“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 unhappy valentine expresses all of this film noir's unrelenting fatality. Opening with an aerial nighttime view of a metropolis, the camera soon draws its circle around three figures acting out an obsessive “criss cross” of love and betrayal: Lancaster, a would-be petty crook; Dan Duryea, as always, hiding cruelty behind his baby face; and Yvonne De Carlo, wed, in her way, to both. In the first moments of dialogue (“meet me at the house at Palos Verdes”), the setting is revealed to be Los Angeles. The city, playing itself in full sun, will encircle and trap the lovers: Angel's Flight is home; a narrow slit of a Bunker Hill bar, home away from home; Union Station, a way in, but not out. Talk of escape to the beach (“Palos Verdes,” “Zuma,” “Balboa”) is just that: talk. Palos Verdes, the peninsula point of Los Angeles, is death.