A Kiss Before Dying **** (1956, Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Virginia Leith, Joanne Woodward, George Macready, Mary Astor) – Classic Movie Review 284

A Kiss Before Dying (1956, Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward).

Robert Wagner gives a career best performance in the brilliantly simmering 1956 colour film noir thriller A Kiss Before Dying, the original film version of Ira Levin’s famous mystery thriller novel.

Director Gerd Oswald’s little-known 1956 American colour film noir thriller A Kiss Before Dying is the brilliantly simmering, smouldering, suspenseful original film version of Ira Levin’s famous mystery thriller novel, remade to much less effect 35 years later in 1991 with Matt Dillon.

Levin won the 1954 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel for A Kiss Before Dying, published the previous year. He went on to write Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, as well as the play Deathtrap. All spawned very successful movies: Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, and Deathtrap.

The young Robert Wagner (only 26 and he had already been in movies for six years) is perfectly cast and gives perhaps his career best performance as the story’s chilling central character, working-class college student Bud Corliss, an ambitious, charming but ruthlessly cold schemer and then killer. Cast against clean-cut type, Wagner is very compelling, charismatic, creepy and credible.

(Wagner was on a roll, enjoying a good year, also cast against type in 1956 in The Mountain, with Spencer Tracy.)

Bud Corliss is courting naïve, rich girl Dorothy ‘Dorie’ Kingship (Joanne Woodward, in only her second film, after Count Three and Pray) in order to marry her and get his grubby hands on the mining fortune of her father Leo Kingship (George Macready). Bud finds Dorie is pregnant with his child and is insisting on getting married, but he realises that now she is likely to be disinherited in favour of her sister. So he has to take some abrupt action.

It is a plot point, by the way, that only Bud calls Dorothy by the name ‘Dorie’.

[Spoiler alert] The little-remembered Virginia Leith plays Dorothy’s canny sister Ellen, who calls in pipe-smoking, bespectacled college lecturer Gordon Grant (Jeffrey Hunter) to help her investigate the mystery surrounding her sister. It is useful that Grant is also a part-timer with the local police headed by his uncle, the Chief of Police Howard Chesser (Howard Petrie). But then Ellen too falls for Bud’s lethal charm herself.

For, a couple of months after Dorothy’s death, Bud resurfaces in Phoenix, Arizona, where the Kingships live and is dating Dorothy’s sister Ellen, who has no idea of Bud’s relationship with Dorothy but has doubts about her sister’s supposed suicide. Ellen believes she has identified her sister’s boyfriend who she thinks might be the killer. But she finds the wrong man in previous boyfriend Dwight Powell (Robert Quarry), whom Bud needs to eliminate pretty darned fast.

Though neither Woodward nor Mary Astor (in her first film for seven years as Bud’s twitchy, over-protective mom, Mrs Corliss, whom Bud lives with and patronisingly manages to tolerate) has enough to do, they still manage to score strongly. Both are excellent value, with Woodward expectedly compelling as the rather clingy, whiny pregnant woman. Her departure from the film less than half way through leaves a gap that Leith has a battle to fill.

The game plan of director Oswald (in his feature début) proves exactly right: keep the film atmospheric, taut and moving swiftly, relish the intense suspense sequences, and focus close in on the actors. Lawrence Roman’s ideal screenplay is dark-toned and noirish, bringing out the best in Levin’s characters and plot twists. And there is splendid work on a constantly moving camera by Lucien Ballard, with lovely, sometimes startling images in DeLuxe color and CinemaScope, chic production designs by Addison Hehr, and jazzy blues score by Lionel Newman, making it a bit of a style object.

And it is a delight that film is packed with Fifties style objects. Just look at those cars: Kingship’s big black limo is a 1954 Cadillac Fleetwood 75 and Ellen Kingship drives a 1955 Ford Fairlane Sunliner convertible.

Time has been kind to it and it is easy to admire it as a real 50s artefact effortlessly oozing with period style, and, unlike the remake, this time we really are made to care for these spoiled, heartless characters, subversively made to sympthise with the handsome, intelligent, stop-at-nothing main character.

Robert Quarry, Bill Walker, Molly McCart, Marlene Felton and Robert Ivers co-star.

It is made by Crown Productions and released by United Artists.

It is filmed in Tucson, Arizona, and the surrounding area, including the copper mine south of town, the scene of the final showdown. Dorothy falls from the downtown 10-storey Valley Bank Building, then Tucson’s tallest building, and the campus shots are of the University of Arizona.

Woodward plays a pregnant woman but the film’s use of the word ‘pregnant’ caused controversy. The word was cut during its preview in Chicago, and United Artists was not allowed by the Hollywood censors to use it in any advertising.

Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter.

The film is the directorial debut of Gerd Oswald. The Berlin-born Oswald specialised after this on second features and TV episode, especially The Outer Limits and Bonanza. He directed four episodes of Wagner’s TV show It Takes a Thief.

Horror author Stephen King called Levin’s first novel ‘a gritty suspense story told with great élan’.

The box-office receipts for the 1991 A Kiss Before Dying with Matt Dillon were poor though his reviews were good.

The Killer Is Loose (1956) is another film in the same vein from Crown Productions and released by United Artists that same year, also shot by Lucien Ballard.

Wagner, Woodward and Hunter were all loaned to United Artists by their studio 20th Century-Fox. Darryl F Zanuck of Fox bought the rights to the book in August 1953. Two years later it was announced the film would be made by Crown Productions. A Crown executive was Robert L Jacks, Zanuck’s son-in-law.

Virginia Leith died on 4 November 2019 at the age of 94.

Dolores Hawkins sings ‘A Kiss Before Dying’ (Music by Lionel Newman, Lyrics by Carroll Coates), weirdly playing on the juke box while Bud and Dorie eat at the diner.

The cast are Robert Wagner as Bud Corliss, Jeffrey Hunter as Gordon Grant, Virginia Leith as Ellen Kingship, Joanne Woodward as Dorothy Kingship, Mary Astor as Mrs Corliss, George Macready as Leo Kingship, Robert Quarry as Dwight Powell, Howard Petrie as chief of police Howard Chesser, Molly McCart as Annabelle Koch, Bill Walker, Marlene Felton, and Robert Ivers.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 284

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