True story recounted in Adrian Boot and Michael Thomas’ photo-book “Babylon on a Thin Wire”: Kiss of Death was immensely fashionable in Jamaica in the fraught cultural and political moment of the early ‘70s, so unnerving in its popularity in fact that the authorities censored all scenes of violence from the constantly repeated showings for fear of encouraging Rastafarian radicals and banana grove revolutionaries. Such an anecdote, combined with the impact of Richard Widmark as tittering assassin Johnny Udo, kicking the wheelchair-bound old lady down the stairs in a famous moment of boundary-pushing savagery, would seem to highlight Kiss of Death as one of the more trashily energetic, rock ‘em-sock ‘em works of post-war noir.
Which couldn’t be further from the case: there’s not much thrill left in this thriller, with its disjointed, problematic plot and slow pace. Director Henry Hathaway didn’t have much affinity for gangster films and it shows, the resulting film possessing very little of the adamantine strength and plainness of Raoul Walsh’s similar pre-war films. It deserves credit for attempting an adult, soberly recounted story, with Victor Mature’s ill-starred hero Nick Bianco suffering for his attempts to live by principle, firstly by not violating his criminal ethics, and then later by doing just that for the purposes of restarting his life and sheltering his children after their mother’s despairing suicide.
Hathaway and screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer offer a nuanced compassion for Bianco and his situation, which thankfully lacks any interventions by Pat O’Brien in a dog-collar (although there are some nuns), instead demanding Bianco put his neck on the line only to protect his new young wife (Colleen Gray) and girls from persecution. Such a portrait of a returning patriarch’s having a hard-bitten shell of enforced resilience eaten away in trying to resume a domestic life perhaps expressed the mood of the returning GIs with unexpected accuracy. There’s a certain charge too to Mature and Gray’s forlorn romance, and the post-war fashion for authenticity, bordering on neo-realism, is apparent in the location photography.
Kiss of Death made Widmark a star and confirmed Mature as one, and that’s comprehensible: Mature’s impression of stalwart physicality and emotional simplicity inflected by melancholy is interesting, and Widmark of course created a template for many a grinning psycho in screen history. By the same token, Mature lacks the kind of grace and intensity other actors might have brought to the role, so the potential for the work to become a kind of character study of a man in a vice is only partly realised. The famous wheelchair scene is just about the only truly galvanising moment in the film, as if dreaming it up unnerved the filmmakers in some fashion, who generally play the rest with a curious mix of intimacy and distraction, lacking a sense of gritty immediacy, and leaving much of the story’s threads distractingly unresolved and fixating on Udo as if by default. This leads to a neatly conceived but rather implausible resolution, and finally the film has aged very badly. Still, Kiss of Death might be considered a median point between They Drive by Night and On the Waterfront in sustaining a hint of social realism in a generic setting, and i
t shares a theme of irrepressible reckoning with Hathaway’s best film, The Shepherd of the Hills.
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