Robert Siodmak | German Film Director & Noir Pioneer | Britannica (2025)

Robert Siodmak (born August 8, 1900, Dresden, Germany—died March 10, 1973, Locarno, Switzerland) was a German director who was known for his bleak film noirs, notably Phantom Lady (1944), The Killers (1946), and Criss Cross (1949).

Siodmak worked as a film editor before codirecting his first feature, a pseudodocumentary entitled Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), in 1930; writers of the film included his brother Curt, who penned several of his later movies, and Billy Wilder. Siodmak made a number of films at UFA, but with the rise of the Nazi movement, he fled Germany in 1933 and settled in Paris, where he continued to direct. In 1940, however, when France was about to become occupied, Siodmak departed for the United States.

Siodmak’s early Hollywood projects were B-films in a variety of genres: dramas (West Point Widow [1941]), spy thrillers (Fly by Night [1942]), and romantic comedies (The Night Before the Divorce [1942] and My Heart Belongs to Daddy [1942]). In 1943 he directed the stylish horror film Son of Dracula, in which Lon Chaney, Jr., starred as Count Alucard (the name spelled backward is Dracula).

Siodmak’s first major triumph was the film noir Phantom Lady (1944), an acclaimed adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s novel, with Alan Curtis as a man accused of killing his wife, Ella Raines as his faithful secretary, and Franchot Tone as his ostensibly loyal pal. Next was Cobra Woman (1944), a Technicolor extravaganza featuring Maria Montez as good and evil twins. Siodmak then returned to film noirs with Christmas Holiday, which was notable for its unusual casting; Gene Kelly and Deanna Durbin, both known for lighthearted musicals, played a wealthy psychopath and his wife. Siodmak had more success with The Suspect (1944), a thriller set in Victorian London. Charles Laughton starred as an unhappily married man who falls in love with a stenographer (played by Raines) and later kills his demanding wife (Rosalind Ivan). The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), an adaptation of a Broadway play, was a psychological thriller with George Sanders as a designer whose relationship with a young woman (Raines) is threatened by his possessive sister (Geraldine Fitzgerald).

In the mid-1940s Siodmak made a trio of films that are widely regarded as classics. The gothic thriller The Spiral Staircase (1945) starred Dorothy McGuire as a woman hunted by a serial killer. Arguably better was The Killers (1946), which took the original Ernest Hemingway short story as its opening point and developed it in an elaborate series of flashbacks. The film noir earned Siodmak his only Academy Award nomination for best direction, and it helped launch the careers of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Also a classic was The Dark Mirror (1946), which offered Olivia de Havilland as twin sisters, one of whom is a murderer.

After the little-seen period drama Time out of Mind (1947), Siodmak returned to noirs with Cry of the City (1948), which featured notable performances by Victor Mature and Richard Conte as childhood pals who grow up on opposite sides of the law. Criss Cross (1949) was even better; Lancaster played a bitter armoured-car driver whose attempts to reunite with his ex-wife (Yvonne De Carlo), who is now married to a gangster (Dan Duryea), result in his becoming involved in a bank robbery. The complicated tale (written by Daniel Fuchs) had atmosphere and resonance, and it was one of the best—and bleakest—noirs from that classic era. Less successful was The Great Sinner (1949). The drama, which was loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, starred Gregory Peck as a Russian writer who becomes a compulsive gambler; Gardner was his love interest. Siodmak was on more familiar turf with the noirish The File on Thelma Jordan (1949), in which Barbara Stanwyck gave an acclaimed performance as a murder suspect; Wendell Corey played the district attorney who falls for her.

In 1950 Siodmak helmed the crime yarn Deported, which was inspired in part by gangster Lucky Luciano’s deportation to Italy in 1946. He then switched gears with The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951), a drama about factory layoffs in New Hampshire, filmed in semidocumentary fashion. Siodmak’s next movie was one of his most enjoyable. The Crimson Pirate (1952) was an energetic spoof of swashbucklers that owed much of its popularity to Lancaster’s charismatic athletic performance. Despite its success, The Crimson Pirate was essentially Siodmak’s farewell to Hollywood.

In 1953 Siodmak moved to Europe, and although he continued to direct, none of his subsequent films matched the success of his earlier work. Over the next 16 years, he made dozens of movies, though just three were in English. Portrait of a Sinner (1959; also known as The Rough and the Smooth) was a seamy tale of an amoral seductress (Nadja Tiller), and Escape from East Berlin (1962) was the fact-based Cold War saga of an East German (Don Murray) who tunnels under the Berlin Wall to help his family and girlfriend (Christine Kaufmann) escape to the West. The Cinerama production Custer of the West (1968), a portrait of the U.S. cavalry officer (Robert Shaw), was the only western Siodmak made. After helming the adventure drama Kampf un Rom II–Der Verrat (Fight for Rome II) in 1969, Siodmak retired from directing.