"From the start, it all went one way.It was in the cards or it was fate or a jinx or whatever you want to call it...." Burt Lancaster's unhappyvalentine expresses all the unrelenting fatality that makes Criss Cross definitive film noir. Opening with anaerial view of an anonymous metropolis, the camera soon draws its circle around three figures fated to anobsessive "criss cross" of love and betrayal: Lancaster, a petty crook; Dan Duryea, as always, hidingcruelty behind his baby face; and Yvonne De Carlo, the object of their rivalry. Criss Cross is an unjustlyneglected late work by German expatriate Robert Siodmak, who remains best known for The SpiralStaircase, The Killers and Phantom Lady. "Like many German (directors), Siodmak thrived in America,quickly learning to blend the melodrama of German cinema, its visual expressionism, and the technicalfacilities of the big studios...He never lost a mordant sense of humour, narrative economy, a relish foractors and actresses, a special care for interiors..." (David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film).