Criss Cross

from filmnoiroftheweek.com

I always find the music in film noir interesting. Unlike self-conscious noirs like Farewell, My Lovely and Body Heat, most noir soundtracks are orchestral – not jazz. The slow wailing saxophone over a Robert Mitchum voice-over can be found in noir parodies like the Guy Noir segments of A Prairie Home Companion. Strangely enough, that kind of music track is never actually heard in classic film noir. With some exceptions (Odds Against Tomorrow, for example) jazz and other forms of popular American music is usually heard only when it's performed on screen and not in the background or over opening credits.

Music performed on screen in noir can be put into two categories. First, there's the tunes belted out by sexy femme fatales in glamorous night clubs. Often the songs, by the likes of Rita Hayworth and Liz Scott, are upbeat and don't have much to do with the film except that they reinforce the fact that the woman are sexy – the Jessica Rabbit effect. Then there's music played by bands in seedy night clubs and bars that are integrated into the context of the film. Instead of being somber and slow the music from the second category is pounding and disorientating – totally fitting the mood of the film. Watch D.O.A. for an example. The most effective music in the film (right behind the bombastic but wonderful score by Dimitri Tiomkin) is a performance in a San Francisco jazz club by the band the Fisherman – an all-black group that jams with so much force it’s exhausting to watch. Edmund O’Brien –after following partiers from his hotel to the club- is so annoyed by the music (and from a jealous husband’s evil eye) it causes him to leave his fellow drinkers and hit the bar alone. That opens up a golden opportunity for villains to then slip him a glow-in-the-dark Mickey Finn.

When Kansas goes undercover in Phantom Lady she’s eventually lead to a creepy drummer in a night club show. The music at the show is typical of a 1940s film. The...

I should have been a better friend. I shoulda stopped you.

Criss Cross is directed by Robert Siodmak and adapted by Daniel Fuchs from Don Tracy's novel. It stars Burt Lancaster, Yvonne de Carlo, Dan Duryea and Stephen McNally. Music is scored by Miklós Rózsa and cinematography is by Franz Planer.

Steve Thompson (Lancaster) and old flame Anna (de Carlo) begin to rekindle their love, much to the dismay of those closest to Steve. She's now unhappily married to mobster Slim Dundee (Duryea), they plan to run away together but Slim is apparently getting wise to their affair. When the two are caught together by Slim, Steve quickly concocts a story that they were plotting an armoured-truck robbery that he wants Dundee to be involved in. Slim notes it's near impossible, but with Steve working for the armoured-truck company it opens the way for inside man possibilities. It deviates suspicion on the lovers, but this is only the start of their problems, for nothing is as it seems.

Criss Cross has come to be a favourite of many a film noir purist, a picture often held forward as one of the shining lights of the 1940's noir universe. But it so easily could have been so different given that the film's original producer, Mark Hellinger, suddenly died of a heart attack. The film under Hellinger's guidance was to be based around a racetrack heist, but with Hellinger's passing the project dropped into limbo and was sold off to Universal along with Lancaster and Siodmak as part of the deal. Although Lancaster was unhappy with the rewritten plot, his relationship with Siodmak had already been cemented three years earlier when they made The Killers, another of film noir's greatest triumphs. For Criss Cross, Siodmak, Fuchs and producer Michael Kraike took Tracy's novel and combined it with elements of The Killers (an Ernest Hemmingway short story). Ava Gardner wasn't on hand to reprise her Killers femme fatale performance, while Shelley Winters was considered but not offered the...

“Steve” (Burt Lancaster) is quite a decent cove, but he has an Achilles heel. His ex-wife “Anna” (Yvonne De Carlo) is a manipulative creature who knows that she has him around her little finger. His hopes of some sort of reconciliation are dashed when he discovers that she has married local kingpin “Slim” (Dan Duryea). Increasingly desperate, he concocts a cunning plan to raise enough cash to lure her away from him, but along the way earns an enmity that he and, for that matter, she are ill-equipped to deal with. Though Lancaster takes top billing, I felt it was De Carlo who stole the show here as a truly malevolent and selfish character and Duryea and her have a toxic sort of chemistry that works really quite well as the plot thickens and the besotted “Steve” becomes more malleable. Aside from having a solid and characterful story, this also benefits from some mean and effective photography - especially as we see how “Steve” longs more and more for his malevolent “Anna”. It isn’t often that Hollywood portrayed one of it’s A-list men in quite such a weak position, especially when the characterisation isn’t weighted down with booze, and in this role Lancaster plays well the vulnerable and lovestruck “Steve” amidst the darkly lit and potently scored drama. Keep an eye out for an early outing for an uncredited Tony Curtis as a gigolo, and enjoy the rest of this tensely constructed exposé on a man in no way in control of his own destiny.