He made his home on the dark side

“I was only trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone.”

Robert Siodmak didn’t write that paragraph; it was penned by one of his collaborators, the great pulp fatalist Cornell Woolrich. But with their bleak and hopeless tone, the words could have come from a character in his films. For as demonstrated by “Dark Mirrors: The Films Noirs of Robert Siodmak,” a fine new series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Siodmak was one of the great noir directors, a filmmaker who, for a period of time at least, never heard of the sunny side of the street.

Siodmak had a long and varied career in several countries, running the gamut from the celebrated 1929 German silent film “People on Sunday” to Burt Lancaster’s euphoric 1952 “The Crimson Pirate.” But he is best remembered, when he is remembered at all, for the great noirs he did in Hollywood, such as “The Killers” and “Criss Cross,” films that led historian Jeanine Basinger to characterize him as “an innovative and cinematic director [who] became a major influence in American film noir of the 1940s.”

During his heyday, Siodmak was often mentioned in the same breath as Alfred Hitchcock. In the years since, his reputation has gone into a mysterious decline even as noir in general has prospered. Maybe it’s because he worked largely in Europe for the last 20 years of his life; maybe it’s his lingering reputation as strictly a director for hire; maybe it’s even the oddness of his name, which one source reports he coped with during shooting by wearing a jacket that spelled it out phonetically: “SEE-ODD-MACK.”

Whatever the reason, the LACMA series, which starts Friday with “Phantom Lady” (based on a book by Woolrich writing as William Irish), is a rare opportunity to appreciate the qualities that made Siodmak such a superior noir director, a true creature of the night.

“Phantom Lady,” released in 1944, is a good place to start, especially when it comes to seeing his gifts as a creator of mood, this time joined to a typically claustrophobic Woolrich plot. It’s about a husband who comes home after spending an innocent few hours with a woman he met in a bar only to discover that his wife has been murdered and he is the prime suspect. And not only that: When the police investigate his alibi, everyone denies having seen the woman he insists was with him.

Siodmak infuses this tale with a slightly disturbing air, a sense of menace under the surface. You can feel it in the overly solicitous, offbeat presence of the investigating police officers. You can feel it in the film’s most celebrated section, a ferocious drum solo acted by Elisha Cook Jr. that turns into bizarre sexual parody. You feel it most in Siodmak’s feeling for light and dark, most visible in a bravura wordless scene in which a lone woman stalks a man who has information she needs.

Siodmak got his gift for this kind of lighting, his facility with sinister, unapologetic shadows, as a result of pre-Hollywood years spent working for the famed UFA studio in Germany. To see his films is to marvel at the constantly inventive ways he worked with black and white. It’s one of the things that makes “The Spiral Staircase” -- an old-dark-house movie about a maniac on the loose threatening a lovely but mute servant played by Dorothy McGuire -- into a classic of the genre and one of the director’s favorite films.

Siodmak, who fled twice from the Nazis, first to France and then to the U.S., also found ways to forge a genuine emotional connection to deeply pessimistic material. The better the source material, the better his direction was, which is why “The Killers” and “Criss Cross,” both starring Burt Lancaster, are two of the director’s best.

“The Killers,” which was the actor’s debut, had the advantage of an Ernest Hemingway short story and a laconic script by Anthony Veiller that crackled with tension and economy. It starts with the death of Swede (Lancaster), a character who is fatalistically waiting for his own murder, and then uses an inventive series of flashbacks to watch insurance investigator Edmond O’Brien try to find out why. In addition to showcasing Lancaster’s vulnerable masculinity, “The Killers” earned Siodmak his only Oscar nomination and features Ava Gardner in what she considered her breakout role.

“Criss Cross,” released in 1949, had the virtue of a strong and complex script by Daniel Fuchs as well as an elaborate robbery plot that predated “The Asphalt Jungle.” It featured Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo in an ill-fated romance set against a Bunker Hill backdrop. “Criss Cross’” opens with one of Siodmak’s best lighting effects, his two leads caught literally -- and later figuratively -- in the headlights of illicit passion. Fatalist noirs don’t get any better than this.

Siodmak did not always elevate indifferent actors; he was at his best with the best people. He gets a strong bittersweet performance out of Barbara Stanwyck in “The File on Thelma Jordon” (1950) and formed the kind of rapport with Charles Laughton that led to one of the actor’s most natural roles in 1944’s “The Suspect.”

Laughton plays a kindly clerk married to a harridan of a wife whose life changes radically when he enters into a sweet and innocent relationship with a shopgirl (“Phantom Lady” veteran Ella Raines). In its story of darkness infiltrating the everyday, it is noir at its most involving and Siodmak at his most watchable.

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Kenneth Turan is a Times film critic. Contact him at calendar.letters@latimes.com.

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Robert Siodmak screenings

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

Tickets: $9 and $6. Screenings begin at 7:30 p.m. For more info: (310) 857-6010.

Schedule

Friday: “Phantom Lady,” “Christmas Holiday”

Saturday: “The Killers,” “Cry of the City”

July 15: “The Spiral Staircase,” “The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry”

July 16: “Criss Cross,” “The File on Thelma Jordon”

July 22: “The Dark Mirror,” “The Suspect”