The Underappreciated Cinema of Robert Siodmak at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 04 February 2025 15:01

Written by Jack Angstreich

Phantom Lady

At the excellent Walter Reade Theater, from December 11th through the 19th, Film at Lincoln Center presented an outstanding series, entitled Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary, devoted to the work of that remarkable director—in addition to numerous titles screened in a digital format, it featured eight of his movies shown in beautiful 35-millimeter prints.

The question of Siodmak’s artistic stature is a vexed one. In France, the revolutionary critics of Cahiers du Cinéma seem to have largely neglected his œuvre—for example, his name does not appear in Godard on Godard, François Truffaut’s The Films in My Life, Eric Rohmer’s The Taste for Beauty or the first two volumes of selections of articles from that journal edited by Jim Hillier, which cover the 1950s and ‘60s—this is all the more surprising given their interest in Hollywood directors generally and genre specialists more narrowly. Siodmak did attract some interest from writers for its rival magazine, Positif—however, Jean-Pierre Coursodon in his judicious entry on the filmmaker in his American Directors sensibly consigns him to a minor rank. (The filmmaker was also discussed in the very original A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941–1953 by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton.)

In England, Movie seems to have generally ignored him, except for a detailed essay on his noirs by Michael Walker; Colin McArthur wrote a short, intelligent chapter about him in his pioneering book, Underworld USA; and John Russell Taylor contributed a brief appreciation in Richard Roud’s invaluable if uneven Cinema: A Critical Dictionary and interviewed him for Sight and Sound. Andrew Sarris’s capsule in The American Cinema is astute if not uncharacteristically glib—it also features an unmerited, if not entirely unsurprising, attack upon Jack Smith. However, he somewhat perversely placed Siodmak in a tier (“Expressive Esoterica”) alongside supreme masters like Edgar Ulmer, André de Toth, John M. Stahl, et alia. Indeed, if these latter individuals should qualify as members of a considerably enlarged Pantheon, and if those on the Far Side of Paradise ought include, for example, Allan Dwan, Victor Seastrom, Alexander Mackendrick, and Charles Laughton, then Siodmak might seem to belong in a category just below these, adjacent to Don Siegel, Joseph Losey—in his Hollywood period—Phil Karlson, etc., a view that possibly largely tallies with the assessments of an even more penetrating American auteurist, Dave Kehr—although, in a brief review for the Chicago Reader, I do think he rather underrates The Spiral Staircase—as does Coursodon—even if it and its director have been overvalued by some commentators.

Evaluating Siodmak also partly involves answering the question as to what extent one can discern any stylistic and thematic unity across his career as a whole. People on Sunday from 1930–a silent and the director’s first film—was a collaborative effort and is proto-neorealist in approach (as well as reflective of the aesthetics of the Neue Sachlichkeit)—but, as impressive as it is, it would seem to have only a tenuous relationship to his most personal efforts, as McArthur has noted. (Both Kehr in a column for the New York Times and J. Hoberman in an essay for Artforum have written perceptively on this work and I previously contributed a brief review of it elsewhere on this website.) Curiously, according to Georges Sadoul, the influential Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs criticized People on Sunday for what he called the “fanaticism of facts,” saying in his book The Spirit of Film that in it reality is deployed to conceal the truth.

The one other title from Siodmak’s first period that I have seen—and the last he directed in Germany before emigrating to France—the seldom screened Burning Secret from 1933, was a genuine discovery of the series. David Shipman, in his The Story of Cinema, was extremely enthusiastic, saying that “Siodmak made one of the best films of the period - or any period - in Brennendes heimnis (1933), a perceptive and subtle version of a story by Stefan Zweig.” (That story was later adapted by Andrew Birkin for a feature starring Klaus Maria Brandauer and Faye Dunaway.) But again, what significant connection this really has to the celebrated films noirs of the director’s Hollywood phase is a matter for further investigation.

Another highlight of the series was the opportunity to view the rarely screened, enjoyable Fly-by-Night from 1942, one of the director’s earliest American features. This was an attempt to reproduce the qualities of the exhilarating Alfred Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps—ittoois executed with a light touch—but is primarily notable for its exquisite black-and-white photography by John F. Seitz, who shot Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard.

JohnRussell Taylor thought the overlooked Son of Dracula from the following year was the director’s first important film after People on Sunday. In an insightful survey of Siodmak’s career in which he referred to the director as “an enigmatic fatalist,” Hoberman wrote in the New York Times:

More stylish than necessary, Son of Dracula [ … ] secured Siodmak a seven-year contract. It also demonstrated that he could take fantasy seriously.

Coursodon accurately states that, “Although Siodmak’s American period consists of about two dozen films in avariety of genres, his reputation rests almost entirely on a small group of melodramas in the film noiridiom: Phantom Lady, The Spiral Staircase, The Killers, Cry of the City, Criss Cross, Thelma Jordon, to which one may add a couple of cult items like The Suspect and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, which do not quite belong to the genre.” Taylor’s judgment is similar if rather overstated:

Though Robert Siodmak (1900-73) had a long and productive career in the cinema, it is fair to say that all the films for which he will be remembered were made during one short period, in Hollywood between 1943 and 1949. During these years he established for himself a special corner in the 40s film noir, and made several prime examples which in their evocation of morbid atmosphere and in the sheer bravura of their staging have seldom if ever been surpassed.

Surely one can adduce many titles that surpass even the best Siodmak noir—for example, the following ones by Hollywood auteurs of the greatest eminence: The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, Detour, The Big Heat, The Reckless Moment, Touch of Evil, Kiss Me, Deadly, Gun Crazy, White Heat, They Live by Night, Fallen Angel, 5 Fingers, Moonrise, The Shanghai Gesture, Beyond the Forest, Undercurrent, Screaming Mimi, The Burglar, Underworld U.S.A., The Wrong Man, Raw Deal, Pitfall, Shockproof,Force of Evil, A Double Life, Leave Her to Heaven, Experiment in Terror, Hell Up in Harlem and The Nickel Ride. (It is lamentable that I haven’t yet had the privilege of seeing any of Budd Boetticher’s contributions to the genre.)

McArthur addresses this part of the director’s career:

Siodmak's Hollywood movies are usually called expressionist, and on a superficial level they resemble those of Fritz Lang in that the action most often occurs at night, with huge slabs of light cutting the darkness from a single source, or those of Jules Dassin in their use of thunder, lightning and rain to indicate delirious states of mind. Siodmak's themes, however, set him apart from both. His central figures are not manipulated by an ironic external fate like Lang's heroes, nor are they dreamers like those of Dassin. Most characteristically, they are driven from within by intense hatreds or loves. 

He adds that “Darkness, cruelty, obsession, betrayal and death are the hallmarks of Siodmak's work.”

About the entertaining Cornell Woolrich adaptation Phantom Lady from 1944, Kehr—who said about it, “The director’s Criss Cross and Cry of the City are immeasurably superior”—offers this summary in a column for the New York Times: “Produced by Joan Harrison, a trusted assistant to Alfred Hitchcock who was venturing out on her own with a series of female-centered suspense films, the film is essentially a whodunit, with the classic ’40s beauty Ella Raines as a secretary who turns into a sleuth when her boss (Alan Curtis), with whom she is secretly in love, is accused of the murder of his unfaithful wife.” His perspective is that it is primarily memorable for its cinematography—he says “the film becomes a series of striking noir tableaus”—while Coursodon’s is more negative, but Hoberman—and Sarris too, apparently—dissents, saying that it “has a nightmarish quality and dreamlike flow that transcends the banality of its script” and Borde and Chaumeton call it “a brilliant thriller with clever lighting.” Taylor has a similar take:

The film was full of bravura passages, yet the overall effect was haunting and gloomy. The same could be said of the films in the same genre which followed: The Suspect (1945), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), his masterpiece The Spiral Staircase (1946) and The Dark Mirror (1946), in which Olivia De Havilland played twins, one good, one bad. 

Hoberman avers that “His next assignment, the flamboyantly Technicolor Cobra Woman (1944), with Maria Montez playing good and evil twins, gave this notoriously limited actress a surprisingly resonant vehicle.” The picture,a South Seas adventurethat inspired Jack Smith, is described by Borde and Chaumeton as an “awesome potboiler” and by Taylor as “that masterwork of camp cinema.”

Adapted from the Somerset Maugham novel by Herman J. Mankiewicz, Christmas Holiday, from the same year, which improbably features Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, iscited by Kehr as “a major noir,” by Hoberman as “an intricately lighted gothic romance,” while Walker says, “The result is a sometimes uneasy, but for the most part a challenging, rich, suggestive film.”

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry from 1945 affords numerous pleasures—including a marvelous performance by Geraldine Fitzgerald that James Agee praised in Time—although it is marred by a studio-imposed ending. Agee reports: 

Uncle Harry (Universal) is a thriller, produced by Alfred Hitchcock's onetime secretary, Joan Harrison, whose murder thriller Phantom Lady established her as one of Hollywood's talented producers. Her second offering, a Broadway play adaptation, is again directed by able Robert Siodmak, and again features a vivid performance by Ella Raines. Uncle Harry is better done than its predecessor, more human, subtler, more exciting. 

The Spiral Staircase, from the same year, has been thought by some commentators to be Siodmak’s best film—Tom Milne called it “one of the undoubted masterpieces of the Gothic mode”—but what potentially places it in the forefront of the director’s body of workis what Coursodon calls “its consistently superb photography by Nicholas Musuraca,” who is especially known for his astonishing collaborations with Jacques Tourneur such as Cat People and Out of the Past. In it, Borde and Chaumeton say that “Robert Siodmak managed to lend a purely visual efficacy of expression to his style,” and with it that his “reputation was henceforth secure.” Walker writes on it that: “The result is not only a superbly executed melodrama of steadily mounting suspense, but a stream of elements which speak the psychoanalytical language of the unconscious [ . . . . ]”

The Killers, from the following year, based on an Ernest Hemingway short story that was later adapted both by Andrei Tarkovsky and Don Siegel, and starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, is one of the director’s more compelling noirs but I agree with Coursodon that it is inferior to the very similar Criss Cross—this was remade by Steven Soderbergh as The Underneath (1995)—from 1949, which features Lancaster opposite Yvonne De Carlo. Coursodon’s statement that “Siodmak's dominant theme in his American period, a man's infatuation with a treacherous woman leading him to his destruction,” perfectly applies to these two titles.

About The Killers—which, in The New Republic, Manny Farber called “a powerful movie without a relaxing moment”—Agee wrote in The Nation that “There is a good strident journalistic feeling for tension, noise, sentiment, and jazzed-up realism, all well manipulated by Robert Siodmak, which is probably chiefly to the credit of the producer, Mark Hellinger.” Farber said about it, “Besides its brutality, it has the noise, the jagged, tormenting movement of keyed-up, tough, flashy humanity that you get from a walk through Times Square,” adding:

Though there is a cheapness about The Killers that reminds you of five-and-ten jewelry, its scenes of sadism and menacing action have been formed and filled with a vitality all too rare in current movies. It is a production that is suspense-ridden and exciting down to tiny details in the background. The stolid documentary style; the gaudy melodramatic flavor; the artiness (most noticeable in the way scenes are sculpted in dark and light) are largely due to Director Robert Siodmak, who has made German movies as well as Universal thrillers.

Borde and Chaumeton said that it “bears the signature of Robert Siodmak, and from the first sequences onward one expects something extraordinary, worthy, through its intensity, to figure alongside Howard Hawks's Scarface.” Pauline Kael’s capsule review of it states that:

Ernest Hemingway’s short story about the man who doesn’t try to escape his killers is acted out tensely and accurately, and, for once, the gangster-thriller material added to it is not just padding but is shrewdly conceived (by Anthony Veiller and the uncredited John Huston) to show why the man didn’t care enough about life to run away. Under the expert direction of Robert Siodmak, Burt Lancaster gives his first screen performance (and is startlingly effective), and Siodmak also does wonders with Ava Gardner. 

Shipman asserts that, “Returning to Universal, Siodmak made The Killers (1946), which disposes of Hemingway's story in so tense and eerie a ten minutes as to make the remainder an anticlimax,” while Hoberman says, “The luxuriantly bleak epitome of mid-’40s pessimism, The Killers confirmed the visual primacy of Siodmak’s style (particularly as realized by the cinematographer Elwood Bredell, who shot both Christmas Holiday and Phantom Lady) while revealing a new harshness of tone.” Walker adds that “it includes some of the finest low-key photography in the whole cycle.”

After The Killers, the director made the pleasurable The Dark Mirror released in the same year, which features a dazzling performance by Olivia de Havilland; about the picture, Walker says, “In some ways a rather confused film, it nevertheless has resonances which make it consistently intriguing.”

The unsung Cry of the City from 1948 may be Siodmak’s finest noir apart from Criss Cross. It has an exceptional cast that includes an unusually good Victor Mature along with Richard Conte, Fred Clark, Shelley Winters, Debra Paget, Berry Kroeger, Hope Emerson among others. About it, Coursodon writes, “The eschewing of both pathos and moralizing is the film's most unusual feature.”

He says, “It was also at Universal that he made, two years later, the underrated Criss Cross, arguably his masterpiece.” Borde and Chaumeton proclaim:

Criss Cross marks the summit of Robert Siodmak's American career. To be sure, it never attains the unalloyed ferocity of certain scenes in The Killers, but the work is much smoother, more profound, more truly distressing. 

They add that, “the most minor sequences retain the intensity of the whole. This complete mastery and strength in reserve, which feel no need to broadcast themselves, are the lot of very few directors in Hollywood.” And finally, “In the last analysis, the fundamental complexity of Siodmak's human beings demonstrates—if such were really necessary—that even within the framework of film noir we're in the presence of one of the finest psychologists of the screen.”

In a brief review for the Chicago Reader, Kehr says:

Robert Siodmak was one of the most influential stylists of the 40s, helping to create, in films such as Phantom Lady and The Killers, the characteristic look of American film noir. But most of his films have nothing more than their pictorial qualities to recommend them—Criss Cross being one of the few exceptions, an archly noir story replete with triple and quadruple crosses, leading up to one of the most shockingly cynical endings in the whole genre.

Hoberman notes that:

With its quasi-documentary use of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles and the flat expanse of the San Fernando Valley, as well as the novelist Daniel Fuchs’s slangy script, Criss Cross is Siodmak’s most American film. It also signaled a thwarted shift in his interests. The director made an unsuccessful movie with Hollywood’s resident naturalist, the producer Louis De Rochemont, and worked with Budd Schulberg on what would become On the Waterfront.

Siodmak effectively disowned The Great Sinner fromthe same year, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner but not shown in this series; it was substantially reshot by Mervyn LeRoy and recut by the studio. On the filmmaker, Shipman pointedly writes:

Like Melville in France, he remained at heart a romantic, and welcomed the offer to make The Crimson Pirate (1952) for Burt Lancaster's company. That actor appears before the credits, advising us to believe only half of what we see, and Siodmak moves easily between spoof and the lightheartedness of the best old swashbucklers—and the climax is a straight steal from The Black Pirate. Roland Kibbee wrote the screenplay, and the action is inventive and high-spirited, as Lancaster and Nick Cravatt, his old circus partner, do their stunts; the cinematographer, Otto Heller, manages to convey the tang of the sea in his images.

The one film from the director’s late, European period that I’ve seen was the powerful The Devil Strikes at Night which was not screened in this retrospective but was praised by the outstanding auteurist critic Fred Camper and, in a much more qualified way, by Farber.

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