Kiss of Death
Our film noir this week is Kiss of Death, from 1947, starring Victor Mature and Richard Widmark. It tells the story of a convicted armed robber who is driven in desperation to turn informer for the prosecutor’s office and undergoes some harrowing experiences as a result. Like a number of other noir films, it’s been remade recently. The original movie, which was well received on its first release and got a couple of Oscar nominations, is representative of an aspect of film noir which we haven’t encountered in this series before—extensive location shooting. The search for authenticity took the production to various locales in New York City and its environs: the Tombs in Manhattan, the Chrysler Building, Sing Sing prison, a Harlem nightclub, a row-house in Queens. Contemporary publicity for the movie stated that Victor Mature and other actors were even taken through the prison induction process and issued with uniforms as part of the preparation. The resulting combination of grey actuality and the kind of solid, un-imitatable detail you get from actual locations, gives a sharp and distinct flavour to the film.
You have to remember that all the way through the 30s and through the wartime years almost all movies were shot on studio soundstages. Some things were shot on location—notably outdoor open-country scenes like those in Westerns—but the great majority of sequences were staged at the studio, including exterior shots of streets and other locations. It’s a standard feature of 1930s movies to find characters sitting by a studio pond, or leaning against a soundstage rail fence, or even walking across carefully built and dressed hills complete with grass and trees. Cameras were big and heavy, and film stock needed the massive killowatage of studio lighting to register the proper glossy image. Everything was much more controllable on soundstages: lighting, camera movement, every detail of setting, not to mention weather and accident. Also, the major studios particularly had a huge standing investment in their soundstages and studio lots, and needed to maximize studio shooting to justify the enormous overhead these factories cost.
By the 1940s audiences had become so accustomed to the gleaming, satiny, totally controlled studio look that it seemed natural, just the way movies were. Developments in camera and film technology had been making cameras lighter and filmstocks more sensitive, particularly in response to the needs of newsreel reportage of World War II. And then, as soon as the war was over, there was Italian Neo-realism—searing, documentary-like movies like Rome Open City and Shoeshine that were shot in real locations, on grainier filmstock, and dramatized the problems of ordinary people. At a single stroke these films demonstrated the artificiality of Hollywood movies that was so familiar it had become invisible.
Between wartime newsreels and Neo-Realism, it became apparent even to Hollywood that there was a kind of immediacy and conviction in location footage that was completely missing in mainstream production. And so started the series of documentary-like movies shot on location, often “based on a true story.” And almost all of these productions overlapped with the crime genre, where the grittiness and desperation of characters was seen as rooted in the harsh conditions of lower-class and criminal-class social life. The first of these was The House on 92nd Street in 1945, and it had quite a few successors, including Call Northside 777, The Naked City —and of course Kiss of Death.
Looking at certain scenes in Kiss of Death, for example the scenes in the prison workshop or its visiting room where the protagonist discovers that his wife has committed suicide, you get a powerful sense of the blankness and indifference of the surroundings, of a world which simply doesn’t care whether people live or die. Almost all of the scenes in police stations, prosecutors’ offices and prisons take on this quality to some extent. And in many of the domestic locations—people’s houses or apartments—there’s a similar sense of people’s vulnerability, of the bad things that can happen to them. For the most part this isn’t conveyed by the standard visual strategy of film noir—the strategy of expressionist lighting and photography—but rather by this blank indifference of real places. There are a few classic noir visual moments in Kiss of Death, mostly towards the end of the picture, but not that many. Instead you get other noir qualities from the locations, from the guns and the cars and the fedoras and overcoats.
As for the story, it’s full of uncomfortable things, just as a film noir should be. In the first place it asks us to identify with a stool pigeon—something that’s extremely difficult under any circumstances, and that the movie never goes out of its way to make easier. Victor Mature, a big, powerful man, is made to cave in under personal pressure, to sweat and squirm in fear of retaliation from the weaselly killer Richard Widmark, to be passive and helpless even while he contravenes the oldest principal of movie manhood—never be a rat. Equally uncomfortable is the spectacle of the assistant D.A. played by Brian Donlevy, who’s cast in the mold of one of those compassionate tough-love cops or wardens in 30s gangster movies who’s trying to help our hero get his life turned around, but who turns out to be unreliable and incompetent in a very unsettling way. And not only incompetent but also manipulative and coercive, just like a criminal. There’s a very nice little moment in the movie where Mature and two cops visit an orphanage, and the nun in charge can’t tell who’s the cop and who’s the robber. And then there’s the movie’s most lurid feature—the giggling infantile psychopath Tommy Udo, played by Richard Widmark in his screen debut in a performance so far over the top that he got an Oscar nomination and became a star overnight. This sadistic little gargoyle is something quite new in crime movies—a bad guy who’s not just selfish and brutal but insane, uncontrollable, completely off the scale.
[screen movie]
I was saying earlier that Kiss of Death makes things difficult for viewers by asking them to pull for a stool pigeon. Normal Hollywood movies—and what I’m saying here is that noir films aren’t normal Hollywood movies—normal Hollywood movies try to make things easy for viewers by creating a simplified moral environment. Heroes may indeed be underdogs, they may have to fight under compulsion and against great odds, but these very facts are usually used to create sympathy for them, to depict them as heroic individuals overcoming the constraints of the social and institutional world around them and triumphing over morally unworthy opponents. In Kiss of Death Nick Bianco is sort of an underdog, and he certainly has to fight through great odds. But he gets into his jam by being a career criminal in the first place. In the opening voice-over—and we can just note in passing how unusual it is in film noir to have a woman’s voice-over—Nettie points to unemployment and prejudice and family obligations as reasons for Nick’s criminal activity. Later on we discover that Nick’s father, too, had been a career criminal. It’s quite a liberal idea to suggest that social and familial environment is the reason for crime rather than personal moral weakness or wickedness—and it’s an idea that undermines a simple right-vs-wrong picture of the world. Then making Nick a squealer, a stool pigeon, a rat—the terms are all right there handy, and very familiar to moviegoers in particular—is another attack on the simplified Hollywood habit of making the good guy only act nobly and the bad guy be the rat and the squealer. It’s quite extraordinary how Kiss of Death presses this point by bringing up these unpleasant words, and this unpleasant subject, over and over again. “Are you feeling bad about it?” the prosecutor asks solicitously. Because of course you ought to be, since there’s nothing worse than a squealer.
All of this is part of the movie’s general strategy of making the hero passive and powerless—and when he does act it’s to rat and squeal. The domestic joys of wife and children are of course precious, but to be left alone to lay bricks and cuddle with your wife and kids isn’t at all a charismatic goal in the world of masculine heroism. Instead of relying on his own individual strength and resourcefulness he’s told to put his trust in the law and the state—and then the law and the state jerk him around and finally fail him completely. I should maybe point out how much more shocking this is in 1947 than it would be nowadays. In fact the 1994 remake depicts the D.A. as by far the lowest form of slime-life in the movie, in a way we’ve become quite used to, and which actually gives the hero back his own initiative and makes this movie far less uncomfortable than the original. But the original never gives the hero this kind of power. When he finally does act independently, and in defiance of the prosecutor, he still acts passively —leaving his gun behind and taking 5 slugs in the belly in order to deliver Udo to the cops. All the scenes of Nick discovering his wife’s death while in prison, later sweating in fear of Udo, prowling around his house in pajamas waiting to be murdered—these are all images of powerlessness. And the powerlessness of the hero is one of the main defining characteristics of film noir—his powerlessness, or his disorientation and confusion, or his desperation. It’s a characteristic that strikes right at the heart of Hollywood story-patterns, where empowerment and success and control are absolutely central. At the end of Kiss of Death, the voice-over tells us that Nick survived and won, but personally I don’t believe it. 5 bullets in the gut? The really, totally noir end of the movie has Nick dying there on the pavement, leaving his wife and kids to the hard and pitiless world one more time. This ending would of course be brutally negative, and it’s hard for even a noir film to be as dreadful as that.
But probably the thing people remember most vividly from Kiss of Death is Richard Widmark—giggling and squeaking and snorting and screaming for blood at the boxing match and pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs. There’s something campy about the performance, but there’s no doubt that, as I said before, this brand of absolutely unrestrained psychopathic sadism represents an escalation in the presence of evil on the screen. I’d like to add that the totally corrupt and predatory old lawyer Howser, played with wonderful rotting perfumed malice by Taylor Holmes, is just as scary as Widmark in his more restrained way. Between them, and throwing in the picture of the cops and law enforcement the movie presents, and of course all the sufferings of the hero, the central Hollywood idea that the world is a place where things work out right comes in for a pretty good beating.