CRISS CROSS

On the face of it this film noir looks promising: it has a decent director (Robert Siodmak) and cast (Burt Lancaster, Dan Duryea), and some critics do like it.

On the other hand some critics don’t and (spoiler alert) I am with them. In fact I don’t think anything about this film works.  

For starters there's a love triangle at the heart of the story which I never bought for one moment, in which Yvonne de Carlo plays a tepid femme fatale who both Lancaster and Duryea are supposed to be in love with, obsessively so in Lancaster's case. 

Her character is so underdeveloped that when there's an indication towards the end that she might have been planning to betray Lancaster all along, rather than opportunistically, it's really hard to care, so it doesn't much matter that we never do find out what she was up to, if anything.  

Siodmak has a nice visual style but he can’t get any dramatic tension going, partly due to a meandering screenplay,  

I perked up a bit when out of nowhere there's going to be a heist which sounds interesting (in particular how the getaway is to be arranged) but frustratingly the heist itself turns into a fiasco. Nor was it clear to me how Lancaster being an ‘inside man’ was necessary for it to succeed.

Frankly, this film is a mess.