Hard-Boiled to Noir: Criss Cross

Sometimes an ending is enough

I have developed a theory about Film Noir for a future book project. I believe that Film Noir developed as a result of largely left-wing filmmakers attempting to adapt hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s, during the 1940s, while being restricted by the Hollywood Production Code and B-movie budgets. As part of that project, I will be reviewing adapted works and comparing them to the final result on film.

First up: Criss Cross.

Published by Don Tracy in 1934, Criss-Cross is pretty much a pulp potboiler. Boxer Johnny Thompson is forced out of the fight game by diminishing purses; he takes a job as an armored car guard. The job pays poorly and, as Tracy describes it, is a monotonous slog. His only bright spot is spending his meager wages taking out Anna, who is beautiful, but gold-digging and selfish. Despite all the time and money Johnny devotes to her, she is physically cold to him, mocking him for the broken nose that is mashed across his face and the cheap dates his offers. Johnny is driven by fierce sexual frustration, to the point where he is obsessed with the goal of getting her into bed.

His dreams are broken when Anna marries local small time gangster Slim. For reasons of her own, however, when Slim is out of town on business, she finally grants Johnny his fondest wish and drags him into bed. They carry on with a torrid affair, all the while worrying that Slim will find them out and kill them both.

Slim proposes a scheme to rob one of Johnny's armored car schemes. If Johnny provides details of a big cash pickup, Slim and his gang will knock out Johnny and give him a cut of the take afterwards. When the big day finally arrives, however, Slim comes gunning for Johnny; it appears that he did find out about the affair. Johnny takes a few bullets before taking out Slim and his partner.

After recuperating from his wounds, he finds himself in the clear for his role in the robbery, as anyone who could implicate him is dead. He is promoted to manager of the armored car office, rapidly rising in the company to the point where his salary is so high that he can afford to put Anna up in an apartment and continue their affair.

Just as it seems Johnny is finally going to get everything he ever wanted, he torments himself worrying whether Anna ever truly loved him. He comes to the conclusion that she didn't and never would, which he can't live with. Just as he is contemplating suicide, a loose end of the robbery catches up to him and he is gunned down. As he thinks he is dying, he is relieved, welcoming death, but the book ends as a doctor delivering the devastating news that he is actually going to live.

Criss-Cross is very much in the vein of a lot of hard-boiled fiction of its age. It features a physically tough protagonist trapped by diminishing or dead-end economic conditions. The femme-fatale is ruthlessly cruel and manipulative, denying him her favors until she is finally achieves the level of her desired level of comfort. The language is sprinkled with moderate swears and racial and ethnic epithets. (The N-word is flung around frequently). The ending is appropriately dark and nihilistic.

Criss-Cross was adapted into film in 1949, starring Burt Lancaster as Steve (changed from Johnny), Yvonne de Carlo as Anna, and Dan Duryea as Slim.

(Spoilers) Lancaster returns to Los Angeles and quickly runs into his ex-wife De Carlo. Right away, the film changes the relationship between the two leads from a man driven by intense sexual frustration and a femme fatale manipulating him with sex, into a rather ordinary ex-husband ex-wife relationship, which sanitizes their ties and discards the central theme of the novel.

He takes his old job at an armored car company and, like in the book, he sets up a robbery with Slim, which goes wrong. Lancaster doesn't kill Slim, rather he wounds him, but the gangster gets away with half the money. In the process, Lancaster takes a bullet.

After the robbery, Lancaster recuperates in the hospital and is lauded as a hero. Before he is healed, however, one of Slim's henchmen kidnaps him and takes him to a remote location, where Anna is waiting with the money. They pay the henchman off, to leave them alone, but he notifies Slim anyway. De Carlo grabs the money, ready to abandon Lancaster because his wounded state would only slow her escape down. Unfortunately, Slim arrives before she can leave and he guns them both down.

It's this shocking ending that likely gained Criss Cross most of its notoriety. As I've said before repeatedly, I love a good downbeat/nihilistic Noir ending. But after having read the book, it feels like a cheat to me. It reinforces the watering down of the novel's central thread of the hopelessness of a man striving to possess a woman who only tolerates him for the material things he can provide her. At the end, Johnny welcomes death as a release from this existential pain but even then, he is cheated.

Instead, in the film, you get a "Crime Doesn't Pay" ending. De Carlo isn't a scheming femme fatale until that ending. Instead, she spends the movie declaring her love for Lancaster. Her marriage to Slim makes no sense, as it does in the book. That inconsistency of tone completely undermines her character. Their affair isn't even scandalous, after all they were married before and besides, her current husband was a gangster. He deserved it, I guess.

I couldn't find any notes or references to Production Code troubles for Criss Cross so we have to assume that producer Mark Hellinger, writer Daniel Fuchs, and director Robert Siodmak made the changes from the book for their own reasons. So long as the lovers get their just deserts at the end (as happened in Born to Kill) the Production Code would have been satisfied, surely they understood that.

The theme of the novel – a man driven to obsessive sexual frustration because he is trapped economically in a dead-end job – fits right in with its time: the Great Depression. That was the backdrop for much of hard-boiled fiction and echoes of that dynamic continued on into Film Noir.

That's what is completely missing in the film version, however. Lancaster and De Carlo are just lovers who struggle to get on the same page in their relationship. She briefly mentions that Slim offers her diamonds, but the next minute she's sobbing in Lancaster's arms. In the book, Anna never loves Johnny, in the movie, she never stops loving him until her unlikely turn to femme fatale.

Still, Criss Cross is a decent Film Noir, with a bang up dark ending, even if it doesn’t make sense.