Criss Cross
Directed by Robert SiodmakSteve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) has come back to Los Angeles, back to his old neighborhood, back to his job as an armored car driver – and back, inevitably, to Anna (Yvonne De Carlo), the woman he divorced and cannot stop wanting. When he finds her dancing with small-time racketeer Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea) at a local bar, the reunion feels less like chance than compulsion. Anna has since married Dundee, but the attraction between her and Steve reignites with the same self-destructive heat that destroyed their marriage the first time.
Caught by Dundee's men in what looks like a compromising situation, Steve improvises a cover: he claims he was proposing a heist to Dundee, offering inside knowledge of the armored car routes. The lie becomes a plan. Detective Pete Ramirez (Stephen McNally), who has long suspected the triangle forming around Anna, watches from the margins as Steve moves deeper into collusion with Dundee's syndicate. What Steve tells himself is a scheme to win Anna back and then escape with her is, in every observable detail, a trap he is constructing around himself.
Criss Cross belongs to that strain of postwar noir where the femme fatale operates less through overt manipulation than through the hero's own inability to see clearly. The heist at the film's center functions not as a thriller mechanism but as an externalization of Steve's psychology – a man so determined to believe in a future with Anna that he engineers his own destruction in her name. The film refuses sentiment without abandoning sympathy, tracking its protagonist toward a conclusion that feels, from the opening frames, already written.
