Criss Cross (1949)

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Criss Cross (1949) – R. Siodmak

Burt Lancaster returns home to L. A. after kicking around the country after the war.  He won’t admit to himself that he’s there to see his old flame (and ex-wife) Yvonne De Carlo but he is.  Unfortunately, she’s now married to Dan Duryea (who has played many bad guys in films noir, so you know he’s trouble).  Still, there’s a flame.  We see in flashback how things began and also how the armored car robbery that Lancaster is planning with Duryea came to be.  After the flashback, we get the robbery itself and its aftermath.  It’s a downer but this is noir.  Perhaps there are similarities to that famous earlier Siodmak-Lancaster film, The Killers (1946), where Lancaster waits for the hired guns he knows will take him out (and we see why in the flashback) but it’s a winning formula.  Here again, Burt is none too bright, driven to the wrong ends by his obsession with a lady, and he pays for his mistakes.  Criss Cross has all the noir tropes and stylistic tics and a Miklós Rózsa score to boot.  See it for its sense of inexorable doom.