Since Germany was the foremost center of filmmaking in Europe by 1920, Austrians like Fritz Lang worked in Berlin movie studios alongside such native Germans as Robert Siodmak. Lang joined the exodus to Hollywood in 1933, after Hitler nationalized the German film industry, but Siodmak made movies in France throughout the 1930s and only went to Hollywood in 1939, when World War II broke out in Europe.
“The rise of Nazism and the coming of World War II had driven such important crime-film directors” as Robert Siodmak and Fritz Lang to the United States.1 By then, the milieu of gangster film had become a darker place, both psychologically and morally, as movies like Dead End and This Gun for Hire indicate. The gangster chose violence as a weapon against the brutal hardness of a “decaying society.”2
Some of the gangster movies of the period belonged to the class of American films christened film noir (dark film) by postwar French critics. Siodmak brought with him from his years in Berlin studios his “mastery of shadowy lighting and worked with cinematographers with a gift of extreme contrasts of light and darkness.” In his peak period in Hollywood, he directed ten extraordinary film noirs in Hollywood.3
Criss Cross (1949)
The dark, menacing atmosphere of Criss Cross, coupled with the somber vision of life reflected in this tale of obsession and murder, mark this movie as film noir, as well as a gangster picture—as noted earlier, there is no reason why the same film cannot be both. The pessimistic view of life exhibited in noir movies—itself an outgrowth of the disillusionment spawned by World War II, a disillusionment that would continue into the period of uncertainty known as the Cold War that was the war’s aftermath—is evident in Criss Cross, probably Siodmak’s best noir. Molly Haskell describes noir movies as “those harsh and livid little tales reeking of European fatalism.”4
Also in keeping with the conventions of film noir is the movie’s air of spare, unvarnished realism, typified by the stark, documentary-like quality of the cinematography, especially the grim scenes that take place at night. Furthermore, Criss Cross demonstrates Siodmak’s ability to create depth of character, in this instance in a movie about a faithless hussy and a naïve chump.
Siodmak attracted a first-class group of collaborators for Criss Cross. The intricate screenplay was by novelist and screenwriter Daniel Fuchs; Frank (née Franz) Planer, another veteran of the German film industry, was the cinematographer, an artist who, like Siodmak, favored location shooting. The musical score was composed by the Hungarian émigré to Hollywood, Miklós Rózsa, who had worked with Siodmak on The Killers (1946). In Criss Cross, his score is characterized by “unsentimental themes, driving rhythms . . . and a raw urban power” that complement the realistic look of the movie.5
Burt Lancaster, who plays Steve Thompson in the film, also plays the lead in The Killers; he perfectly embodied the vulnerability of the noir antihero. Steve is victimized by the femme fatale (fatal female), another staple of film noir—a seductive, remorseless woman who uses men and then discards them. Yvonne De Carlo plays Anna, the femme fatale and the lady for whom Steve gets involved in an armed robbery.
Franz Planer acted as location scout and chose exteriors throughout Los Angeles; for example, a house in the run-down Bunker Hill section that served as the family homestead of Steve’s mother (Edna Holland) and younger brother Slade (Richard Long). There is also an old apartment building that has a faded, deteriorated look, where a small-time mob holds its meetings.
Since the term film noir was not in general use in Hollywood in those days, and would not be for another few years, Siodmak considered Criss Cross a gangster movie. He described the antihero of a gangster picture as someone “who has failed in life and has therefore committed a crime. . . . If you give such a person a good enough motive for the crime,” the audience will be on his side. This sums up the character played by Lancaster in Criss Cross.6
The title of the film is easily explained: When a person double-crosses someone who has already double-crossed them, it is called a “criss cross.” The main character in Lang’s movie Scarlet Street, which is about a criss cross, is, in fact, named Chris Cross.
The movie begins with the camera swooping down on a nightclub parking lot at night, while Steve and Anna are kissing. Their embrace is revealed by the headlights of a passing automobile. The story begins on the night before the armed robbery in which Steve is participating. Then Steve narrates, voice-over on the sound track, the events leading up to the heist. “What happened was in the cards—it was Fate,” Steve asserts more than once, in a futile attempt to shirk any responsibility for what took place.
The extended flashback begins eight months earlier, when Steve comes back to town after traveling around the country, attempting to get over his divorce from Anna. They were only married for seven months, but Steve still carries a torch for her. He bunks in his mother’s house in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles. He goes to the Rondo Club, where he and Anna used to hang out, aware that he will probably run into her there. He comments in a voice-over, “A man eats an apple, gets a piece of the core stuck between his teeth. . . . I knew one way or the other; somehow I would wind up seeing her that night.” And so he does. Indeed, he becomes infatuated with her all over again. “It was in the cards,” he insists, “it was Fate.”
Steve’s sexual enslavement to Anna is painfully obvious in the scene in which he watches her dancing to an overheated Latin American tune with another man (a young Tony Curtis). Steve’s fatal attraction to his ex-wife is demonstrated vividly in this scene. One of the customers assumes that Steve is miserable about being an unlucky gambler and says to him, “You shouldn’t bet if you can’t afford to lose.”
Yvonne De Carlo and Burt Lancaster in Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949); Lancaster plays the ex-husband of De Carlo, who is unaware that she has taken up with a gangster.
Steve subsequently discovers that Anna has married Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), a second-rate racketeer, but Steve’s passionate affair with Anna continues. One afternoon Slim, who suspects that Anna is two-timing him, interrupts a tryst between her and Steve. To mollify Slim, Steve, who has gotten his old job back at Horten’s Armored Car Service, offers to set up an armored truck robbery involving a factory payroll. Steve hopes that his share in the loot from the armed robbery will enable him to spirit Anna away from Slim so that they can start life anew, beyond Slim’s reach. With that, the forty-minute flashback ends, and the movie proceeds with the armored truck robbery.
Steve is driving the armored car when the robbery takes place. Slim’s gang sets off smoke bombs when the heist commences. In the ensuing scuffle with the cops, Steve is seriously wounded by one of Slim’s own men. He suddenly realizes that Slim has double-crossed him: he is meant to take the fall for the robbery. In retaliation for Slim’s betrayal, Steve shoots a couple members of his mob and even wounds Slim himself. Slim gets away with half of the take from the heist. Steve later hands over the other half of the loot to Anna for safekeeping and instructs her to meet him at the cottage on the ocean that they have used as a rendezvous. Steve plans to double-cross his double-crosser: a criss cross.
Meanwhile, Steve is hospitalized with severe injuries, which the police assume he sustained in heroically attempting to foil the robbery. Mr. Nelson (Robert Osterloh, in a peerless performance) is sitting in the corridor outside of Steve’s room; he is ostensibly waiting to see another patient. This harmless-looking individual, whom Steve trusts to drive him to his rendezvous with Anna, “turns out to be in Dundee’s pay.”7 Nelson delivers Steve to the cottage on the shore and then inexplicably takes off. Anna is not glad to see Steve.
Anna brutally informs Steve that she plans to abscond with the loot from the payroll robbery on her own, thereby double-crossing both Slim and Steve, but Steve wants her to take him with her. She responds cruelly, “How far could I get with you? You have to take care of yourself,” meaning that she cannot drag a disabled man along with her. Then she states her personal creed: “You have to do what’s best for yourself. That’s the kind of world it is.” As a crooked politician says in Preston Sturges’s film The Great McGinty (1940), “Everybody lives by cheating everybody else.”
Nelson, of course, has tipped off Slim to the whereabouts of Steve and Anna, as Slim paid him to do. Slim suddenly materializes in the dark doorway of the cottage, carrying a cane in one hand and a gun in the other. He reassures Steve that Anna is all his and then shoots them both. They die in one another’s arms, although they are obviously no Romeo and Juliet. Slim hears the police sirens blaring outside and turns away to face the cops, who followed him to the cottage of the doomed lovers.
Aside from being a superior gangster picture, Criss Cross also qualifies as an excellent film noir; for example, the hospital scene: “Out of the hospital darkness comes Steve’s worst nightmare,” Mr. Nelson, the man he thought was “harmless”—until Nelson says laconically, “You and I have a date with Dundee.”8 The shadowy setting in the hospital room suggests the sinister night world of film noir. Moreover, Siodmak’s movie reflects the pessimistic and cynical view of life that is embedded in film noir. Thus, Martin Scorsese notes in his documentary A Personal Journey through American Cinema (1995), “There are no dispensations in film noir; you pay for your sins.” Steve wanted to be with Anna again, and when they meet one last time, “it spells doom for both of them.”9
Criss Cross was shot in 1948, and when it was released in 1949, it was not considered an exceptional movie. That is, it was not much studied or written about—until film critic Jay Cocks included it in his list of “Ten Great Movies to Be Watched Over and Over” in the mainstream magazine TV Guide, forty years after its release.10 Furthermore, in Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir, Karen Burroughs Hannsberry lauds Burt Lancaster’s skilled performance as an individual driven to crime to “please a lady.”11 What’s more, Michael Barson anoints Criss Cross as “one of the best—and bleakest—noirs from that classic era.”12
Criss Cross is finally being recognized as a top-notch gangster picture; Carlos Clarens compares it favorably to John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle, which is an established classic (see chapter 6).13 Thomas Leitch likens Siodmak to the other expert German directors who managed to maintain in Hollywood their expressive visual style and employ criminal plots to encapsulate a character’s psychological flaws.14 Some film historians compare Siodmak to Sternberg in this regard. Pauline Kael states that Siodmak’s “swift, skillful direction makes the terror convincing” in his American movies.15 Siodmak returned to Germany in 1954, to continue making German films for the balance of his career. In retrospect, it is evident that his American period was the peak of his output as a director. Yet, Kael laments, “Robert Siodmak’s Hollywood films are much better known than he is.”16
White Heat (1949)
Raoul Walsh, like Robert Siodmak, has never been accorded the regard he deserves as a director of crime films. Michael Atkinson believes that Walsh’s filmography, like that of William Wellman, contains a number of routine features he made at the studio’s behest so that his outstanding films, like White Heat, run the risk of being overlooked and neglected. “His best films,” writes Atkinson, “are essential because of the balance [that] Walsh effortlessly attains between human frailties (doubt, weakness, woe) and the pulpy, fast-moving exigencies of popular Hollywood.”17 His lesser movies, like the Jack Benny comedy The Horn Blows at Midnight, are best forgotten.
Walsh started his career in movies as an actor, playing John Wilkes Booth in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). That same year, he directed his first gangster picture, Regeneration, which demonstrated what he had learned working as an apprentice to Griffith. Walsh went on to make some fine action movies during the sound period. In 1939, he joined forces with James Cagney for The Roaring Twenties, an important gangster picture that recalls The Public Enemy. Ten years later they collaborated on White Heat, “in which the old-style, breezy Cagney gangster had become psychotic.”18 In the original screenplay, no explanation was provided for the cruelty of the character played by Cagney, Cody Jarrett. In discussing Cody Jarrett with Walsh, Cagney asked him how they could make Cody different from the mobster that Cagney had played in The Roaring Twenties. According to Martin Scorsese, Walsh replied, “Let’s make him crazy.” Cagney chimed in, “A real psychopath.”19
In White Heat, the gangster becomes a “psychologically crippled monster and a violent sadist” who is very much “on the periphery of society.” In short, he becomes an “alienated social fugitive.”20 Whereas in The Public Enemy Tom Powers breaks his doting mother’s heart, Cody Jarrett’s mother is a cold-blooded, heartless woman who is the mentor of her gangster son. She encourages his criminal behavior. Ma Jarrett was modeled on the legendary Ma Barker, who presided over a mob made up of her own sons.21
The gangster genre had waned during World War II, when war pictures were the order of the day; with pictures like White Heat, it was coming back to life. Walsh surrounded Cagney with a first-class supporting cast: Margaret Wycherly, who was nominated for an Academy Award for playing Gary Cooper’s mother in Sergeant York (1940), gives a gripping performance as Cody’s insane mother. Virginia Mayo, who plays a character who cheats on her husband with Steve Cochran’s character in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), plays another two-timing wife, Verna Jarrett. This time Mayo is cheating on James Cagney, once again with Steve Cochran, who has the part of Big Ed, a member of Cody’s gang. Mayo is especially good as Cody’s duplicitous wife. Last, but certainly not least, Robert Osterloh, the enigmatic Mr. Nelson in Criss Cross, is Tommy Riley, another member of Cody Jarrett’s gang.
Mention should be made of the musical score by Max Steiner (Gone with the Wind), one of the most influential film composers of the time period. Joseph Milicia writes that Steiner’s score “propels us through the film,” beginning with the taut and turgid music for the opening credits, “keeping the film in high gear.”22 Joseph Breen, the industry censor, initially complained that the screenplay went into far too much detail about the planning and execution of crimes, because real criminals would find such information of practical use. The script was modified accordingly. The Catholic Legion of Decency allowed White Heat to squeak by with the disapproving rating “Objectionable in Part” because of what they saw as an excessive amount of violence in the picture, but the Legion of Decency’s rating did not deter moviegoers from seeing White Heat, and the box-office returns were considerable.
White Heat starts out with a train robbery carried out by Cody Jarrett and his gang. The heist involves the killing of the two engineers in the cab of the locomotive. The gang returns to the remote cabin they use as a hideout, where Cody’s mother and his wife Verna are waiting. Big Ed expresses to Verna his conviction that Cody is no longer an appropriate leader for the gang: “It ain’t right having a crackpot giving orders; someone should take over.” When Big Ed does take over, Verna will inevitably switch her allegiance to him.
In one scene, Cody is struck by an agonizing migraine headache that he likens to a “red-hot buzz saw” inside his head, a reference to the movie’s title. Cody had faked headaches as a child to get his mother’s attention; now the fancied headaches have become real. Cody and his mother retire to a bedroom. Martin Scorsese comments, “He’s crying, and he sits on his mother’s lap—a middle-aged man!”23 The pathetic sight of Cody gradually sliding into his mother’s lap as she comforts him, says Scorsese, emphasizes that Cody depends on his mother; she controls him. “Cody has an oedipal relationship with his mother,” Drew Casper notes; “his mother never allowed him to grow up.”24
Soon thereafter, Cody and his mob move into a cheap motel in Los Angeles. He eventually lands in prison for armed robbery—he has managed to avoid the murder charge he deserves. Cody’s mother comes to see him in prison and informs him that Verna and Big Ed have been carrying on an affair since he has been in stir. His mother consoles Cody by reassuring him that the situation can be ameliorated. She says, “You’ll be out soon, and then you’ll be back on top of the world”—which is where his mother believes he belongs.
One day while having the noon meal in the prison mess hall, Cody receives word that his mother is dead. Given his fixation on his mother, he becomes crazed with grief. He hurls himself onto the long mess hall table, madly smashing dishes. The camera switches to an overhead shot as Cody wildly slugs the guards; he is finally subdued and jammed into a straightjacket, screaming all the while “like some mortally wounded animal.”25 The extras in the mess hall scene were not alerted to what Cagney was going to do, so their look of dismay is genuine.
Philip Evans, the Treasury agent (T-man) assigned to Cody’s robbery case, arranges to have an undercover cop as Cody’s cell mate, Hank Fallon, alias Nick Pardo (Edmund O’Brien). When next Cody experiences a migraine, Fallon massages his temples the way that Cody’s late mother used to do. Fallon “worms his way into the confidence of his cell mate, taking over the nurturing and reassuring role of Cody’s mother, despite his personal revulsion for Cody.”26 But Cody is so fond of him that he assigns to him the share of the loot from their robberies that would have gone to Cody’s mother.
Cody, with the help of inmate Tommy Riley, breaks out of jail and takes Tommy and Fallon with him. He stuffs Parker, another convict, into the trunk of the getaway car because he discovers that Parker had participated in a failed attempt on Cody’s life while they were in prison. When Parker complains that the trunk of the automobile is stuffy, Cody hollers, “Hold on! I’ll give you some air!” Cody then riddles the trunk with bullets. Walsh was not averse to some gallows humor in the film.
Once out of jail, Cody goes after Verna and Big Ed for betraying him. He finds them in an abandoned house. Verna convinces Cody that Big Ed killed his mother so that he could take over the gang. When Cody confronts Big Ed, the latter slams a door in his face as he tries to escape Cody’s wrath, but Cody shoots Ed through the closed door in the same way that Raven exterminated someone in This Gun for Hire. Verna, who really killed Ma Jarrett for treating her like the slut she is, reaffirms her commitment to Cody once Ed is dead.
Cody plans another robbery, this time of a chemical plant, and Fallon tips off the T-men about the caper. When the T-men, accompanied by a full complement of policemen, arrive at the plant, Cody is devastated to learn that his “buddy” Fallon is with the cops and has been betraying him from the start. Meanwhile, Verna, always the treacherous opportunist, offers to help Agent Evans take Cody alive. Nonetheless, Evans rightly sees Verna as Cody’s accomplice and arrests her.
Ma Jarrett’s often-repeated advice to her son, “to get to the top of the world,” serves as his epitaph. Cody Jarrett’s self-immolation makes for an overwhelming finale to the film. As Cody’s gang members get picked off one by one by the police, he climbs to the top of a huge oil tank, laughing maniacally all the while. Fallon shoots at him with a long-range rifle, but he is not seriously wounded. “What’s holding him up?” Fallon wonders. Cody, it seems, has decided to die on his own terms.
Ed Lowry’s arresting description of Cody’s last moments cannot be bettered: “Perched atop a refinery oil drum, engaged in a hopeless gun battle with the police, and realizing he’s betrayed by Fallon, Jarrett fires his gun into the drum, shouting, ‘Made it, Ma; top of the world!’ The white heat explosion that follows marks Jarrett’s ascension to the tragic” as he is blown into eternity.27 The gangster as tragic hero.
White Heat marked the peak of the careers of both Raoul Walsh and James Cagney. “Walsh was the most accomplished craftsman working at Warner Bros.,” and White Heat is his masterpiece.28 Because Walsh’s lengthy filmography contains some routine movies, he has not been given the high place in film history that he deserves. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Raoul Walsh left an impressive body of work as his legacy.