The Bedford Incident

The Bedford Incident (James B. Harris, 1965) A veritable volume of Bartlett's Quotations fills my head after seeing The Bedford Incident. 

For instance, the astronaut's description of his job as "98% tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror," and Elwood P. Dowd's "You can be 'oh-so-smart' or 'oh-so-pleasant'—I recommend "pleasant." Then, because the story is basically, "Moby Dick in The Cold War," there are all sorts of Melville quotes...and one bad joke: "Cook 'em, Dan-O."

It's that last one that sticks, though. The Bedford Incident is, basically, a terrible, terrible joke with a possible several mega-tonnage punchline. And director James B. Harris, who, before making this film, was Stanley Kubrick's film-making partner, can't have missed the thought as his ex was making an out-and-out comedy of errors out of the nuclear arms race.  

But where that one took to the air, The Bedford Incident plays out at sea in a cat-and-mouse game between a Soviet nuclear sub and a naval destroyer. In command is Captain Eric Finlander (Richard Widmark, steely with just a touch of baleful twitchiness that goes full-on berzerkoid in an interview), a determined commander who takes enormous pride in the proficiency of his crew, and in the hunt and pursuit of his targets. As an advisor is a former Nazi U-boat commander Wolfgang Shrepke (Eric Portman), who was responsible for the most tonnage (ours) sunk during the second World War. Also on board is reporter Ben Munceford (Sidney Poitier), who serves as an exposition conduit and Royal Pain In The Ass. Among the crew are Martin Balsam as the ship's new doc, James MacArthur as a too-eager ensign, Wally Cox as the sonar bat, and if you're watching early and quickly, there's a young Donald Sutherland as a garbage analyst—garbage being clues to conditions on the enemy boat, and age-analysis gives tracking position and history.

It shows how extreme the measures are on the Bedford, how detail oriented, how precise, how strategic and how puckered the thought processes go into keeping an eye on the enemy. And once found, Finlander will pursue chasing Soviet subs out of territorial waters, even forcing them to stay underwater until they're desperate for air, provoking confrontation. When your Nazi adviser tells you he's scared of your methods, it means you might be going so overboard as to pro-actively lower the life-rafts.

If you're immersed at all in pop-culture, you can see elements of Bedford in such disparate strategy plays as "Star Trek" and The Hunt for Red October. And such gamesmanship is all well and good in limited skirmishes. But, when the arsenal is nuclear? Do you really want a cigarette in a room full of gasoline?  

No, and that the game is played despite the mega-stakes makes the movie and its characters seem not just petty, but a little dim for all the talk of brilliance. The point of hubris is well taken, but the point was better made as an out-and-out black comedy about short-term, selfish interests in the face of global catastrophe.

Don't Bother To Knock

Don't Bother To Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952) The McKinley Hotel in New York is apparently not what it used to be. For example, there's no baby-sitting service, and that vexes the Joneses (Lurene Tuttle and Jim Backus), who are attending a soiree in the joint's ballroom. But, elevator operator Eddie Forbes (Elisha Cook Jr.) has a neat solution: his niece, Nell (Marilyn Monroe) has just come into town and needs a job. Eddie asks her to look after the Jones' kid, Bunny (Donna Corcoran) and she shows up to look after the kid while Mom and Dad are downstairs.

 

That's all neat and tidy...seemingly. What isn't neat and tidy is the on-going non-relationship between Skyways airline pilot Jed Towers (Richard Widmark) and a singer employed at the hotel, Lyn Lesly (Anne Bancroft, in her screen debut). Lyn had sent Jed a "Dear John" letter ending their six month relationship, sending him into a tail-spin. He's checked into the McKinley to confront her about it and doesn't like it when she tells him that he doesn't "have an understanding heart." Of course, he doesn't understand, so he goes back to his room to sulk ("The female race is always cheesing up my life!").

Across the way is the Jones' apartment, where Nell is baby-sitting, and makes herself at home. That means different things to different people, but to Nell it means trying on Mrs. Jones' negligee and earrings, lipstick, and shpritzing the woman's perfume. It's clear that Nell may not be the best sitter that could have been hired, and might actually need a sitter herself, given her disregard for the personal property of the folks who hired her. Dolling herself up, whatever her reasons, is enough to attract the interest of Jed, who's nursing the earlier break-up and a bottle of whiskey.

When Nell catches him peeping, she draws the blinds, which only amuses Jed. This being the 1950's and Jed being a "man's man" pilot and all, he calls her up on the house phone and tries to talk his way over for a night-cap, but Nell, after initially being interested, hangs up on him.

Meanwhile Eddie (because he knows "her history") stops by to check up on her and is shocked to find her in Mrs. Jones' "things" and tells her that she has to put everything back—he's had his job 14 years and he doesn't want her to do anything to risk it. Besides, if she wants the finer things in life she should stop mooning over her dead boyfriend and move on. She changes, but when Eddie leaves, she puts everything back on.

 

Then, she calls Jed and invites him over.

Even though the film is 70 years old, we'll stop there for spoilers because it's the surprises that make Don't Bother To Knock an interesting see. Nell is such a mystery with hair-pin turns that you wonder what could possibly happen next...and then you get jolted again. "I can't figure you out! You're silk on one side and sandpaper on the other!" Jed yammers in frustration. The truth is he won't figure her out, even Nell can't figure herself out. She's stuck in a loop and all people can do is follow her down her rabbit-holes.

Which is why it's amazing that it's Marilyn Monroe playing Nell. Monroe performances you always take with a grain of salt—at least a grain of sympathy or empathy—and not to make a pun of it but she's graded on the curve, allowances are made. And just as frustrated directors found out the hard way, Monroe knew that the camera loved her and knew how to use it. The camera was the one thing in Hollywood she could trust. With the bar of excellence seemingly lowered, you come away more than a little impressed.

What had she done before? Cameo's basically. In The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, she'd had scenes where she made an impression when she was on the screen, which was minimally. And the parts called for sexy but not voraciously so. Her dramatic role in Fritz Lang's Clash By Night was small, but Don't Bother to Knock, despite its pulp origins and low budget was a huge...if somewhat daunting... role—play "crazy" but sympathetic.

And she's pretty amazing at it. Even with sympathy filters up, there's a lot of work here that tosses the control that she maintained in most of her performances and you're struck by how genuinely alarming it is. Even on-set Bancroft was impressed: "It was a remarkable experience. Because it was one of those very few times in all my experiences in Hollywood when I felt that give and take that can only happen when you are working with good actors. There was just this scene of one woman seeing another woman who was helpless and in pain, and [Marilyn] was helpless and in pain. It was so real, I responded. I really reacted to her. She moved me so that tears came into my eyes."

Almost immediately, she would use her energies for the artifice of star performances that would turn Elton John's "candle-in-the-wind" into kleig lights.

To the Devil a Daughter

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...

 

To the Devil a Daughter (1976) The last Hammer horror film. Would that they have gone out with something better.

 

It looks so promising, though. With a cast that features Christopher Lee, Richard Widmark, Honor Blackman, Denholm Elliott, and a pre-fame Nastassja Kinski, photographed by an A-list cinematographer, based on a novel by the same author of Hammer's The Devil Rides Out (Lee's favorite of his many Hammer films). But that 1967 film boasted a script by Richard Matheson and was directed by Hammer's most successful director, artistically and financially, Terence Fisher.

 

To the Devil a Daughter had neither of them.

 

The movie bounces back and forth in time, but the story proper begins when writer John Verney (Widmark) is on a book tour in London promoting his latest book on the occult, "The Devil Walks Among Us." At a party given by his friends Anna (Blackman) and David (Anthony Valentine), Verney is approached by Henry Beddowes (Elliott), who asks Verney a favor. Will he go to Heathrow Airport pick up his daughter Catherine (Kinski), who he believes to be in the hands of a mysterious religious sect called Children of the Lord. Why can't he go himself? Well, that's a long story to be told in flashback later.

A flashback more recent than the one that starts the movie, where Father Michael Rayner (Lee) is excommunicated from the Catholic Church for heresy. Rayner, it seems, has gone over to "the dark side" and, in Bavaria, established the Children has a satanic cult with the intention of bringing an incarnation of the demon Astaroth to Earth. And who does he plan to be the bearer of such deviltry? Why, Catherine, of course, who has been raised by the sect for just such purposes, as promised to them by her mother, a member of the Children. Henry was witness to all this and forced not to interfere lest he come to a hellish end.

Hence the machinations of putting Verney into the middle of it, as he "knows the occult" and might be able to fight off the Order. It seems a bit flimsy—Michael Crichton wrote about medicine, but I think I'd want a different doctor to operate on me—but the movie's got to start somewhere. Verney manages to fool Catherine's minders and stash her in his apartment, but Rayner and his flock use black magic and all sorts of arcana to try and find Catherine, and its up to Verney to try to save her soul.  

Despite a good cast and the photography of David Watkin (he worked on it between shooting Mahogany and Robin and Marian), To the Devil a Daughter is some of the worst kind of ghoulish tripe to come out of the post-Exorcist era, taking itself way too seriously, even while some of the instances and special effects make you want to giggle (a bloody demon puppet being the most egregious example). Despite all this, the cast remains stoic and professional, not even hinting of suppressed laughter or inordinate eye-rolling (although Widmark, reportedly, tried to quit a couple times. Damn professional, I think. The creepiest thing about it is Kinski was only fourteen when she made it—it was her second film—and a lot was asked of her. In fact, too much.

 

After the movie came out, Wheatley, who found it not only inept, but obscene, asked Hammer to never again adapt one of his novels. Now, that's saying something. But, one could hardly blame him. The only reason to see it, actually, is for Lee, who thought highly of Wheatley, and seemed to relish the chance to do a Draculish version of a cleric, combining priestly authority with malevolence.

Hell and High Water (1954)

Hell and High Water (Samuel Fuller, 1954) Sam Fuller was a tabloid journalist before he became a film-maker, and when he switched careers—after stints writing pulp novels and screenplays—he had his first big hit with a topical Korean War picture, The Steel Helmet. From then on, Fuller kept his eyes on the headlines for his subject matter in order to attract audiences in such of something new. It kept his already edgy film-making style on the bleeding edge of topical audience-grabbers.

So, you can hardly blame him when he starts his atomic-age spy adventure, Hell and High Water, with a literal bang—an atomic bomb explosion, created with a high-octane initial explosion inter-cut with government approved nuclear footage (carefully color-corrected, evidently, as the actual colors  might reveal atomic secrets via the boiling colors inside the conflagration.

That bomb blast is preceded by opening titles: 

In the summer of 1953, it was announced that an atomic bomb of foreign origin had been exploded somewhere outside of the United States. Shortly thereafter it was indicated that this atomic reaction, according to scientific reports, originated in a remote area in North Pacific waters, somewhere between the northern tip of the Japanese Islands and the Arctic Circle. This is the story of that explosion.

A French atomic scientist, Prof. Montel (Victor Francen) on his way to a conference goes missing at Orly Airport; the headlines around the world assume that he has defected behind the Iron Curtain. But one man is about to find out differently. 

Retired submarine commander Adam Jones (Richard Widmark) is traveling anonymously in Tokyo.  A former sub-mate recognizes him, but he brushes him off. $5,000 will do that. He's been wired the money as down payment for a job in Japan; what it entails he has no idea, but he's traveled there to find out. Instructions take him to a hidden base, where an eclectic group of officials and atomic scientists—including the missing Frenchman—have summoned Jones for a particular mission.

They've taken possession of a scuttled Japanese submarine to do some investigating of a remote island in the Bering sea above the Arctic Circle, where a Chinese freighter has been making frequent deliveries, and where a recent surveillance plane has been shot down. The pilot was a friend of Jones' so he's already hooked to take on the mission, plus, he'll get an additional $45 grand  if he pulls it off, but he has two demands—he wants his pick of his old crew to get the submarine into shape...and he wants it armed.

The first one he gets, but the committee, in a hurry to get going because that targeted freighter has once again sailed, doesn't give Jones the time to test the torpedo tubes...or, for that matter, give the sub an extended dive test. Well, it wouldn't be a secret mission without some form of handicap. But, it doesn't stop the handicaps from increasing by taking on Marcel as an observer, and he brings along his assistant, Professor Denise Gerard (Bella Darvi*), whose presence is perpetually disruptive—initially because the crew-members of Jones' old command see her as a sign of bad luck for an all-male crew, but eventually, because she inspires a lot of unwanted attention, causing fist-fights and a general lack of focus.

The problem is solved by the Captain, by cracking down on his crew and placing her off-limits—to everyone, but himself, of course. Rank evidently has its privileges.

Fuller did his research aboard an active submarine, and he was able to use the relatively new Cinemascope widescreen process to advantage aboard the cramped quarters of the submarine sets, showing that it could be used for more than religious epics. One of the benefits of that research is in the using of red interior lights in a submarine—which were used to keep light from being emitted from a raised periscope and to allow crewmen's eyes on watch to adjust to the dark. It creates an eerie glow that Fuller uses to great advantage during one of the improbable love scenes between Jones and Gerard.

Fuller stages some nifty little underwater sequences as the sub plays cat-and-mouse games with a Chinese submarine and the freighter only to find that the island that it's going to is a feint for a second island, where there is a marked difference in detectable radioactivity and a secret that reveals a plot that would be re-run in the Cold War James Bond films of the '60's. 

This wasn't one of Fuller's favorite assignments or results, which he dismissed as "a sea picture where we never went to sea" (although Fuller is a clever magician with stock footage that you never know that, despite the set-bound nature of many of the set-pieces)—but it is fondly remembered—recycled footage was used in the "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" TV series and Steven Spielberg used it as research for 1941, and proudly showed Fuller a print of it in the trunk of his car when Fuller filmed a cameo for that film (as Fuller chortled in his autobiography).

Still, it is a diverting adventure yarn, with some surprises and shocks along the way, even if it's muted Fuller (perhaps because the original writer, Jesse Lasky, Jr. was allowed a re-write of Fuller's re-write of his script).  It is rare that you could call a film by Sam Fuller "a programmer" but Hell and High Water is as close as the man would come in his career.

* Fuller took on the assignment out of loyalty to producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who stood by the director after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had strong, and censorious, objections to Fuller's Pickup on South Street. But, along with taking on the job, Fuller had to put up with some of Zanuck's casting suggestions—Bella Darvi being one of them. Darvi was discovered by Zanuck's wife Virginia—her stage name is a combination of the first syllable of the Mr. and Mrs. Zanuck's first names—who insisted she move into the Zanuck home after her divorce from her husband. Soon after, she became Darryl Zanuck's mistress. Widmark protested Davi's casting, but was overruled. Fuller did have a problem with Darvi's heavily accented English, so he used Zanuck's tric of calling in a favor, employing his frequent co-star Gene Evans to function as her dialogue coach.

Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961) It was Katharine Hepburn who shepherded this film from its origins as an episode of "Playhouse 90"* to this version as a three hour epic.** The movie is padded with shots of Spencer Tracy touring the city (still in rubble in 1960, twelve years after the judges trials at Nuremberg***), and background of the characters, including a chaste meeting of minds with a Nazi widow (Marlene Dietrich, still oozing mystery at the age of 60). Screenwriter Abby Mann makes the citizenry complicit in his expanded screenplay, despite their protestations of ignorance. And the military at the time of the trial was in the middle of the Berlin Airlift, their attention now turned to "the Bolsheviks" and cozying up to Germany for strategic advantage, casting the worth and even the result of the trial in question for political expediency. The movie is allowed much more cynicism than the Playhouse 90 broadcast, where the words "gas chambers" were subject to censorship by sponsor The American Gas Association.

The movie threatens to swamp itself with star-power but leavened it by Tracy disappearing into his role. Maximilian Schell repeats his television performance (winning an Oscar in the process, as did Mann for his adaptation). Of the newcomers, the best performances are Montgomery Clift in face and body language denoting a characters damaged by the brutality of the Nazi regime. And Judy Garland, who'd always seemed like a raw nerve in her films, acts merely from the neck up—and that's all that's required. Not as controlled are Richard Widmark, whose prosecutor is a bit too demonstrative in private for a courtroom strategist, and Burt Lancaster, given a great speech but, a weakness of the actor, aware of it. Laurence Olivier was intended to play German Ernst Janning, but dropped out. I'm not sure that would have been an improvement, but it would have been interesting.

Kramer struggles with the material; he would later become an expert on courtroom directing. But here, he's more intent on making the drama look interesting with camera moves by circling witnesses and, most egregiously, using a fast zoom to zero in on a dramatic moment. It's used sparingly, but even that's too much for the material. He would learn to trust his actors and inherent drama of the scene to carry it.

But, Judgement at Nuremberg manages to be something that eludes most Kramer films—it's a bit more timeless, especially in regards to the short-sightedness of chipping away at bedrock principles for today's political viability and the future's further erosion. One could be speaking of water boarding as torture in Abby Mann's summation speech.

****

Read it. Read the whole thing. But linger on the words after the picture below.

Judge Haywood: The trial conducted before this Tribunal began over eight months ago. The record of evidence is more than ten thousand pages long, and final arguments of counsel have been concluded.

Simple murders and atrocities do not constitute the gravamen of the charges in this indictment. Rather, the charge is that of conscious participation in a nationwide, government organized system of cruelty and injustice in violation of every moral and legal principle known to all civilized nations. The Tribunal has carefully studied the record and found therein abundant evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt the charges against these defendants.

Herr Rolfe, in his very skillful defense, has asserted that there are others who must share the ultimate responsibility for what happened here in Germany. There is truth in this. The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization. But the Tribunal does say that the men in the dock are responsible for their actions, men who sat in black robes in judgment on other men, men who took part in the enactment of laws and decrees, the purpose of which was the extermination of humans beings, men who in executive positions actively participated in the enforcement of these laws -- illegal even under German law. The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime -- is guilty.

Herr Rolfe further asserts that the defendant, Janning, was an extraordinary jurist and acted in what he thought was the best interest of this country. There is truth in this also. Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the Government of which he was a part. Janning's record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial: If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe. But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary -- even able and extraordinary -- men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat at through trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen.

There are those in our own country too who today speak of the "protection of country" -- of "survival." A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient -- to look the other way.

Well, the answer to that is "survival as what?" A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!

Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.

* if you want to see it, it is here. 

 

** Probably to give her love and paramour Spencer Tracy another plumb acting role. His health (owing to his tendency to drink to excess) was always improved when he was working.

*** Although shots of Richard Widmark driving through the city are obvious process shots.

**** William Shatner's sitting in front of Tracy. Tracy was Shatner's hero and when he saw Tracy do the speech in one take, he blurted "I didn't know film actors could DO that!" Tracy shunned him for the rest of the shoot.

The Street with No Name

The Street with No Name (William Keighley, 1948) Another of the odd docu-dramas Filmed in the real locations (but not better actors) that studio 20th Century Fox made in the 1940's with the FBI's full co-operation. As with the earlier example, The House on 92nd Street, Lloyd Nolan once again plays FBI inspector George Briggs who hires a new agent recruit to infiltrate a violent gangster racket run by one Alec Stiles (Richard Widmark, a year after tearing up the screen in Kiss of Death). Mark Stevens plays the mole, George Cordell, while a young John McIntire (wait a minute, he looks old in this one, too!) is his chief contact with the Feds. The Stiles gang is high on fashion, but low on smarts with the exception of Stiles, who's big on intricately worked out by-the-book schemes, secret rooms inside warehouses and likes to do a lot of whining about his gang, his moll, and probably the government, too, if he actually paid taxes. He takes a personal interest in Cordell (working under the alias of George Manley) and personally hires him as part of his mob.

The movie builds to a violent climax with anybody-who's-anybody in the cast all in the same place dodging bullets and daggers and hiding in all the spacious blackness that director Keighley and cinematographer Joe MacDonald (he shot My Darling Clementine, Call Northside 777, and Pickup on South Street) can offer. It's a minor noir, curious only for Widmark's early work and the spare elements of the truthiness at FBI Headquarters, which are less on display than The House on 92nd Street. This would be the last film of its type to have the full co-operation of the FBI until James Stewart starred in The FBI Story in 1959, and, of course the TV series "The F.B.I." starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jnr.

Well...almost. The script for The Street with No Name ended up being recycled for another, better film for Fox, which we'll talk about next week. 

Pickup on South Street

Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953) By the time Samuel Michael Fuller wrote and directed Pickup on South Street for Darryl F. Zanuck* in 1953, he'd already had three tough careers, as an infantryman in WWII, as a street-wise journalist for a New York daily (he was the New York Evening Graphic's crime reporter at the tender age of 17!) and a pulp-fiction novelist and ghost-writer. Fuller knew the seamy side of life, knew how to portray it suggestively to avoid the censors, but still punch it up to make sure audiences picked up on it. Fuller's movies had a crusty vitality that few directors have successfully emulated (although many have tried). That sort of lesson you learn on the street, not in the video store.

He'd already made five very eclectic pictures for 20th Century Fox starting with I Shot Jesse James, two Korean War films—the low-budgeted The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets!—The Baron of Arizona, and an historical newspaper picture, Park Row. When Darrel Zanuck suggested a trial movie, Fuller pitched him another idea about grifters and spies working against each other in the bowels of New York. 

Pickup on South Street has some amazing sequences, starting with the opening gambit: a couple of fed's are tailing a call-girl, Candy (the soon-to-be-Mrs. Howard Hughes, Jean Peters), who's found some temporary legitimacy as a courier for her ex-boyfriend, Joey (Richard Kiley), when who should sidle up to her but a professional pick-pocket named Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark). He gets in close, uses a newspaper as a blind, then deftly violates her purse (no, there is no ambiguity here—Fuller edits it like it's a sexual act, cutting from the purse to a flushed-looking Candy). He intercepts something he doesn't expect—micro-film with government secrets. This Joey-guy seems to be a communist spy.

Of all the people in the world for the safety of United States to depend on! Skip's no hero and has no loyalties to anybody but himself. Pretty soon he's being hounded in his squalid little bait-shack domicile by the city cops, the fed's ("You wavin' the flag at ME?!" he asks, mystified), the moll he buzzed, and the U.S.-based communist cell that Joey's working for. What's a "dipper" to do? The patter is wise and rapid, the love scenes smoldering and intimate, and the fight scenes look like they hurt! 

A lot!** (There's a particularly nasty one with Peters and Kiley in which the camera hurriedly rushes back out of the way of the hurling bodies—the best thing about the fights is they look spontaneous and un-choreographed, and quite thuggish). It's a movie to love...and respect.

It's hard to believe that Zanuck would approve this film (and he got some complaints about it from J. Edgar Hoover), but he liked his B-roster rough and down in the dirt, and Fuller wouldn't have it any other way. However, just because his protagonists are all grifters (the cops, however, are all nasty creeps) they're all Good Americans, as opposed to the well-tailored, polite communists, and that's Fuller's punch-line to the whole magilla. 

You can practically hear his wheezing cackle.

* Fuller liked to tell the story of why, after making successful B-movies, he decided to sign a contract with Fox and Zanuck over the other studios. He asked the other studio-heads what they did with the profits from their movies. All gave advice on tax shelters. Zanuck was the only one who said, "We make better movies."


** The fight scenes kept the film from receiving a pass from the Production Code, and had to be filmed a few times before the film could be accepted for exhibition. As it is, Peters goes slamming face-first into a book-case at one point, and Widmark socks Kiley over a subway turnstile, and drags him by his ankles down some stairs, his jaw hitting every step along the way. Ouch!

Kiss of Death (1947)

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947) Another of Henry Hathaway's neo-realist film noir's that aped the post-war Italian film penchant for shooting dark themes in real locations without glamour and emphasizing the grit.  This one, about the rise and fall and rise of heist-criminal Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), starts out in the sky-scrapers, jail-houses, and police offices that reverberate with the realistic sound that you can't acquire in a sound-baffled soundstage, but once the mayhem starts, the film scurries back to the safety of studio sets.  It's rough in the mean streets of noir. Safer to make your own.

Bianco is an ex-con who can't find a job, and with a wife and two kids to support, he decides to make his own work—robbing a jewelry business in downtown Manhattan.  The job goes South and he ends up on the street with a police bullet in his leg and a stretch awaiting him at the gray-bar hotel.  He's offered a chance by assistant D.A. Louis D'Angelo (Brian Donlevy) to supply evidence on his cronies, but Bianco sticks to the criminal code—he won't squeal, sing, or rat, even when D'Angelo offers him an early parole so he can see his kids.  But Bianco won't bend.  His family is being "taken care of" by his sheister of a lawyer (Taylor Holmes), who visits him in prison to keep tabs on Bianco's loyalty.

But, in prison, Bianco gets wind that things aren't going so well.  And a visit to the prison library newspaper galleys tells him his wife has committed suicide, his kids are now orphans, and his silence has bought him nothing.

Hathaway's direction is no-nonsense throughout, but stylistic, anyway, and the scenes in the initial robbery, in the D.A.'s office and the lock-up have a drab, utilitarian look to them—the robbery has a nice touch in it, as the crooks' target is on the 44th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, and the post stick-up elevator ride (with plenty of stops) provides a particularly teasing kind of tension.  Mature is fine, Donlevy's abilities aren't taken advantage of, and there are bit parts by Karl Malden and one of my character actors, the short-lived Millard Mitchell (who played Gene Kelly's producer buddy in Singin' in the Rain).

But Kiss of Death is also the feature debut of Richard Widmark, who plays the cheap gangster killer Tommy Udo.  You don't see him kill too many people, but one of them is indelible in its cruelty and vicious enthusiasm.  Widmark's performance is amazing, looking like a wire-thin Dan Duryea, with Cagney's ability to hold the eye in every scene he's in.  His dialogue isn't the greatest (even though the script is by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) and limited, and repeated over and over, but Widmark punctuates it with a goonish laugh that implies a sarcastic inner amusement that he knows he's stringing you along. 

Hathaway, knowing what he was getting from the young actor, pulled out all the stops for his performance. There's one scene where someone's waiting for udo, who's holding court in a curtained-off restaurant back-room. Hathaway holds on the curtain, elongating the wait, then cuts to a close shot of the part in the curtains, where all you can see is the glint in Udo's eye before he gets up and makes his way to the camera. It's an amazing shot and one that shows the director's confidence in his young actor's ability to hold an audience's attention, even when he isn't actually seen.

It's curtains for Widmark's Tommy Udo