Kiss of Death ***** (1947, Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, Coleen Gray, Richard Widmark) – Classic Movie Review 2066

The poster may feature Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy and Coleen Gray, but director Henry Hathaway’s tough and gritty vintage 1947 thriller Kiss of Death provides a brilliant showcase for the 33-year-old Richard Widmark, who was Oscar nominated as Best Supporting Actor in his screen debut. Kiss of Death is notable both for giving Widmark his unforgettable breakout role and as an important, exciting example of 40s film noir.

Winning the 1948 Golden Globe for Most Promising Male Newcomer, Widmark sears the screen as Tommy Udo, a giggling, psychopathic mob hit-man always ready with an impulse to push an old lady down the stairs. Tommy giggles gleefully even as he shoves a wheelchair-bound old woman (Mildred Dunnock) tumbling down a long stairway to her death.

Widmark’s triumph here is to take a noir stock character and make it his own simply by taking the performance a whole lot further than anyone else had dared to hitherto. Alas, there were no further awards or nominations for Widmark in all his long career.

Top-billed star Victor Mature never achieved much of an acting reputation at all but here he is entirely fine as Nick Bianco, a minor mobster who’s arrested and sentenced to 27 years in jail. Even better is Brian Donlevy, playing the Assistant D.A. Louis D’Angelo, who persuades Bianco to rat on his partners in crime, who then despatch Widmark’s Udo for Bianco’s blood. In her first billed role, little-remembered Coleen Gray plays the heroine, Nettie Cavallo, who used to babysit his Bianco’s daughters and visits him in prison.

Hathaway invigoratingly shoots in documentary, realist style on actual locations in New York, rattling it all blisteringly along with the help of eye-catching black and white images by cinematographer Norbert Brodine. A lot of the credit must also go to screen-writers Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer for their stupendous, crafted screenplay, adapting a story by Eleazar Lipsky, Oscar nominated for Best Original Story.

Also notable in the cast are Mildred Dunnock as Mrs Rizzo, Karl Malden as Sergeant William Cullen, Taylor Holmes as attorney Earl Howser, Howard Smith as Warden, Anthony Ross as Big Eddie Williams, Millard Mitchell as Detective Shelby and J. Scott Smart as Skeets.

The film was costly to make at $1,525,000 and earned $1,650,000 back, so it did not end up as a major box-office hit but managed to break even on the world market and set the 20th Century Fox studio off on a series of distinguished gangster movies.

Worryingly, American college fraternities formed Tommy Udo clubs ‘with the intent of putting women in their place’ and for years people handed Widmark phonograph disks to record the maniacal laugh he used in the film.

It was remade as a 1958 horror Western entitled The Fiend Who Walked the West, directed by Gordon Douglas and starring Hugh O’Brian and Robert Evans. And it was remade again as the thriller Kiss of Death by director Barbet Schroeder in 1995 with Nicolas Cage and David Caruso and Samuel L Jackson, dropping the idea of Tommy Udo.

Widmark recalled: ‘The director, Henry Hathaway, didn’t want me. I have a high forehead. He thought I looked too intellectual.’ But Hathaway was overruled by 20th Century Fox studio boss Darryl F Zanuck. Widmark added: ‘Hathaway gave me kind of a bad time.’

Richard Widmark died on March 24 2008, aged 93.

Widmark was a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. He hated firearms and was involved in gun-control initiatives. In 1976, he stated: “I know I’ve made kind of a half-assed career out of violence, but I abhor violence. I am an ardent supporter of gun control. It seems incredible to me that the United States is the only civilized nation that does not put some effective control on guns.’

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2066

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