Robert Siodmak’s exemplary 1949 film noir “Criss Cross” (which I discuss in the clip above) tells an emotionally tangled story by means of an unusually knotty narrative tangle. It starts in the middle of things, with a romantic clinch that is full of unclarified references to past and future, and most of the film’s action comes in the form of a long flashback, from the perspective of the protagonist (played by Burt Lancaster), within which there is another implicit flashback to a still earlier time. It’s a moment to praise Don Tracy, the author of the novel on which the film is based, and Daniel Fuchs, the screenwriter who adapted it. Fuchs is one of the more substantial if less-remembered literary writers to have headed to Hollywood: he had published a trio of novels in the nineteen-thirties, all set in his home town of Brooklyn, and, between 1937 and 1954, sixteen short stories in this magazine. His Wikipedia page offers a pair of tributes to him, by Irving Howe and John Updike, that would be the envy of most fiction writers. Updike’s quote comes from a lengthy and vigorously enthusiastic piece about Fuchs and his later, fourth novel—about Hollywood—in the Oct. 23, 1971, issue of The New Yorker (available to subscribers). Howe’s appraisal is from his 1948 article about Fuchs in Commentary.
But it’s worth adding that one of the critical shibboleths about classical Hollywood was that of the ostensibly sharp division of labor between directors and writers. Those who have endorsed the concept of the director-as-auteur have too often done so in terms of imagining visual style stuck, so to speak, in the interstices of someone else’s script; those who reject auteurism often do so in terms of giving screenwriters their due. Here’s Siodmak, from a 1959 self-portrait in Sight and Sound, posted at the Film Forno site:
I have no idea if that was the case on “Criss Cross,” or how Siodmak felt about Fuchs’s script; in any case, even if he did shoot it verbatim, it’s likely because it was the way he wanted it.
