Criss Cross · reception & legacy
1949 · Robert Siodmak
How Criss Cross has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A solid programmer in 1949 that spent decades in the shadow of Siodmak and Lancaster's earlier hit The Killers; noir devotees have since flipped the ranking, and it's now routinely placed among the very greatest films noirs.
What's debated
The perennial noir-nerd debate: is Criss Cross actually better than The Killers — the leaner, sadder, more fatalistic of the two Siodmak–Lancaster noirs?
Its footprint
Its location shooting around Bunker Hill and Angels Flight makes it a treasured time capsule of a demolished Los Angeles, lovingly dissected in Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself; Steven Soderbergh remade it in 1995 as The Underneath.
Where it stands
A 'noir-heads know' canon climber — not a household name, but on Letterboxd and in noir circles it's a you-must-see, often cited as the genre at its purest.