Two Films Noirs: 99 River Street and Criss-Cross

From the start it all went one way.  It was in the cards or it was fate or a jinx or whatever you want to call it.
 Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) in Criss Cross, script by Daniel Fuchs.

Criss Cross (1949) was directed by émigré Robert Siodmak and is similar in many ways to Siodmak's earlier The Killers (1946):  its star (Lancaster), its plot (a robbery gone wrong followed by betrayal), its complicated flashback structure, even its music (the marvelous Miklos Rosza).  Criss Cross uses deep focus and Los Angeles locations to give a sense of Steve being trapped by his life and his love for his former wife Anna (played by Yvonne De Carlo), with whom he plans to run off after double-crossing her present husband, Slim Dundee (played by the reliably sleazy Dan Duryea).  Everyone is trapped in their own world, from the bartender to the armored car employees, who are trying hard to make their paychecks go further, and Siodmak has sympathy for everyone's struggle.  Only the police are shown unsympathetically:  detective Pete Ramirez (played with self-conscious righteousness by Stephen McNally) causes Anna to marry Slim and then leaves Lancaster unprotected in the hospital, leading to both Steve and Anna's destruction.

The script's structure gives weight to contrasts between life and theatre, as well as beteen violence as spectacle and as private destiny
Blake Lukas on 99 River Street, script by Robert Smith (Film Noir, The Overlook Press 1979

Cinematographer Fritz Planer does as good a job with New York in Phil Karlson's 99 River Street (1953) as he did with Los Angeles in the Siodmak film.  John Payne plays Ernie Driscoll, a washed-up boxer married to a greedy former showgirl.  This film noir is late in the cycle of such films and includes a number of strange and disorienting elements, including Driscoll's last fight, before we realize Driscoll himself is watching it on TV's Great Fights of Yesterday and Linda James (played beautifully by Evelyn Keyes) claiming to Driscoll she had killed a man and when he offered to dispose of the body it turned out to be a theatre audition!  Driscoll's wife Pauline is murdered and Linda goes with him to New Jersey to track down the murderer, even as Driscoll says to her "in my book you are one more phony.  Any time you get hooked up with a dame you're bound to end up in trouble."  Because this film was made in the Eisenhower era, when the disillusionment with World War II was changing, it has an ostensibly happy ending.  But Karlson's gritty film belies the idea that Driscoll's anger and resentment can be overcome just by meeting another dame and buying a gas station.