Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Criss Cross
1949 · Robert Siodmak · Criss Cross on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the opening shot descend from high above onto two people. (camera)
The film opens with a crane move down from a nighttime vantage no character could ever occupy, arriving on Steve and Anna already mid-embrace before anything has been explained.
Payoff: You are shown where this is heading before you know a single fact about how it got there. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. Deleuze calls this an absolute out-of-field, a vantage that belongs to no character, only to a verdict already passed.
Notice a shoulder or doorframe blocking part of the shot. (camera)
Planer keeps cutting bodies, furniture, and doorframes across the lens, so you are constantly watching a scene that is partly hidden from you.
Payoff: You are never given a clean, complete view, which is exactly how much this world lets Steve see. In the reading: out-of-field-relative. Deleuze calls this the relative out-of-field, a nearby hidden thing the camera implies without ever actually showing you.
Listen for the score pushing forward instead of just underlining scenes. (sound)
Rozsa's brass-heavy, insistent music does not comment ironically on the action, it presses ahead with the same inevitability the story itself is building toward.
Payoff: The music is not telling you how to feel about the plot. It is behaving like the plot.
Listen to Steve's voice explain why he had no choice. (sound)
Lancaster narrates in a flat, rationalizing tone that insists he is being forced into everything, while the images keep showing him actually choosing each step himself.
Payoff: The voice and the picture are telling you two different stories, and only one of them is true.
Notice a third person almost always present in a scene. (staging)
Steve and Anna are rarely alone together on screen. Someone else, Slim, a detective, his mother, is nearly always staged somewhere in the frame with them.
Payoff: Even in scenes he thinks are private, Steve is always actually being watched by somebody.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what the images show him doing, not what his voice says he is forced to do.