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Ever since Suspicion indeed, on the one hand, and Rebecca on the other, volumes of reel of film have told the tales of the paranoid woman of the era, she is the very sight of the times and the very words sudden fear themselves may be used to describe noir itself, it's attack vogue, it's play in the dark nature, the insuring lustre of stars on the screen, reworking in this case the themes, of suspicion, and the key player in the play of death is a dictating machine, a media within the media.
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It was released by Eagle-Lion Films, based on the 1946 novel of the same title written by Murray Forbes.
It's everything high noir should be — a story of hardened criminality, deceit, weird and fantastical problems and situations, ambiguity, pursuit, fate, twists and doomed and destructive love affairs — it's incredible what can be packed into this 83 minute ride.
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Although not the best loved nor even the best known of the period adaptations of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, The Brasher Doubloon (1947) does remain highly faithful to type in that it squeezes in the many well known and oft tread tropes, types and topics familiar to readers of that series.
Following the success of the Chandler adaptation Murder My Sweet (1944) and Chandler's adaptation of Double Indemnity (1944), the author became in fashion in Hollywood: Warners filmed The Big Sleep, MGM did The Lady in the Lake (1946), and Paramount filmed a Chandler original, The Blue Dahlia (1946).
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A significant amount had happened in the world and in cinema in the twenty years between the two films, and while the story is in essence exactly the same, the two worlds, that of Berlin in 1931 and Los Angeles in 1951, have little in common.
While Fritz Lang presented public and personal paranoia to the max in his 1931 masterpiece, neither are edged deep into the drama of the 1951 M, but it is otherwise an effective film.
There are stabs at public paranoia and criminal psychology, although both seem to be token efforts at times. The police procedural which returns an otherwise constantly roving camera to the quite corner of a soundstage on a fairly regular basis, is handled by Howard Da Silva, who plays the carefree cop, chewing his way from meeting to meeting, first with the city's mayor, and then with various psychologists, colleagues and villains.
There’s a fight at a night club ― or is it a fight? There’s
a panicky couple of lovers ― Burt Lancaster and the incredible and much loved
Yvonne De Carlo ― and there is a sizeable team of men, who have clearly come
together with larceny in mind.
One long flashback and many moments of indecision from
Lancaster’s character ‘Steve Thompson’ later, and the movie concludes with its
high-octane combination of heist-gone-wrong meets triple-cross.
In Criss Cross, Robert Siodmak made a restless film noir,
giving the story an exciting structure that raises the drama higher than it
might otherwise be. The art here is in complicating something that might
under other circumstances be quite straightforward.
One way this is achieved is through some regular film noir
favourite tropes, moves and signals.
The first of these is the idea of returning. This isn’t just a favourite theme in film noir, and it is the start of many a good story. But film noir does use this to a great extent. Thus the flashback commences with Burt Lancaster’s character returning to Bunker Hill ― full of melancholy ― full of wisdom ― full of questions ― replete with memories ― weighed down with experience ― and looking for a lost love.