Criss Cross

Neither love nor friendship nor family nor even the sunrise can comfort you in this brilliant but exceptionally bitter noir by genre specialist Siodmak (THE KILLERS, PHANTOM LADY). As a fate-blaming patsy and the inconstant ex-wife he can't stay away from, Lancaster and De Carlo make for a physically beautiful but emotionally toxic couple, with an armored-car heist providing the trigger for deception and double-crosses. Siodmak and cinematographer Franz Planer provide flavorsome location work in L.A.'s long-gone Bunker Hill neighborhood, until the focus narrows down for a final crescendo of restricted vision, nightmarish passivity, and perhaps the cruelest last shot in all of noirdom