Criss Cross

Robert Siodmak, USA 1949, 88 minutes

Rating: PG violence

Illicit passion, greed, robbery and murder collide in this powerful thriller starring Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo.

“I’d call this one of the great films noirs, except that greatness seems like an odd concept to evoke when you’re talking about a genre so often obsessed with failure – failure in love, failure in money, failure in crime, failure to see what’s going on or where you’re heading. Burt Lancaster plays another in his late 40s line of doomed losers (cf Siodmak’s The Killers, 1946)…If you watch carefully, you can spot Tony Curtis in his first screen role, swinging with De Carlo to the jazz flute and Latin rhythms of Esy Morales and his Rhumba Band.”
– Robert Hanks, Sight and Sound, September 2020.