Kiss of Death (20th Century-Fox, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Saturday Turner Classic Movies had run three films noir (or at least films gris) in a row with at least some vague connection to Christmas, though with one thing or another I’d only had time to comment on the first one, Lady on a Train, a marvelous fusion of screwball comedy, murder mystery and musical starring Deanna Durbin and directed by her future husband, Charles David, in 1945. The second and third in the sequence are more traditionally noir (though in 1944 Durbin had done an even darker Christmas-themed movie, Christmas Holiday, with Gene Kelly as her co-star -- though instead of the bright, sprightly holiday musical you would have expected from that title and those stars it was a dark melodrama in which Kelly plays Durbin’s crazy ex-husband who’s escaped from a mental institution and is determined to kill her), the acknowledged 1947 classic Kiss of Death and the not as well regarded but still intriguing 1946 Raymond Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake. Kiss of Death officially starred Victor Mature, Coleen Gray (who got an “Introducing” credit) and Brian Donlevy, but it was Richard Widmark (in his first film) as crazy killer Tommy Udo who got the notices and career boost from it. The infamous scene in which he grabs the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Rizzo (Mildred Dunnock), mother of one of the criminals Udo is supposed to track down and kill, and pushes her in her wheelchair down a flight of stairs to her death followed Widmark throughout his career -- 20 years later, working with Don Siegel on the film Madigan (in which Widmark played a police detective with a penchant for accepting favors from local merchants, but still basically honest in the end), he was complaining that people still thought of him as Tommy Udo even though by then he’d played as many good-guy as bad-guy roles. I’ve long suspected 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck thought of Widmark as the new James Cagney (whom Zanuck had signed in 1930 when he was head of production at Warner Bros.), a small and high-voiced but tough actor who could play bad guys or good guys whose behavior skirted the good-bad line.

Kiss of Death has only a tangential Christmas theme in an opening narration by Coleen Gray stating that small-time crook Nick Bianco (Victor Mature, showing his usual bovine imperturbability -- in 1941 Josef von Sternberg had got a marvelously nuanced performance out of him as a corrupt doctor in The Shanghai Gesture, but no one else was ever again able to get that much acting out of Mature -- though given that his character is pretty simple-minded and gets led into traps both by fellow crooks and the law because he’s too stupid to perceive them, Mature’s non-acting actually sults the part quite well and a more accomplished actor like Bogart, Dick Powell or Robert Mitchum might not have been as good) has to do his Christmas shopping his own way because his criminal record keeps him from getting a legitimate job. (I remember a few years ago there was a campaign called “Ban the Box” -- the box being the question on an employment application which asks if you’ve ever been convicted, or sometimes even if you’ve merely been arrested even though you haven’t been convicted, which is hard to square with the principle of Anglo-American law that you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.) Nick is arrested for robbing a jewelry store on the 10th floor of a tall business building -- there’s a great suspense scene from director Henry Hathaway in which we wonder whether he’ll get to the ground floor with the loot in time before the police, called by the jeweler, arrive and seal the building so Nick can’t get out -- and tough-as-nails assistant D.A. Louis D’Angelo (Brian Donlevy in one of his best performances, before his chronic alcoholism robbed him of his authority) tries to get Nick to turn state’s evidence and rat out the other members of his gang, who did escape.

Nick turns him down and meets Tommy Udo on his ride to state prison -- Udo, it turns out, is going to be his cellmate, though from the start we’re told that Nick is a good-bad gangster (he drifted into a life of crime because that’s what his father did, too -- the next year Nicholas Ray would make They Live by Night, which even more boldly hinted that criminal tendencies are hereditary) while Udo is a bad-bad gangster, who kills people because someone has hired him to do so but who also takes a great deal of sadistic pleasure in his work, boasting about how he likes to shoot people in the belly so it will take them longer to die. (Two years later Neville Brand spoke similar dialogue for his role as a psycho killer in the 1949 film D.O.A.; that film’s writers, Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, blatantly plagiarized the lines by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer in Kiss of Death.) When he went into prison Nick had a wife and two daughters, but when he gets word that his wife has committed suicide and his daughters are in an orphanage, he re-contacts A.D.A. D’Angelo and agrees to “squeal.” Nick is ultimately released and testifies against Udo in a trial based on an earlier murder Nick knew Udp had committed, but Udo is acquitted and Nick knows that Udo will come looking for him and kill him if he has the chance. Eventually Nick agrees to wear a wire and try to record Udo confessing to yet another murder, and he nearly loses everything -- his life, his new wife (Coleen Gray) who used to baby-sit for the kids, his job and his more or less settled existence -- but as a result of Nick’s information there’s a final shoot-out in which Nick is wounded and Udo dies (so Nick doesn’t have to worry about him beating justice in a courtroom again).

Kiss of Death is a well-made film -- Hathaway was usually known as a Western director (he was the next guy on the list if you couldn’t get John Ford or Howard Hawks) but he handles the confines of a film noir quite well -- even though it’s also one of Fox’s “documentary” movies (begun by former March of Time producer Louis de Rochemont in the 1945 film The House on 92nd Street), which had their credits written as if typed on a typewriter and were often shot in real locations rather than studio sets. It’s not all that interesting a story -- though its depiction of how the criminal law is really enforced is a lot closer to reality, then or now, than the dramatic trial scenes (I was astounded when Andrew Weissmann, one of the attorneys in Robert Mueller’s investigation of the ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, said most criminals serving time in prison got there by jury convictions; he should know better -- most people in U.S. prisons got there by cutting plea bargains, and a lot of the “tough on crime” laws in the U.S. were passed at the urging of prosecutors to give them more leverage to cut plea deals), and I loved the line Hecht and Lederer gave Mature when Nick tells D’Angelo that his side of the law is almost as crooked as Nick’s own, a blurring of the moral line between criminals and cops that would become far more important in 1950’s and 1960’s movies and would get almost totally erased in 1970’s movies like Dirty Harry, The French Connection and Death Wish which would present cops with the apparent morals (or lack thereof) of criminals and expect us in the audience to approve.

Kiss of Death is a peculiarly schizoid movie in which the villains are more interesting than the heroes -- indeed, one of the way it anticipates modern movies is the lack of anyone we can unambiguously root for (the closest character to a representative of positive social values is Donlevy’s, and he seems pretty scummy in his unscrupulousness and his demand that Nick put his own life at risk permanently in these days before witness-protection programs just to nail a few relatively unimportant crooks; at one point he feigns interest in working up the food chain to find the higher-ups, the fences who buy stolen jewels and the crooked dealers who make the real money off them, but for the most part he’s depicted as a harried prosecutor who will take whatever he can get in the way of convictions or plea deals) -- and it’s a good film as it stands but it has the hints of something even better that could have been made of the same material.