Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 12, 2020 9:03:08 GMT -8
I’ve always had a cinematic love/hate relationship with Burt Lancaster. He can appear stiff and wooden or stylishly hard-edged and obstinate. In Criss Cross we get the stiff-and-wooden.
But it’s not all his fault. The script is terrible. Or I should say, it gets worse the further along this movie goes. This is basically a heist film. Sort of. A little ways into this we get one of the longest (and least effective) flash-back sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie.
We go back to see the origins of the Steve Thompson/Lily Munster love affair. They used to be married. Burt (Steve) went away for a while. Why? Oh, do not expect too much out of this script.
But he comes back and wants her again without admitting it to himself. (I guess. Again, a rather hamfisted script.) Yvonne De Carlo (Anna) is supposedly such a femme fatale that she is warned out of the town by Steve’s cop friend. But we see nothing from Anna that suggests she’s anything but a fairly normal and safe woman.
But the script calls for her to be a femme fatale even if she doesn’t act like one. Maybe if she had worn her Lily Munster makeup, it would make sense. But in this movie, very little does make sense after a while.
But it starts out fine. Dan Duryea is good as Slim Dundee, the rival for Lily’s affections and a local hoodlum. For some reason, Steve decides he wants to be a criminal. Again, hamfisted writing. Supposedly he tells Slim of his desire to rob the armored car company that he works for so that he has an excuse for why Slim found Steve at Lily (and Steve’s) home when he comes home.
Oh, yeah, Lily and Slim got married. Why? Please, don’t ask this movie to make sense. This is another movie where the supposed protagonist (Steve Thompson/Lancaster) is so onerously annoying, stupid, and just plain unlikeable that you really don’t care if he loses the girl and if Slim gets the girl. I won’t tell you how this turns out but, trust me. By the end of this, you might be actively rooting against Steve Thompson.
I have no idea why this film carries a relatively high 7.5 rating at IMDB. I can’t decide if De Carlo or Lancaster is worse. I actually think De Carlo is fine. But her character, as written, is so misshapen, there is no way that even the finest actress could have made the part work.
And Lancaster is like a wind-up robot who is going the throw 100% Burt Lancaster High Energy at any role. If the role is good, and there are good supporting characters, this can work. If not, then all you get is a lot of angst and pent-up energy coming out of Lancaster that seem almost inappropriate to the setting. Plus, I think he’s completely miscast in this role.
Dan Duryea, Alan “Alfred” Napier (he masterminds the heist), and Percy Helton (the bartender) add some personality and interest to the film. But the lead characters do not.
At the start and finish there is a beautiful fly-over of San Francisco. Parts of this film wanted to be classic Noir. But it was just gutted by a rotten script. For instance: The whole shtick is "You can't rob an armored car. It's never been done." But, oh, Steve is an inside man so this somehow is the difference. But it's clear at the end there is little trick to robbing an armored car if you just wait for the men inside to come out carrying sacks of money and then hold them up at gunpoint (or other trickery). Huh? What's with all this "You can't rob an armored car?" stuff. The armored car wasn't even a factor.
