{"id":14941,"date":"2020-09-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-18T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=14941"},"modified":"2020-09-23T17:58:34","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T00:58:34","slug":"classic-corner-criss-cross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/classic-corner-criss-cross\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Corner: Criss Cross<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was recently invited to guest on a podcast called \u201cKilmerKast,\u201d<\/a> which is (as you\u2019d guess) a guided tour through the filmography of Val Kilmer, and I took the occasion to finally watch Kill Me Again<\/em>, John Dahl’s 1989 feature debut. Dahl would go on to make Red Rock West<\/em> and The Last Seduction<\/em>, two of the finest neo-noir<\/em>s of the 1990s, a decade in which many of the conventions of that genre were subsumed and dumbed down by the far more general, and ubiquitous, \u201cerotic thriller.\u201d And yet, though Dahl\u2019s work was special, fully rooted in the specifics of noir<\/em>, his first film doesn\u2019t land, because Kilmer is so egregiously miscast \u2013 he\u2019s playing the sap, the greedy\/horny mark who is drawn into the web of the femme fatale<\/em>, and spends the whole picture fighting, unsuccessfully, to detangle from it. But Kilmer doesn\u2019t make a good sap; he projects too much intelligence, and seems to know too many angles. It\u2019s a tough role to play, the sucker who thinks he\u2019s smart (until he realizes he\u2019s been played for a fool.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forty years earlier, Burt Lancaster played the streetwise yet naive lunk gloriously. In Robert Siodmak\u2019s Criss Cross<\/em> (now streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>), he\u2019s right at home; he fits right into the noir<\/em> world of shady nightclubs filled with tough, world-weary customers, and he\u2019s born to deliver hard-boiled narration. If you\u2019ve seen other Lancaster work of the period (like Brute Force<\/em> and Siodmak\u2019s The Killers<\/em> earlier, or Sweet Smell of Success<\/em> a few years later) you know that few actors could bring a hard case to life like Lancaster. What\u2019s surprising about Criss Cross<\/em> is how successfully he turns down the ruthless intelligence, the darting-eye resourcefulness, that serves him so well elsewhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lancaster plays Steve Thompson, whom we first meet on the eve of a big heist, as intimacies are exchanged and promises are made to Anna Dundee (Yvonne De Carlo, miles from \u201cThe Munsters\u201d), a tough broad with a chip on her shoulder. The heist in question is an armored car job, with Steve the inside man behind the wheel. As he sets out on the road that fateful day, he thinks about Anna and a little smile crosses his lips \u2013 and the flashbacks begin, narrated by Lancaster with noir<\/em> fatalist bon mots<\/em> like  \u201cIt was fate, or a jinx, whatever you wanna call it, from the start.\u201d We go back a few weeks, as Steve returns to Los Angeles looking for work and trying to reconnect his life \u2013 and with Anna, his ex-wife, whom he still holds a torch for. \u201cHe\u2019s divorced,\u201d we\u2019re told, \u201cbut he\u2019s still got her in his bones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, she\u2019s found herself a new lunk, the splendidly-named \u201cSlim Dundee\u201d (Dan Duryea). But there\u2019s still a palpable fire between Anna and Steve; they\u2019re pouting and play-acting, but they\u2019re still burning, no matter how hard they try to pretend otherwise. (\u201cDon\u2019t tell me you don\u2019t trust me.\u201d \u201cThat hurt your feelings?\u201d) Daniel Fuchs\u2019s screenplay unspools their doomed romance with lightning efficiency \u2013 he doesn\u2019t hesitate to skip unnecessary dialogue scenes, moments when we don\u2019t have to be told what\u2019s going to happen, because we\u2019re wise- filmgoers who\u2019ve seen a motion picture or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s impossible to pull off an armored truck job, Steve is told again and again \u2013 \u201cNobody ever got away with a heist of an armored truck in 28 years!\u201d \u2013 and perhaps that\u2019s for good reason, but nevertheless, they pull together a crew of colorful characters and get to work. It\u2019s one of those heist movies where specifics of the job are withheld until it\u2019s actually happening, an ingenious device that allows us to marvel at the foxiness of the plan, and then, almost immediately, gasp at how it all goes wrong. Here, the plan goes very wrong indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To this point, \u201cCriss Cross\u201d is a solid, sturdy noir<\/em> thriller, but nothing particularly exceptional. It goes its extra mile in the extended hospital sequence that follows Steve\u2019s injury in the failed heist. He fades in and out of consciousness as the suspicions of the authorities and the strange behavior of his visitors increases; with every blackout, the walls close in, and there\u2019s a greater sense that this man has nowhere to go. The sweaty paranoia of these few minutes overwhelms, and Lancaster shows up <\/em>for them; his eyes dart about the room, all but bugging out, as he starts to suspect that the jig is up. (Steven Soderbergh\u2019s 1995 remake, The Underneath<\/em>, bests the original only in this stretch, by leaning further into the first-person POV Siodmak uses for the first few minutes.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve does his best, but he\u2019s easily outfoxed by both Anna and Slim; blinded by his lust, but also by his limitations. The outcome is bleak, as it must always be in truly great noir, and then it\u2019s over: a grim farewell, shots, sirens, panic, and big \u201cTHE END\u201d card before the viewer knows what\u2019s hit \u2018em. \u201cThey don\u2019t make \u2018em like they used to\u201d is an overworked turn of phrase these days, but sometimes it\u2019s on the money, and when it comes to a movie like \u201cCriss Cross,\u201d it\u2019s not just that they don\u2019t make them like this anymore. It’s that they probably shouldn\u2019t even try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCriss Cross\u201d is <\/em>now streaming<\/em><\/a> on the Criterion Channel.<\/em>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Siodmak\u2019s 1949 thriller (now streaming on the Criterion Channel) is a master class in noir construction, characterization, and mood. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":14944,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-14941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}