Criss Cross, 1948

Directed by Robert Soidmak

 ”All woman are bitches,” I said. She smiled at me. Her eyes were deep and black. “All woman are cheats and liars and bitches,” I told her.
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m a whore.”
“You’re different,” I said. “I mean real women.”

Criss Cross, 1934 by Don Tracy

Spicy.

Don Tracy’s double-crossing armed robbery caper about a down on his luck, love-struck, ex-boxer and his trampy ex-wife gets the “Hollywood” treatment by Soidmak in 1949.

(click Here to enlarge)

Price: $525.00

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I  love Barbara Stanwyck. As a child I whiled away the hours daydreaming about being Ms. Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley. Not the simpering Audra, who didn’t look like she had any fun.  Stanwyck  got to ride around on a horse with a shotgun, boss around her grown up sons, get into fights, and still wear frosty blue eyeshadow and false eyelashes. How cool was that? Later, I was bedazzeled by “Missy” in the more sophisticated comedies like Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve. Of course Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper fell for her too — was it the incredibly glamourous (i.e. Glittery) costumes? the card sharking? The wisecracks? Stanwyck always looked good and got what she wanted. Then I got older and wiser. Ms. Stanwyck was my teen dream idol. Cool and sophisticated, she never got the butterflies for the boys. Evidence: Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. Naughty Noir Stanwyck could hang out by the lockers or go smoking in the girls bathroom and no one would dare nark on her. Boys beware.

Growin up gangster in Brooklyn is just da kind of hard knocks life ya need ta produce da two  biggest tv westerns ever’. Protecting the ranch is the same as protecting the hood. Bros is Bros, right?

Dortort grew up in a Brooklyn tenement slum.  As as teenager Dortort joined the Atlantic Avenue gang. Even though he was dead center in the Murder, Inc. hood, I could not find any info on this particular gang (there were as many gangs in this area of Booklyn in the 1930′s as there are Starbucks in Seattle today). Later, Dortort would revisit this life for two novels, Burial of the Fruit and Post of Honor.

Juvey delinquents were a popular “menace to society” in the 1950′s. So it’s fun to note the bizarro nature of the publishers treatment of the subject. Burial of the Fruit tale is real pulp, but the flap copy treats it like some kind of documentary on moral decay in the slums. The poor illustrator does not know what to do.

My Caption: Out for a lovely springtime row in a boat in the slums of Brooklyn, the teenage killer (the one that looks like a fed) is about to grab Trixie’s  naughty “ciggie”.