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Hemingway's prose meets Hopper's diner in the opening, the hired assassins (Charles McGraw, William Conrad) enter like the underworld's Abbott and Costello. "What's the idea?" "There isn't any idea." Their target is the former palooka turned grease monkey (Burt Lancaster), waiting at the boarding house and "through with all the runnin' around," only gun blasts illuminate the gloom. Existential pulp expansion, Citizen Kane treatment. The insurance company agent (Edmond O'Brien) investigates, acquaintances piece the ill-fated galoot back together until "the double-cross to end all double-crosses" emerges. From retired police lieutenant (Sam Levene) to jilted girlfriend (Virginia Christine) to timorous chambermaid (Queenie Smith), testimonies point to the racketeer (Albert Dekker) and his moll (Ava Gardner). "You're supposed to be a troublemaker. Okay. Make some." A hard-boiled grotesquerie parceled out in snarls of light and shadow, a signature Robert Siodmak arrangement. Swift Chester Gould strokes give Jack Lambert's cinder-block mug and Jeff Corey's oleaginous jitters, Vince Barnett contributes a beautifully weary aria as a hoodlum with eyes on the stars. (Their heist at the hat factory unfolds as an unbroken high-angled shot swooping from workers' entrance to payroll office to front gates for a shootout.) Lancaster's abstracted brawn harmonizes with Gardner's perverse sultriness—she purrs "The More I Know of Love" at the piano, straight to the camera while an electric candle in the foreground links her to the smitten lunk. "When he did fall, it had to be for dynamite." Spiky jewel in the soup bowl, scrawled constellation on the prison wall. Showdown at the mansion, taciturnity versus hysteria. "Don't ask a dying man to lie his soul into hell." Siegel has the official remake, Siodmak the unofficial one (Criss Cross). Cinematography by Elwood Bredell. With Charles D. Brown, Donald MacBride, and Phil Brown. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |