“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 the unrelenting fatality that makes Criss Cross definitive film noir. Opening with an aerial view of an anonymous metropolis, the camera soon draws its circle around three figures fated to an obsessive “criss cross” of love and betrayal: Lancaster, a petty crook; Dan Duryea, as always, hiding cruelty behind his baby face; and Yvonne De Carlo, the object of their rivalry. Criss Cross is an unjustly neglected late work by German expatriate Robert Siodmak, who remains best known for The Spiral Staircase, The Killers and Phantom Lady. William K. Everson calls Criss Cross “a top-notch ‘caper' movie...taut, exciting, extremely well-written, and quite one of the best of the sleazy underworld films of the '40s, the closest Siodmak came to capturing the essence of Lang.”