From "Drama of Violence Thrilling," by Philip K. Scheuer, Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1949:

Angelenos will get a special kick out of Criss Cross because much of it was filmed in the city's highways and byways, but the moviegoer in Chicago, Ill., or Hohokus, N.J. will not sit through it unmoved, I'm betting. It's another sock melodrama of dark and devious doings, of the kind Universal International has been specializing in ever since the late Mark Hellinger gave the go signal to Burt Lancaster and The Killers.

Criss Cross was, indeed, a Hellinger property, smartly retrieved by the studio from his estate and handed confidently to The Killers's director, Robert Siodmak, and its star, Lancaster. I found it every bit as taut and scalp-tingling as its predecessor, although I think it would have furnished an even more cumulative thrill if it had been told in the order it happened and not in The Killers's flashback style.

Lancaster, who delivers the same handsome, humorless performance that he did in Kiss the Blood off My Hands, is linked with Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea in the sort of ugly, morbid triangle that can end only in violence and bloodshed. Its sole moral vindication lies in their final liquidation, the paying of their debt to an increasingly callous society; and while neither Lancaster nor Miss De Carlo deserves a better fate, one confesses, as usual, to a sneaking desire to see them spared and still alive at the fade-out. Subversive, that's what it is, positively subversive.

Miss De Carlo, as Lancaster's estranged wife, is beautifully type-cast, whatever her peculiarly limited qualifications as an actress. She remains a two-timer to the last. Duryea makes his Slim Dundee the expected nasty customer—so hep, in fact, that the hardest twist to take is his gullibility in believing Lancaster has come over to his side.

You may have some trouble crediting the "snatch" at the hospital, a development which comes when most yarns of this type would be ending, after Lancaster has been badly shot up. But police records show that it has occurred. The mill robbery that precedes it is as masterfully carried out (and photographed) as the payroll job in The Killers.

Director Siodmak's sure cinematic touch seldom falters, whether in casting down to the smallest bit or filming such locales as Bunker Hill, Angels Flight, Terminal Island, the Union Depot and a run-down Spring St. hotel. Michael Kraike's production, Daniel Fuchs's screenplay and Miklós Rózsa's music are on a par with the direction.

Excerpted from "A Cottage at Palos Verdes" by David Thomson, Film Comment, May 1990:

It is night, over Los Angeles—the tiered ghost of City Hall looms below—but if this is an airplane shot, then it feels as if we are crashing, or wallowing, drawn down by the death sentence in the Miklós Rózsa music. Our graveyard is a parking lot. In a cramped line of space between glossy cars, we find Yvonne De Carlo and Burt Lancaster, kissing, but desperate already, afraid of being seen. There is no establishing shot, we are plunged into their haste and panic, and left to struggle with the clash of her satin gown and his sporty jacket. They are afraid that "Slim" will find out; they have snatched this fearful instant out of the discretion that must safeguard their "plan." "If it was only this time tomorrow," says De Carlo, wide-eyed and staring into the dark. And we believe in her wish. But tomorrow comes, and brings a closure that the ardent, sorrowful gaze of Burt Lancaster has always anticipated. For he is a chump, and she is weak, and their abiding frailty would as soon overwhelm a plan as ivy smothers iron.

This is Criss Cross, 1949, directed by Robert Siodmak....There is a persistence to it that I can't get out of my head; if I could find it in me to think that films could be so grand, I might wonder if this one was a missing masterpiece, a little too odd or contorted perhaps to be taken in at one gasp, bursting out up there, on the screen. The picture needs to be sorted through. And Siodmak has never quite made it into the Pantheon—which may be our mistake. Andrew Sarris assigned him to grade III, Expressive Esoterica, and he didn't even include Criss Cross among Siodmak's "most successful projects"—Phantom Lady, Christmas Holiday, The Suspect, Uncle Harry, The Spiral Staircase, and The Killers.

Not that an auteur seems required here, not when we confront a world so in awe of destiny and implacable décor. Criss Cross is a title predicated on the fatality of positioning; it is also a movie that truly employs its company logo—that L.A. night takes off from the Universal-International Earth in its velvet darkness. The photography is by "Frank" Planer ("Franz" to Murnau once), who had just done Letter from an Unknown Woman for Max Ophüls. Criss Cross merits a respectable place in noir, yet it has dazzling, fresh-air, sunswiped scenes, too; and its darkest luster attends less to violence than the faltering in the love story. All the daylight points up the "mistake" waiting in the darkness: these characters could walk away from the noir trap into the dusty sheen of an L.A. that John Fante wrote about.

...I don't want to claim Criss Cross as a great film, though I find it more rewarding and lasting than The Killers, which it resembles in its study of a disastrous love and a man prone to winning gesture. I'm not sure that Siodmak is an auteur, or that he was ever what we might think of as an artist, an author, someone taking sole responsibility. He was a director very much like Michael Curtiz—very deft, yet anonymous. I suspect that Daniel Fuchs understood the film I'm seeing better than anyone else, but Fuchs knew he had no prospect of control. This is a film made by willing and effacing slaves to a system. That is how all Hollywood films honor fate.

...There is something vital to auteurship here in the certainty among so many skilled and creative practitioners that the picture belonged to the studio. Film noir responds to the studio system, for it is the concerted admission of some baleful, controlling force that eclipses individualism. And the individuals are past protest or complaint: they know they are losers in the game, yet they hope to lose with as much grace and wit as possible. Film noir is the last great genre produced by the system—suppose that it is, in part, the collective resignation of the filmmakers at their subservience? Can the genre's dismay really come from the war, from an interest in Freud, or whatever? Or is it a reflection of being in Hollywood?

It is the stoic foolishness that lets me enjoy Criss Cross so much. For film noir was also the last tradition in which Hollywood could treat its characters as losers whose endings need not be triumphant. What makes the film so refreshing now is the fatalism, the thought of what might have been and the tranquil estimate of human shortcomings. Hollywood today has grown so muscular with achievement: movies are so often trite metaphors for the filmmakers' drive for success, as witness this self-sloganeering from Don Simpson:

Q: Is there a central thread running through all your movies?

A: To date, they're generally about people confronting the reality of daily life in a headlong fashion, vanquishing their internal and external demons.

There's no room in such vanquishings for us to stretch and think. What was the last major American box-office movie that concluded with something less than knockout accomplishment and snaring music? And so I hearken back to Criss Cross—so rich, so modest, so ordinary once. Why have we abandoned our failures as a subject? Or why did Hollywood taunt us with that brief age that permitted characters who just didn't know what kind of world it was?