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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 15 |
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A FRESH LOOK AT A FILM NOIR CLASSIC
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Filmed half a century ago,
it still has awesome power
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If you have not seen "Kiss of Death," this column may be a "spoiler" because it gives away important plot details. |
It's been more than half a century since I first saw Henry Hathaway's "Kiss of Death" on a re-issue double bill with "Road House," another noir classic starring Richard Widmark. "Kiss" knocked me out then and it continues to knock me out every time I see it again.
So, the day after I learned that Widmark had died at age 93, I decided to take one more look at the 1947 film that introduced him to moviegoers and made him an overnight sensation. I wanted to test my noir sensibilities now that I'm no longer a naive kid and have seen more noir than London has seen fog.
Result: Another knockout victory for "Kiss of Death."
Widmark's performance is every bit as transfixing as it was when I first saw it in the early 1950s. After watching him screw his face into that twisted, skull-like sneer and erupt with the most maniacal giggle ever heard on film, it's absolutely impossible to believe this guy could ever play the romantic lead to Doris Day, the screen's reigning virgin queen, as he actually did 11 years later in "The Tunnel of Love."
But this time around I tried to condition myself to look beyond Widmark and finally take notice of all the other marvelous things about "Kiss of Death" that have helped it remain one of the most luminous of all films noir.
First, you have to give credit to Hathaway, a director seldom talked about for his noir films, even though he made quite a few good ones, including "The House on 92nd Street" (1945), "The Dark Corner" (1946), "Call Northside 777" (1948), "Fourteen Hours" (1951) and "Niagara" (1953). When I think of Hathaway, I most often think of two of my favorite westerns--"Rawhide" (1951) and "True Grit" (1969) or that masterful war film "The Desert Fox" (1951). Now I'm re-thinking Hathaway as a noir master.
Look again at the opening sequence in which the film's protagonist, petty crook Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), takes part in the robbery of a jeweler in a skuscraper office building in New York City. Hathaway has Mature and his henchmen try to calmly ride down to the lobby in a crowded elevator, unaware that the tied-up jeweler has managed to trip an alarm and cops ae rushing to the building. The camera is right in Mature's face as he sweats his way through these tense minutes, as harrowing for us in the audience as it is for him, his pockets full of loot.
Hathaway also gets a really monumental performance out of Mature, a likeable big hunk of an actor who seldom was called upon to tap his dramatic muse. Mature's performance, in fact, is his best ever. I talked with Mature when he was long retired and living on a golf course in Southern California, but he still remembered that performance with pride. It came three years before he played the Biblical strong man in DeMille's "Samson and Delilah," a box office blockbuster that forever typed Mature as the same sort of beefcake hero he had played in his film debut as a caveman in "One Million B.C." (1940).
Getting a powerful and sympathetic performance out of Mature was essential for audiences to go along with "Kiss of Death." After all, the man he plays is a crook whose only chance to redeem his life is to turn informer for the police, marking himself as a "stoolie" with almost all his former friends and associates. Mature had to make us believe he was a good man inside, but still mean enough to survive in a world dominated by vicious men.
In the original version of the film, some additional sympathy came to Mature's character, Bianco, while he's in prison. One of his robbery partners drops in on Bianco's wife, who's struggling to feed their two little girls, and ends up raping her. She feels so helpless and without hope that she kills herself. Unfortunately, the scene was deleted from the film because of its terrifying elements and we never actually see Patricia Morison, who played Mrs. Bianco.
But screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer gave us another sequence later that really puts us on Bianco's side. In return for naming the men who took part in the robbery and linking them to some other crimes, Bianco demands to see his two little girls, who now are living in a Catholic orphanage. Mature makes that sequence a dramatic highlight, hugging and kissing those little girls with such abandon that you almost believe they were his own kids and he hadn't seen them in a decade.
The second half of "Kiss of Death" is about Bianco finding a new path in life, falling in love with a former neighbor, Nettie (Coleen Gray), who had been his girls' babysitter and becomes their new mother. Living under a false name, he works as a laborer, but continues to be asked by Asst. District Attorney Louis D'Angelo (Brian Donlevy) to supply information on his former associates.
Finally, he's asked to appear in court to testify against hired killer Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), but Udo gets off with a not guilty verdict and suddenly Bianco knows he's marked by Udo for death.
We've already seen plenty of Tommy Udo by the time he becomes the No. 1 menace to Bianco's new life--and he's terrified us. Ironically, our first glimpse of him is when he's sharing a jail cell with Bianco. Seeing the two men side by side early in the film, it's clear Bianco is just a normal guy with a little hoodlum attitude while Udo is a jittery, quirky, sneering lunatic who might do anything at any moment. While in jail together, D'Angelo first comes to see if he can make a deal with Bianco to finger his robbery partners. Bianco brushes D'Angelo off, but Udo spills hate all over the place at the sight of the assistant d.a.
"I wouldn't give you the skin off a grape!" Udo tells D'Angelo.
Later, in the film's most vicious scene, Udo is sent to find a thug who's suspected of having squealed on his pals. The man has skipped town, but Udo finds the man's mother (Mildred Dunnock), who's in a wheelchair, and decides to terrorize her. His theory: The woman's son will know what he's in for when he reads in the papers what's happened to his mother. Ripping a lamp cord out of the wall, Udo lashes the woman to her chair, wheels it to the top of a flight of stairs and, giggling insanely, shoves her down the stairs to her death.
It's a horrifying scene, but it puts us in serious suspense later in the movie when we realize Udo is likely to do even worse to Bianco's wife and daughters if he can't find Bianco first and pay him back for "squealing" on him.
Bianco knows he's going to have to draw Udo into some kind of trap so the police can arrest him for carrying a gun and send him back to court. That sets up the dramatic conclusion of "Kiss of Death" outside a fish restaurant Udo frequents.
Before making "Kiss of Death," director Hathaway had some valuable experience making two films that both were done in what was known in the 1940s as "documentary style." Both "House on 92nd Street" and "Call Northside 777" used this style to great effect, incorporating news and documentary footage into the film along with the dramatically staged scenes, enhancing the air of realism. Hathaway does a little bit of that in "Kiss of Death," but decided to film almost every scene on real locations in New York City rather than on soundstages back in Hollywood.
As a result, "Kiss of Death" has a gritty, raw look to it that serves the storyline and adds to the feeling that these events are really happening to real people.
The acting also is uniformly good, from top to bottom. Only Widmark, making his screen debut, is encouraged to go "over the top" to create his character. Victor Mature's performance is straight-on without flourishes and the same can be said of Brian Donlevy as D'Angelo, a young Karl Malden as one of D'Angelo's men, and Taylor Holmes as the crooked lawyer who handles Bianco's robbery case.
Coleen Gray, who plays Bianco's young new wife, also was making her screen debut and her performance is unusually finished for such a newcomer to film work. She went on to play many more strong character parts in movies, but never became a real name-above-the-title star before moving into TV work for the bulk of her long career.
The supporting cast is rich and deep, too. Mildred Dunnock had only the one brief scene in the movie, ending up in a heap at the bottom of the staircase. But she already was a well-regarded stage actress and was the original Linda Loman, wife of the tragic Willy Loman in Broadway's "Death of A Salesman," a role she repeated in the 1952 movie version. Though Karl Malden probably has fewer than a dozen lines in the movie, he, too, was an acclaimed stage performer and earned an Oscar in 1951 for "A Streetcar Named Desire," reprising his role from the original Broadway play.
And here's a nifty trivia item from the movie--the very obese restaurant maitre'd seen in one sequence, though unbilled in the credits, was J. Scott Smart, then the star of radio's hit detective show "The Fat Man." He would play his only starring role in a movie four years later when Universal brought "The Fat Man" to the screen.
"Kiss of Death" has been remade twice--the first time as a western! It was called "The Fiend Who Walked the West" (1958). The Victor Mature role was played by Hugh O'Brian, TV's "Wyatt Earp," and the Widmark role by Robert Evans, who left acting not long afterward and became a producer of many memorable films, including "Chinatown," "Urban Cowboy" and "The Godfather." It was filmed again in 1995 by French director Barbet Schroeder with David Caruso ("CSI Miami") in the Victor Mature role and Nicolas Cage, who won the Best Actor Oscar the same year for "Leaving Las Vegas," in the Widmark role. Neither remake was any kind of success.
After all these years since I first was plunged into the dark world of "Kiss of Death," it still hasn't lost its impact. It's a genuine classic that just seems to get better with each passing year.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The photo of Victor Mature is courtesy of 20th Cnetury-Fox. This column first posted March 31, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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