Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (Harold Hecht-Norma Productions, Universal-International, 1948))

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that I watched Turner Classic Movies’ for Eddie Muller’s weekly “Noir Alley” feature, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, a 1948 film based on a 1940 novel by British crime writer Gerald Butler. The novel was published just after Britain entered World War II but wasn’t filmed until after the war, The protagonist of the movie is American servicemember Bill Saunders (Burt Lancaster),who’s stranded in London three years after the war ended, and is clearly shown as a victim of what is now called post-traumati\c stress disorder (PTSD). When he’s told by a bar owner that it’;s closing time and he needs to leave, Saunders punches out the owner and accidentally kills him. The film opens with an evocative scene in which Saunders, fleeing the bar and being chased by the police, runs headlong across the city and ultimately ends up in the single room of schoolteacher and nurse Jnae Wharton (Joan Fontaine). Saunders pleads with her not to turn him in, and the two begin a rather testy relationship in which Saunders’ sheer animal magnetism (well, he’s being played by Burt Lancaster!) wins oot over her initial disgust. He takes her on various dates, including one to a horse-race track at which he meets tout Harry Carter (Robert Newtonin hsi first American film, already showing his knack for sneering villainy that would keep him working for the remaining decade of his life). When Joan gets Saunders a job driving a truck for the children’s hospital at which she works, Harry hatches a plot that involves Saunders allowing Harry’s gang to hijack his truck and steal the medical supplies it contains.

Harry has been blackmailing Saunders all movie because he was a witness to his assault on the barman, though when Saunders actually serves a stretch in prison it’s only for six months for the lesser crime of assaulting a police officer, not murder or manslaughter. Saunders’ sentence included being whipped 18 times with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and naturally director Norman Foster and screenwriters Ben Maddow, Walter Bernstein, Leonardo Bercovici and Hugh Gray go all-out for the sadistic glee of Burt Lancaster doffing his shirt (something he did in almost all his movies at one point or another, especially in these early years) and being whipped. Unfortunately for Saunders, on the night of the big staged robbery Joan decides to go with him, and he has to beat up three of Harry’s men to be allowed to proceed. Also,this time his cargo is badly needed penicillin to combat an epidemic of scarlet fever. Saunders has a run-in with the father of one of the little girls with the disease, who doesn’t want his child inoculated because her older brother had previously died of diptheria and he blamed this on a doctor’s inoculation, so he doesn’t want his surviving child to receive the penicillin shot even though Saunders, Joan and we all know that’s the only way her life can be saved. (Given the heights of madness in this country over the COVID-19 vaccines and the conspiracy theorizing surrounding them, this part of the movie seems all too relevant today.) At one point Joan receives a visit from Harry, hwo tries to rape her and she stabs him with a scissors in self-defense, and Saunders arranges with the captain of a ship to take both hismelf and Joan to Lisbon away from trhe reach of british law. But in the end she persuades him to turn themselves in and trust that tle law will deal fairly with them.

Blake Lucas in The Film Noir Encyclopedia expressed disappointment that Kiss the Blood Off My Hands did not live up to the lurid promise of its title, describing the film as “simply another entry in the Burt Lancaster cycle of masochistic melodramas, in which a tormented Lancaster journeys through a treacherous world accompanied by the dissonant strains of Miklós Rosza’s music.” Lucas also mentions that the Production Code Administration tried to get the filmmakers to change the title to The Unafraid, but they refused. Despite having only been making movies for two years, Lancaster had already won a great deal of independence from the studio system. He and his agent, Harold Hecht, formed their own production company, which they named “Norma” after Lancaster’s wife, and made a co-production deal with Universal-International that allowed them to film the movie on the Universal lot and in particular to use their standing sets of London. At the time the cash-poor Universal saw co-production deals with actors as a way to get major stars for their movies without having to pay star salaries up front; two years after Kiss the Blood Off My Hands Universal would co-produce Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73, essentially a film noir in Western drag, with James Stewart’s company, and Stewart would make over $1 million on the deal. Lancaster and Hecht also insisted that the entire cast, except for Lancaster himself, would consist of British actors, and in Joan Fontaine they lucked out: a British native and also a major star with an Academy Award under her belt. Even Blake Lucas concedes that Fontaine’s role, a sympathetic one instead of the femmes fatales played by Ava Gardner in The Killers (Lancaster’s first film) and Yvonne De Carlo in Criss Cross, raises the quality of this film.

Lancaster wanted Robert Siodmak to direct Kiss the Blood Off My Hands because Siodmak had directed Lancaster in The Killers and it had been a smash hit, and as cinematographer he wanted Gregg Toland – but Siodmak’s schedule nade him unavailable and so Norman Foster was assigned the direction. Both Toland and Foster had worked for Orson Welles, Toland as the cinematographer of Citizen Kane and Foster as principal director of Journey Into Fear – and the shots of Saunders on board the ship that’s supposed to take him out of the country are strongly reminiscent of the ones of Joseph Cotten aboard a tramp steamer in Journey Into Fear. But Toland didn’t work out for some reason and Foster fired him and replaced him with Russell Metty (who had done preliminary tests for Kane and would work with Welles again on Touch of Evil). One wonders oif Toland’s problems had to do with his fatal illness that would kill him in 1948 after he finished his last film, Samuel Goldwyn’s Enchantment. But Metty’s work is excellent, and though it doesn’t live up to the bizarre mixture of shock, horror and titillation of its title (what could have, at least with the Production Code still in effect?), Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is a great film noir both thematically and visually. It’s also one of the films that makes me regret that after his early days, in which he played largely villains, Burt Lancaster became too big a star to be cast as anything but heroes: his loss, and ours.