Robert Siodmak Retrospective at Film Forum A HOLLYWOOD director once bracketed with Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak (1900-73) is credited by some scholars with developing the German-French-American synthesis known as film noir and dismissed by others as an impersonal technician whose greatest talent was successively adapting himself to three national movie industries and whose trademark on-set joke was "It stinks - print it!" Cynical chameleon or rootless cosmopolite? Siodmak (pronounced See-ODD-mak) is, as the film historian Jean-Paul Coursodon put it, "one of the puzzling paradoxes of the American cinema." He's also the subject of a rare, nine-film retrospective as part of Film Forum's celebration of Universal Pictures that starts Friday and runs through Aug. 9. Universal is where, having made movies in Weimar Berlin and pre-World War II Paris, Siodmak reinvented himself in the 1940s as an American director, and the retrospective includes films like "The Killers," "Cobra Woman" and "Phantom Lady." Along with the other mainly Jewish, Central European émigrés who found refuge in Hollywood, Siodmak infused American crime thrillers with a mix of Expressionist brio and existential fatalism. The critic Andrew Sarris once joked that Siodmak's "American films were more Germanic than his German ones." It could also be said that the director's low-budget debut, the insouciant plein-aire comedy "People on Sunday" (1930), made in Berlin's public parks with a youthful group of future exiles (including Siodmak's then flat-mate Billy Wilder and younger brother Curt) was more French than his French productions. Looking to escape Paris for the United States, Siodmak would claim to have been born in Memphis and subsequently taken by his parents to Germany. The New York Times, which profiled the director at the height of his success, called him "the only native-born American with a foreign accent in Hollywood." German sources give Siodmak's actual birthplace as Leipzig or Dresden. In any case, it was Dresden where he grew up and defied his wealthy father to find work in the movies. Universal's main wartime attraction was the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, but the studio had a history of hiring German talent and a tradition of atmospheric horror films. Siodmak's first Universal releases have a marked German subtext. The eponymous vampire in the grimly flavorsome "Son of Dracula" (1943), written by his brother Curt, brings a European contagion to America. More stylish than necessary, "Son of Dracula," which is also part of the retrospective, secured Siodmak a seven-year contract. It also demonstrated that he could take fantasy seriously. 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. If there is a Siodmak touch, it is the sinister dance that the sarong-wrapped dictator of Cobra Island performs for her ecstatic subjects, who greet her writhing with an unmistakable version of the Nazi salute. There's another sort of reference to Hitler - and an equally delirious musical interlude - in Siodmak's next movie. The killer in "Phantom Lady" (1944) is a megalomaniacal artist who links himself with the great criminals of history. Produced by the Hitchcock assistant Joan Harrison, "Phantom Lady" associated Siodmak with one of Hollywood's leading filmmakers. "Something was bound to happen when a former Alfred Hitchcock protégée and a former director of German horror films were teamed on the Universal lot," Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times, "something severe and unrelenting, drenched in creeping morbidity and gloom." And it did happen: "Phantom Lady," in which spunky Ella Raines assigns herself to save a man framed for the murder of his wife, has a nightmarish quality and dreamlike flow that transcends the banality of its script. The movie's chiaroscuro soundstage Manhattan often resembles the demonic Berlin of a Weimar silent film, but Siodmak was also alert to the possibilities of musical montage, most emphatically in the feverishly erotic jam session Raines attends in an after-hours jazz club. "Christmas Holiday" (1944) - in which Siodmak was tasked with providing Universal's stellar ingénue, Deanna Durbin, an adult role, namely a chanteuse in a New Orleans bordello - is a noir as odd as its title. It's an intricately lighted gothic romance that casts Gene Kelly as a neurotic tough guy and makes near-surreal use of Wagner's "Leibestod." Siodmak was next given a pair of overly genteel films that, if not noir, were predicated on the noirish situation of a respectable man - Charles Laughton in "The Suspect" (1944) and George Sanders in "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry" (1945) - driven by love to domestic homicide. Then Siodmak was on loan to RKO for the lurid thriller "The Spiral Staircase" (1946). A week after this hit shocker opened, The New York Times reported that Siodmak was "disturbed by the many recently published references to him as "a second Alfred Hitchcock." " His next Universal film, "The Dark Mirror" (1946), a doppelgänger mystery starring a twinned Olivia de Havilland, only reinforced that idea of Siodmak as a director of clever psychological thrillers. But Siodmak's third release of 1946 was something else. 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. Elaborating through flashbacks on the laconic Ernest Hemingway story of a doomed ex-boxer and the hit men sent to dispatch him, "The Killers" is a sort of deadly bolero in which the newcomer Burt Lancaster alternately awaits death and desperately pursues an elusive femme fatale (Ava Gardner in her first leading role). Siodmak received an Oscar nomination for directing "The Killers," which also garnered nominations for screenplay, score and editing - "The Spiral Staircase" and "The Dark Mirror" got nominations as well - and contemporary reviews of "The Killers" rarely fail to cite the director's touch. The connoisseurs James Agee and Manny Farber were both impressed. Agee praised Siodmak's "journalistic feeling for tension, noise, sentiment and jazzed-up realism." Farber credited Siodmak with the movie's "stolid documentary style" and "gaudy melodramatic flavor" while noting "the artiness (most noticeable in the way scenes are sculpted in dark and light)." Siodmak was on loan to 20th Century Fox for "Cry of the City" (1948), then returned to Universal to surpass "The Killers" with an even more predetermined tale of a naïve chump, a faithless dame and a caper gone wrong. "Criss Cross" (1949), again starring Lancaster, now opposite Yvonne DeCarlo, includes several of the director's great set pieces. The prolonged rumba in which the sultry DeCarlo dances with a pompadoured lounge lizard (an uncredited Tony Curtis, spotted by Siodmak among the extras) is as powerful as the jam session in "Phantom Lady"; an armored car heist pulled off in a miasma of tear gas appears as a battle of corpses; a hospital rub-out anticipates one of the most famous scenes in "The Godfather." 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." Dumped from the project, Siodmak successfully sued the producer Sam Spiegel for $100,000. Having gone abroad to direct Lancaster in "The Crimson Pirate" (1952), Siodmak jumped ship to remain in Europe, making movies in Britain, West Germany and France. Cosmopolitan to the end, he capped his career with a pair of West German-Italian epics: "Pyramid of the Sun God" (1965), adapted from a novel by Karl May, and "The Last Roman" (1968). In between, he directed "Custer of the West" (1967) in Cinerama and Spain, from a script by two blacklisted Hollywood writers. Severely re-edited for release in the United States, "Custer" appeared as the director's final puzzlement. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Renata Adler saw signs that "somebody meant to try something fairly ambitious." Custer appeared as "a thoroughly modern man who would have liked Camus" - an enigmatic fatalist, not unlike Siodmak.