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Yvonne De Carlo, Criss Cross by Michael Atkinson Hard to believe, but the very same Yvonne De Carlo who played vampire mom Lily Munster in the original, mid-'60s TV show "The Munsters" was once one of Hollywood's sexiest screen broads. Born Peggy Middleton in Canada, De Carlo changed her name to fit her looks, which were berserkly, luxuriantly decadent, and starred in dozens of cheesy romances, noirs and costume epics, almost always as the dangerous slattern looking to score big using the only asset she had--her sexuality. It was some asset, backed up by a torpedo figure, silky hair, half-lidded foggy-moon eyes and a husky voice. In the classic noir Criss Cross, Burt Lancaster is a proud dupe led around by the invisible wire De Carlo has attached to his nuts, and all you need to do is take one look at her--dancing distractedly to a Latin beat as if she's trying to remember where she last left her diaphragm--to know his number is up. Anna, a gangster's wife in a satin dress, isn't quite a cliched femme fatale. De Carlo never plays her tough. "Tramp," Lancaster hisses at her when he discovers she married a local crook. "Tell me about it," she resignedly murmurs back. This woman's a scrambler, saddened and hardened down to her toenail polish from having run out of viable options and decent men. But you know that once she gets her hands on enough money, she'll do without men altogether. Anna's not defenseless, and she eventually plays everybody in the film for suckers. "I'll make you forget about all that, you'll see," she murmurs to Lancaster right before the heist that puts them all on the run, and De Carlo handles the dialogue with a masterful kind of lusty woodenness that clearly says without shouting that she wishes she could tell the truth, but can't. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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De Carlo has the saving grace of not for a moment trying to seem any smarter than her character; Anna's despair and ruefulness feel more than skin-deep. (No surprise that De Carlo's own life was a litany of neglect and exploitation.) That honesty helps you overlook the more theatrical outbursts, which are flawed moments for Anna as much as they are for De Carlo. (My favorite of these is when she blurts, "Look at the way he treats me," and pulls down her shirt to Lancaster so he can examine her bruises.) When Anna turns on a dime to take the stolen money and abandon a wounded Lancaster for her psycho husband to find, De Carlo allows her character not a millisecond of genuine remorse. "I'm sorry," she spits repeatedly, as if the words were curdled milk. Often, actors are so confident and accomplished that scenes of fear and hysteria are beyond them--we just don't believe their loss of control. When Anna snaps, "How far would I get with you?" to her ostensible soulmate and packs up her goods in a mad panic, De Carlo's awkward rendition of emergency feels convincingly helpless and real. There's acting, and there's on-screen presence that simply can't be pretended. De Carlo, beautiful and moving because of her unpolished honesty, specialized in the latter. Criss Cross is the film in which she gets away with it best. What did you think of this performance? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |