Criss Cross · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A camera comes down out of the night over a parking lot in Los Angeles. It finds two people holding each other beside a car, telling each other it's going to work out. It isn't going to work out. Nothing has been explained yet and the verdict is already in, because the shot arrived from a vantage no person in this film will ever stand on.

That descent cost Universal money. Crane moves did. Siodmak spends it in the first thirty seconds, before a word, and then builds the rest of Criss Cross underneath it.

Deleuze has a pair of terms worth borrowing here. Every frame implies things outside it. Usually what's implied is next door: the gun in the other hand, the man in the hallway. Deleuze calls that the relative out-of-field, and Franz Planer's photography runs on it. He shoots through obstruction constantly, a shoulder or a doorframe or a stair rail cutting across the lens, so you are always watching something partly hidden by something nearer. That's Weimar grammar, the same one M codified: menace kept just off-screen, low-key pools isolating a figure inside a room you can't otherwise read. But there's a second kind, the absolute out-of-field, an outside that isn't anywhere in space at all. You can't pan to it. The opening crane is that. Not a character's view, not a vehicle anyone chartered, not a place. It's the position of a sentence already passed.

Steve Thompson comes home to Bunker Hill and says he wants an ordinary life. Deleuze would file him under the impulse-image, the category sitting between feeling something and doing something, for films where what moves a person isn't a motive but an appetite. He built it on Stroheim and Buñuel, and it comes in two layers. First the derived milieu, the actual social world, filmed here as found space: the Angels Flight funicular, the rotting Victorian rooming houses, real stucco in real light. Siodmak had been doing this since Menschen am Sonntag in 1930, nonprofessional faces in unmodified locations, and he never lost the habit. Underneath the milieu is what Deleuze calls the originary world, which isn't a location at all. It's the raw field of drives that the social surface is a crust over. Steve says he came back to the neighborhood. What came back was the appetite, and the neighborhood is only where it happens to feed.

Anna arrives through a rumba. Esy Morales's band plays, the camera moves, the club is packed, and Steve watches her across a room full of other people. He is never alone with her, including in the scenes where he believes he is. Siodmak had already proved in Phantom Lady that a diegetic band number could carry the erotic voltage the Production Code forbade him staging directly, and he runs the method again. What it produces is what Deleuze calls a fetish: a part-object cut out of the originary world and charged far past its size. Anna in that shot isn't a person with reasons. She's a charge.

Drives have a direction. The impulse-image, Deleuze says, runs down a line of slope: the appetite uses up its world and slides toward exhaustion, and the physics of the film permit no climb. Watch what the lie does.

Slim finds them together. Steve has one second, and what he says is: we're planning to knock over my own truck.

Deleuze's small-form action-image works by indices, small visible gestures from which you infer a situation you can't see. The cruelest of them is the equivocal index, an act that fits two different situations equally well, so you can't tell which one you're standing in. Steve manufactures one deliberately. The same scene, two people in a room, is converted from adultery into conspiracy by a sentence. Then the film does the thing that makes it worth arguing about: the invented situation is the one that comes true.

Cinema's oldest claim on us is that the camera was there. Something stood in front of the lens, the image carries a residue of this happened, and most film theory since Bazin has been an argument about what that guarantee is worth. Deleuze's late move, the powers of the false, concerns films that make the invented productive rather than the true, and his figure for it is the forger, someone who creates instead of reporting. Criss Cross has a forger about a decade before the concept has a cinema to describe. Steve fabricates a robbery out of panic and the world obligingly builds it for him. In Welles or Resnais that power opens a story out. Here it clamps shut on contact, because we have already seen the parking lot. The false can create in 1949. It can only create downward.

Then the smoke. The robbery gets a few minutes. Siodmak shoots it at a real industrial exterior and floods the frame with drifting white, done in camera, so that men fire on each other through a fog none of them can see through. Deleuze's name for a space like that is any-space-whatever: a space that has stopped serving as a setting for action, lost its coordinates, and become pure potential. He was especially drawn to the white and emptied version, fields where connections must be made because nothing is given. It's the film's most expensive passage and its most remembered one, and notice where it falls. At maximum consequence the machinery of the action-image — see a situation, act, change it — simply quits. Perception is withdrawn, so no action can be adequate, so the shooting is blind. A genre still officially committed to competent men doing decisive things reaches its decisive moment and can't see. Ted Kent's cutting says the same thing structurally: an hour of long, patient, increasingly uncomfortable scenes in bars and kitchens and hospital rooms, then the heist hacked into short disoriented bursts. The trap gets the running time. The event gets minutes.

Deleuze is suspicious of flashbacks. A dated memory of a former present is a closed circuit; it goes out, collects the explanation, comes back, and hands you information rather than time. He argues it needs justifying from outside itself, and in the French films of the thirties he finds that justification in destiny. Le Jour se lève opens at the terminal moment, so every remembered scene is watched under sentence. Daniel Fuchs takes the architecture whole, and Rózsa scores it with the low brass ostinato and minor-second dread figure he'd built for Double Indemnity, re-tooled for a poorer man. So the film never asks how this happened. It asks you to watch it happen while knowing. And its most punishing decision is that it doesn't stop when it catches up to the parking lot. It passes it, and plays the last stretch with the safety off. The final two-shot in the beach house puts the lovers on opposite sides of a barrier and photographs them through obstruction, which is exactly how Pépé le Moko ends. Siodmak learned that in his Paris exile and had been waiting to use it.

Two things this picture did to the form. It moved the screen time off the crime and onto the construction of the man who commits it, which is the shape most serious heist films have used since. And it showed a studio that you can give away the ending in the first shot and lose nothing, because dread is a stronger engine than surprise. When French and then Anglo-American critics began assembling film noir as a category, this was one of the specimens the definition got built from; the deterministic strain of noir is largely this film generalized. Soderbergh went back to it in 1995 for The Underneath, which tells you how durable the design is.

Watch the daylight next time. Planer lights the Los Angeles day scenes open and hard, sunlit without warmth, and those are the scenes where Steve announces he wants a normal life. Night is where he's comfortable. The sun simply declines to help him. And listen to him talking over all of it, telling you the whole way down that he had no choice, while the images show a man choosing, repeatedly, fast. The film never settles which of the two is lying. That unresolved seam between a voice and its pictures is a hairline crack in the classical contract, and it's the part of Criss Cross that keeps growing.