After defining the genre with I gangsters (The Killers), Siodmak reunites with Burt Lancaster to create an even darker work, a film where the trap is not the “heist” (the robbery), but memory itself. The aerial opening, with the camera gliding over Los Angeles at night like a bird of prey that has chosen its prey, then descending onto a dark parking lot, is not an introduction: it is a sentence. It tells us that the protagonists are not entering the story; they are already in it, and we are only witnessing the inevitable closing of the circle.

The film is the chronicle of a relapse. It is the tragedy of a man who knows he is doing wrong and does it anyway. Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) is not the classic noir sucker; or rather, he is, but with full awareness. Lancaster, who in The Gangsters was “The Swede,” a passive victim awaiting death, is here an active agent of his own downfall. He is a man who returns. He returns to his city, he returns to his family, he returns to his honest job as a security van driver. But Siodmak shows us that this “normality” (the California sun, the routine) is only a fragile facade. Steve's honesty is not a virtue; it is a thin shell just waiting to be broken by his true, unique, incurable disease: his obsession with Anna Dundee (Yvonne De Carlo). His is not a choice, it is a condemnation. He is a Dostoevskian character trapped in a B-movie, a man who needs his destruction to feel alive.

And what destruction. Yvonne De Carlo, often relegated to exotic or “Technicolor queen” roles, delivers a performance here that redefines the femme fatale. Her Anna is not the cold-blooded schemer of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Siodmak and De Carlo paint her with shades of almost unbearable ambiguity. Is she a victim or a perpetrator? Is she a woman desperately trying to survive in a world of predatory men, or is she the ultimate predator? The film brilliantly refuses to choose. The moment Steve finds her in a nightclub (the “Round-Up”) is the quintessence of Siodmak's mise-en-scène. The air is thick with smoke, the noise is deafening. Steve searches for her and the camera finds her: she is dancing a feverish rumba. It is not a dance, it is a ritual. It is the embodiment of primordial desire, of chaos, of everything that Steve's “honest” life is not. She is the perfect bait, and Steve, the fish, takes it knowing that poison is attached to the hook.

Their relationship is a “double game” of self-deception. He knows she is married to the gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea at his peak of slimy smirking), yet he cannot stay away from her. She knows he is her only escape, yet she cannot (or will not) cut ties with her husband. It is a folie à deux that can only have one outcome: collision. And it is Steve who steps on the gas, proposing to rob his own armored truck. This is not a criminal plan; it is suicide by proxy. It is the only way Steve can conceive of “buying” Anna, of snatching her away from Slim using the only language their world understands: money. But in noir, money never buys freedom; it only buys a faster ticket to the morgue.

Siodmak, with his roots deeply planted in UFA German Expressionism, orchestrates the film like a feverish nightmare. The robbery itself is a masterpiece of brutality and chaos. Shot in broad daylight (a brilliant anti-noir move), it uses smoke from smoke bombs to transform the sun-drenched street into a World War I battlefield, a hell of shadows and ghostly figures. But the real expressionist masterpiece is the hospital sequence. Steve, wounded and trapped in a bed, becomes the guinea pig of paranoia. Siodmak distorts the space: the camera takes on oblique angles, the shadows of ceiling fans and windows stretch across the walls like bars of a psychological prison. Steve is immobilized, unable to act, as the walls of his trap close in on him. It is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari reimagined as a post-war drama: the world is no longer “real,” it is only the projection of his guilt and fear.

The inevitable ending closes every door. The escape to the beach house, shrouded in fog (another noir archetype that Siodmak uses as a shroud), is not a hope, it is only the last station of the Via Crucis. The last “double game” is that of Anna, who reveals her true opportunistic nature only when Slim's gun is pointed at her. But Slim is also betrayed. The “Criss Cross” is not just a crossing of glances or destinies; it is a chain of mutual betrayals, a zero-sum equation where everyone loses. Steve, who throughout the film has sought to possess Anna, gets his wish in the only way that the Fate of noir allows: a deadly embrace, a union in nothingness. Siodmak offers no catharsis, no redemption, no moral lesson other than that the past is never past, and that the flame we seek to warm ourselves is, almost always, the one that will incinerate us.