Ex spots the mark

From an arial view of some anonymous stretch of Los Angeles we descend into a parking lot, and in that parking lot we find a man and a woman, hiding amidst the cars, speaking hushed and excitedly, and in the midst of this exchange we cut jarringly to the man’s point of view, to a close up-vision of the woman’s sculpted, lovely face, her eyes like luminous planets, and she’s looking right at him, at the camera, at us, and this is how, with great economy and elegance, we get locked from the very start into the almost dreamlike subjectivity of the doomed hero of Criss Cross (1949). We become lost in his longing as he watches the woman he desires dancing a rhumba in a club with Tony Curtis, and later become lost in the haze of a heist gone awry, a landscape made of smoke out of which figures in suits and gas masks and carrying guns appear and disappear. The hero’s voice-over narration speaks to us of the inescapability of fate—a thesis strengthened by the film’s subtle array of grid-like imagery—and, seeing events play out from his claustrophobic perspective, it becomes hard to argue with him.

Following Double Indemnity (1944), the second film in Metro Cinema’s Film Noir series leaps ahead five years to a moment when both the major studios and poverty row were churning out moody crime thrillers like so many bratwursts. Yet it’s remarkable how consistently good these films were, as though whatever, in retrospect, makes these films noir—artful atmosphere, moral ambiguity, social commentary, hot sex—makes them good. Director Robert Siodmak and star Burt Lancaster had already collaborated on the sublimely fatalistic, extremely liberal adaptation of Hemingway’s The Killers (1946), and while Criss Cross revisits somewhat similar thematic terrain, Daniel Fuchs’ script, based on Don Tracy’s novel of the same name, offers some fascinating variations on by-now familiar motifs. We’re back in the realm of secret affairs, criminal plans to escape or do away with an oppressive male power figure, and the femme fatale’s capacity to drain the hero’s better judgement—presuming he ever had any—familiar from Double Indemnity. But in this case the deadly female, played by Yvonne De Carlo, a considerably more angelic actress than Barbara Stanwyck, is no stranger taking advantage of the hero’s ignorance. She’s his ex-wife.

So Criss Cross is the story of a marriage. Lancaster’s beefy, hopelessly romantic armoured car guard already tried sharing a life with De Carlo’s object of desire, and, he says, they fought like cats and dogs. He left town for a while, then came back, and with one look at her on the dance floor, she not even knowing he’s watching her, he’s drawn in again. Since he went away she got herself glued to a very amusing douche bag crime lord, deliciously embodied by Dan Duryea, so she and Lancaster begin an affair—if you’re no good as spouses, maybe it’ll work as adulterous lovers. It doesn’t, of course. They want too much, nostalgic for what never really was. I hope I’m not spoiling things when I tell you that things end badly. But how do we get to that ending? Believe me, you’ve got to experience Criss Cross to really understand.

Already dead: The Hit

The mystery at the heart of The Killers—whether we refer to the version starring Burt Lancaster (1946) or the radically reconfigured too-violent-for-TV version with Lee Marvin (64)—concerns a marked man’s resignation to death. What would make an ostensibly vital young man accept his executioners without a fight? Why wouldn’t he run when he knows they’re coming to snuff out his life? The special genius of the 1964 version is that, good to its title, it’s actually about the killers, allowing them to ponder openly the psychological state of the person they’ve disposed of—something hired killers aren’t supposed to do. Half the point of hiring a killer is to place murder in the hands of someone with no personal investment in the victim. But the movies have been telling us over and over that killing’s rarely so simple a task, and killers, for all their repugnancy, can feel strangely close to us. They can help us sort through big questions that stories about far noble people have a harder time addressing.

British director Stephen Frears’ The Hit (84), written by Peter Prince, returns to the muddy existential stream of The Killers, though it’s not directly related to either previous film or to the Ernest Hemingway story upon which those films were very loosely based. It follows London mobster-turned-supergrass Willie Parker (Terrence Stamp) from his testifying against his cronies in court to his idyllic life in hiding in Spain, a life that, ten years after his betrayal, is about to end. He’s abducted by a thin, funereal figure in a pale suit named Braddock (John Hurt) and a flamboyantly unseasoned thug of an apprentice named Myron (Tim Roth). They are to drive Willie over the border to Paris where they’ll finish the job in the presence of their employer. But what begins to eat at the voluble Myron, and perhaps even at the stoic Braddock, is how detached Parker seems about the whole thing. He’s positively serene, explaining, with a shrug and a smile, that dying’s no big deal. “It’s as natural as breathing.” Why isn’t he nervous, groveling, wriggling away? He must have something up his sleeve.

As with The Killers, there’ll come a point in The Hit where the nature of this resignation will be exposed. Well, kind of. Unlike the victims in The Killers, Willie’s interior logic doesn’t seem to be dictated by frustrated romance or unconscious desires for suicide. What’s especially interesting is how The Hit, which may very well not have been written with The Killers in mind at all, seems to have learned a little something from both Killers. It initially has us identify with Willie, who may be a dirty snitch, but whose desire to escape the London underworld for the Costa del sol is hardly tough to relate to. He’s also handsome, charming, and utterly watchable. Which is to say he’s Terrence Stamp, who would bring a similar flair to a not dissimilar character many years later in The Limey (99), which itself appropriated images of Stamp playing yet another sympathetic criminal in Poor Cow (67).

But then something deliciously odd happens, something the classicists say you’re not to do. The Hit switches protagonists, gradually abandoning Willie in favour of Braddock, the least forthcoming guy in the movie, a man whose true identity is so elusive that the final words spoken are questions put to him about which of many men he might actually be. Hurt is at his most fascinatingly blank. He doesn’t answer. And this blurring of identities, along with the burrowing into a new life while shedding the old one, along with the Spanish landscape and the beautiful young woman along for the ride (Laura del Sol), recalls yet another movie about unspoken desperation and the complicated assimilation of roles and duties: Antonioni’s The Passenger (75). So besides helping us to rediscover a forgotten gem of 1980s British cinema, a movie that’s smart, artful, strange, often gorgeous and entertaining enough to recommend to just about anyone, not to say brilliantly acted, Criterion’s new DVD release is also a fascinating little piece in a larger cinematic lineage, pointing both backward and forward toward a number of history’s more interesting movies that deal with the psychic geometries of death, assassination, secrets, and surrender.

Among Criterion’s typically superb special features, there’s a terrific essay by Graham Fuller and an audio commentary that finds Frears, Prince, Hurt, Roth and editor Mick Audsley recalling in relaxed, accessible language the thrill of moving into features after years in British television, the challenges of making a road movie in a foreign country with very little money, and how awesome is Spanish legend Fernando Rey, who plays a key supporting role. I especially appreciated Roth’s personal musings on the diversity of performance styles on display. The Hit was one of Roth’s first major roles, and, while watching a shot that features he, Hurt and Stamp seated together in the car, he draws our attention to how elegantly distinct acting sensibilities can harmonize, all of them playfully rubbing up against one another for the camera to simply soak up. All in all, a treat.