite spots.

Criss Cross has a lot in common with The Killers, including an elaborate set of double-crosses (the film’s original advertising slogan was, “When you double-cross a double-crosser”) centered around a major robbery and the loot therefrom. It also has a score by Miklós Rósza, but whereas Rósza way overscored The Killers, he’s a lot more reticent here and much more effective in using music to help director Siodmak create a sinister mood. Thompson has landed a job driving for an armored-car company where he previously worked, and he’s hatched a scheme to steal over $600,000 from his employer. He offers the scheme to Slim and they recruit a gang, including an older British man named Finchley (Alan Napier, doing his usual dime-store imitation of Boris Karloff, playing a part similar to Sam Jaffe’s in The Asphalt Jungle and William Talman’s in Armored Car Robbery) who plans out the caper. To pull off the job Steve insists that he be in the driver’s seat when the heist occurs, which he accomplishes by having the gang fake a phone call from a doctor saying the usual driver’s wife is sick and he needs to see her. Steve makes the gang promise that the third man in the armored car – his father, who got him the job in the first place – won’t be harmed, but of course he gets shot and killed in the robbery. Steve is badly wounded and he ends up in the hospital, while the newspaper reports of the robbery make him seem like a hero who tried to foil the caper instead of a participant.

Like Ole in The Killers, Steve hopes to double-cross his fellow crooks and run off with Anna and the loot. To do that he offers Nelson (Robert Osterloh), the hit man Slim has sent to the hospital to knock him off, a $10,000 bribe from the loot to let him live and take him to Anna, but Slim tracks them down by following Nelson. Anna announces that she’s going to take all the money for herself and leave Steve to die, either of his wounds or at Slim’s hands. She even makes a big speech to the effect that love is a luxury she can’t afford and she’s just using all the men in her life for what she can get out of them. Slim shows up and kills both Steve and Anna before the cops, who have trailed him to Steve’s and Anna’s hideout, show up – though it’s unclear whether they just arrest him or shoot him down. One of the most unusual touches in Criss Cross is the thoroughly repulsive traditional family Steve lives with and which he can’t wait to escape from, including a tyrannical mother (Edna Holland) and a younger brother, Slade (Richard Thompson), a wretched young man whose girlfriend is just as nauseating as he is. It also has an unusual scene in the nightclub where Esy Morales, a Latin bandleader who’s actually billed fifth in the credits, plays a song called “Jungle Fantasy” while Yvonne De Carlo dances up a storm with an unidentified man. Reportedly Robert Siodmak ran into this man on the Universal lot and casually asked him if he could dance, then cast him when he said he could. Once Criss Cross came out, Universal was deluged with fan letters demanding to see more of the “hunk” who’d danced with De Carlo at the nightclub. His real name was Bernard Schwartz but he was signed to Universal as “Anthony Curtis,” and he later shortened that name to Tony Curtis and became one of the biggest movie stars of the 1950’s. Lancaster and Curtis would make three more films together, including the ultra-dark 1957 masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success.

My husband Charles made the interesting comment that though it was made three years after The Killers, Criss Cross did much more showing off of Lancaster’s body and overall good looks. Lancaster had already been a boxer and a circus acrobat and trapeze artist – a skill he got to immortalize on film in his 1956 production Trapeze (another Lancaster-Curtis collaboration) – before briefly settling on Broadway after World War II and then landing a film contract. Lancaster’s imdb.com page contains quite a lot of quotes from interviews he gave over the years, including this one: “I woke up one day a star. It was terrifying. Then I worked hard toward becoming a good actor.” Actually he’s quite impressive in these early films, portraying a gritty toughness that’s believable for these roles as lunk-headed patsies in films noir, though later on he would be even more capable as the religious hypocrite in Elmer Gantry in 1960 – and when I first saw that film in 1972 I had just read Sinclair Lewis’s source novel and found myself wishing they’d have made a sequel featuring the final third of Lewis’s book, which they hadn’t used in 1960 and in which Gantry becomes an established leader of a mainstream church, at a time when Lancaster would still have been young enough to repeat the role.