Affair of Uncle Harry and The Dark Mirror, but the capstone was The Killers. Released in 1946, it was Burt Lancaster's film debut and Ava Gardner's first dramatic, featured role. A critical and financial success, it earned Siodmak his only Oscar nomination for direction in Hollywood. His German production Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam, based on the false story of Bruno Lüdke, who was falsely accused of being a serial killer by the Nazis, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957. While still under contract at Universal, Siodmak worked on loan out to RKO for producer Dore Schary in the thriller The Spiral Staircase, a masterly blending of suspense and horror, which Siodmak said he edited as he pleased, due to a strike in Hollywood in 1945. The film earned Ethel Barrymore an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. For 20th Century Fox and producer Darryl F. Zanuck, he directed, partly on location in New York City, the crime noir Cry of the City in 1948, and in 1949 for MGM he tackled its lux production The Great Sinner, but the prolix script proved unmanageable for Siodmak who relinquished direction to the dependable and bland Mervyn LeRoy. On loan out to Paramount in 1949, he made for producer Hal B. Wallis his penultimate American noir The File on Thelma Jordon, with Barbara Stanwyck at her most fatal—and sympathetic. Siodmak saw in this film a thematic link with The Suspect and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, with the failed lovers of these films and significantly their tragic conclusions (ten years later he addressed the same theme in The Rough and the Smooth). Perhaps his finest American noir—although not his last—is Criss Cross that was to reunite him not only with Lancaster, but also The Killers producer Mark Hellinger, who died suddenly before production began in 1949. Working without the hands-on control of Hellinger again, Siodmak was able to make this film his own as he could not the earlier film. Yvonne De Carlo's working-class femme fatal (a high mark in her career) completes the deadly triangle, along with Lancaster and Dan Duryea: the archetype of doomed attraction central to all Siodmak's noirs, but the one he could fully express to its nihilistic conclusion. Siodmak immersed himself in the creative process and genuinely loved working with actors, acquiring a reputation as an actor's director for his work with many