Kiss of Death (1947)

[Mappin & Webb Ltd.]

Kiss of Death begins with seemingly benign portrait described by a narrator over shots of a bustling Manhattan: “Christmas eve in New York a happy time for some people; the lucky ones. Last minute shopping, presents for the kids, hurry home to light the tree and fill the stockings…for the lucky ones. Others aren’t so lucky.” Here we are introduced to Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), a former jail-bird now trying to fly the straight and narrow. After a year of his prison record impeding his efforts to get a legit job, we see Nick and a few cohorts enter a jeweler’s office and rob them as our narrator informs us, “This is how Nick goes Christmas shopping for his kids.” At the conclusion of this scene, Nick is mere seconds away from eluding the police who have been tipped off to the burglary. Fleeing the building he attempts to escape their grasp by running into the crowded streets of New York. Before Nick is able to make his flight, a cop in pursuit shoots him in the leg - dropping him to the ground and ensuring his Christmas will be spent at the graybar hotel. Nick’s robbery gone wrong mirrors the fate of his father. Twenty years earlier the old man was escaping from a robbery he just committed when he ended up with a copper's slug in his back. The young Nick Bianco witnessed his father’s death and to compound the trauma of the tragedy, it was one of Nick’s earliest memories. However in present day, when the violins die down, Nick is looking at plenty of jail time - but he does have a way out.

Assistant D.A. and family man Louis D’Angelo (Brian Donlevy) tells Nick if he sings about the failed heist, he can get out of serving time in the big cage. But Bianco is no canary and refuses to chirp about his crew. Not even when D’Angelo tries to push his guilt buttons about his two young daughters growing up without their dad does Nick show signs of budging. The Assistant D.A. believes that Nick is a good guy at heart and attempts to give him a means to avoid incarceration. We see Nick’s wheels turn at this prospect and persuasion put forth by D’Angelo. To the core though Nick is old school and decides to do his time with his beak shut.

Three years into doing his bit in the joint, Nick finds out that his wife has killed herself by sticking her head in a gas oven because of her assorted woes; Nick in jail, financial hardship, single motherhood and her penchant for hitting the bottle hard. Upon hearing this news Nick wants to get out and take care of his kids who have landed in an orphanage with nobody to care for them. In prison he gets a visit from Nettie (Coleen Gray), a young lady who once was his daughter’s nanny when Nick was on the outside and things weren't quite so grim. Nettie subsequently quit the nanny gig and moved away long before Nick’s wife did herself in by treating her melon like a bundt cake. A minute into her visit with Nick it's obvious that he and Nettie have a connection. Additionally he asks her to keep tabs on his daughters which she agrees to do out of fondness for them, and of course Nick.

Beside himself with guilt and concern for his daughters, Nick is motivated to cut a deal with D’Angelo and give up his crew. Unfortunately this is where Nick must cross paths again with Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark). Tommy and Nick had met before during Nick's sentencing, winding up in the same holding cell for little while. Tommy expressed to Nick his surprise at being behind bars noting, “Imagine me in here? Big man like me gettin’ picked up just for shoving a guy’s ears off his head? Traffic ticket stuff.” With that statement we understand Tommy’s idea of a moving violation differs drastically from yours and mine. Tommy Udo’s capacity for violence is proven later in the film when he silences a potential informer by lashing the stoolie’s mother to her wheelchair with an electrical cord and pushes her down a flight of stairs. Cementing his dark disposition, Udo gives his legendary creepy cackle at the sight of his maternal manhandling.

Under the guidance of D’Angelo, Nick "accidentally" bumps into and pretends to be pals with Udo to get some dirt on him for the Assistant D.A. The plan works and the D.A.’s office is taking Tommy to trial for murder, Nick testifies against him and everything seems rosy. Nick and Nettie have gotten married; he now has a regular job and a new identity. His daughters are finally out of the orphanage, living with the newlyweds and happily improving their roller-skating skills on a daily basis. The picture can’t get any more perfect until the frame the D.A. tries to hang on Tommy Udo doesn’t take and his slick shyster manages to get Tommy acquitted of the charges he faced. Now Nick has the psychopath Tommy Udo gunning for him and his family. While he wants to help Nick, the assistant D.A. can only wait for Tommy to violate his parole in order to get him off the streets. That may be too little too late for Nick, Nettie and the girls with a lunatic like Udo looking for payback. Nick sends Nettie and the girls packing to the country and decides to take care of Tommy Udo himself. At this point the cat and mouse game between Nick and Tommy plays out with both parolees having to tread carefully under the watchful eye of D’Angelo.

This movie is entertaining in patches, but it’s not sustained on the whole. Director Henry Hathaway doesn’t cover any unique ground or bring anything very original to the table with this picture. He had already incorporated filming in actual locations and utilizing the quasi-documentary style with his previous work The House on 92nd Street and would do the same (with more effectiveness) a year after Kiss of Death with Call Northside 777. The movie looks fine and there is some nice editing in several key scenes such as the opening heist, Udo’s wheelchair pushing scene and the ending which nicely bolster the tension. The script is solid but lacks some panache -leaving the narrative flat in many places. While there are some great lines, the bar was set fairly high in my book with writers Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer at the script’s helm. Between the two, they’ve penned such gems as Notorious, Spellbound, His Girl Friday, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Thing from Another World and Oceans Eleven - just to name a few (even more impressive is Hecht’s unaccredited contributions to many scripts over several decades. Check out his IMBb page and be in awe). That being said, the performances of Mature and Widmark are the elements that elevate Kiss of Death above mediocrity.

Victor Mature is effective in his role as Nick Bianco, balancing a believable hood with a genuine guy who is motivated by his kids to straighten up from his crooked ways. It could have been played very sappy (especially in the scenes with the saccharine sweet little girls) but Mature nicely acts out the role and not the dramatic story. The result is a performance that elicits just the right mix of sympathy and compassion for his character and his wistful eyes also seal the deal when necessary too. Perfect casting and acting combined for the crucial role of our protagonist Nick.

The main reason to recommend watching this film is the screen debut of Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo: his performance is outstanding. As Tommy Udo, he doesn’t so much give you the creeps as he force-feeds them to you. He’s a perfect storm of menace, sadist and sociopath. Widmark commands every scene he’s in with such a forceful presence and performance that as the film continues, you find yourself simply waiting for him to appear. He also gets some classic lines such as telling a cop fishing for info that he wouldn’t give him “the skin off a grape.” Without Victor Mature’s understated performance Widmark’s Udo may have lost some of his effectiveness by seeming too over the top or out of place contrasted by a less convincing Nick Bianco. The two portrayals, however, balance each other perfectly and create a solid foundation of tension and excitement for this otherwise moderate noir

[David]

Nice job, M&W - thanks.

I like this one way more than you seem to, but it's always nice to see things from another perspective. Plus, I'm always
a sucker for Newman's 'Street Scene'(!)

[MartinTeller]

(review from January 15, 2006)

So-so noir, watchable but a little slow. Victor Mature is excellent in the lead, but Richard Widmark (in his screen debut, for which the Academy nominated him) chews the scenery as the sadistic antagonist. He calls people "squirt" about 50 times, which makes it really hard to take him seriously. Rating: 6


(review from March 7, 2010)

The first time I saw this, I hadn't yet developed a taste for noir. Now I see it as one of the purest examples of the genre. Desperation, a hero trapped, chiaroscuro lighting, vicious thugs, ominous music, tense situations and bleak cynicism. I also have developed a fondness for both Victor Mature and Richard Widmark, both of whom are excellent here. Although Widmark's repetition of "squirt" does get a little irritating, and this iconic performance hounded him for the next several years, but fortunately he was able to break away from it. Really just a good movie all around, I regret giving it a low rating earlier. Rating: 8

[Adam Lounsbery]

Kiss of Death is director Henry Hathaway's greatest film noir. It's a mix of the semi-documentary style of his earlier films The House on 92nd Street (1945) and 13 Rue Madeleine (1947) with the hard-boiled conventions of his private eye flick The Dark Corner (1946).

The film begins with the following words: "All scenes in this motion picture, both exterior and interior, were photographed in the State of New York on the actual locale associated with the story."

Unlike The House on 92nd Street and 13 Rue Madeleine, however, this commitment to veracity isn't in service of a true-ish retelling of World War II-era espionage, but of a hard-boiled crime drama about a three-time loser facing 15 years in stir after being nabbed for a jewel robbery.

His name is Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), and if he wants to watch his two little girls grow up, he's going to have to stool for the district attorney's office.

Bianco has been in this position before, and he took the full four-year rap instead of squealing.

"I'm the same guy now I was then. Nothin' has changed. Nothin'," he tells Assistant District Attorney Louis D'Angelo (Brian Donlevy).

On his way up the river to Sing Sing, Nick meets a cackling, sociopathic hood named Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark). Udo won't show up again for awhile, but he'll play a major role in Nick's life when he does.

For awhile, Nick stays clammed up, but then his wife Maria commits suicide and he starts to rethink matters. When a pretty girl from his old neighborhood, Nettie (Coleen Gray), comes to visit him in Sing Sing and tells him that the driver on the jewelry job, a guy named Pete Rizzo, was responsible for Mrs. Bianco putting her head in the oven, Nick decides he wants to talk to the D.A. and secure his release in exchange for information. (In the original story, it was implied that Rizzo raped Nick's wife, but that's sidestepped in the final version, making it seem more as if she was having an affair with Rizzo.)

Nick trusts Assistant D.A. D'Angelo enough to tumble to a job in his past that he got away with -- the Thompson Fur Company heist -- to provide a cover for his trips to the D.A.'s office. D'Angelo promises that he'll drop the charges later for insufficient evidence.

Things are looking up for Nick. He's able to care for his daughters, and he's eventually paroled, leaving him free to marry Nettie.

But as soon as Tommy Udo -- Nick's old pal from the trip up to Sing Sing -- re-enters his life, things go very bad very quickly. Udo is the kind of guy who thinks nothing of wrapping up an older wheelchair-bound woman (played by Mildred Dunnock) in electrical cord and pushing her down a long flight of stairs, in one of the most enduring scenes of cinematic sociopathy.



Kiss of Death was Richard Widmark's film debut, and his balls-out crazy performance is something to behold. The filmmakers thought that Widmark's high forehead made him look too intelligent, so they outfitted him with a low-browed hairpiece. Like Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), Widmark's performance as Tommy Udo straddles the line between gangster movie and monster movie. Director Hathaway had toyed with the idea of casting the manic Harry "The Hipster" Gibson, who sang the 1944 druggie classic " " as Udo, but it's impossible now to imagine anyone but Widmark in the role.

The screenplay for Kiss of Death was adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer from a story by Eleazar Lipsky originally called "Stoolpigeon." Lipsky was a novelist who worked as a Manhattan assistant district attorney. He was also legal counsel for the Mystery Writers of America. Perhaps because of Lipsky's day job, the realism of the setting of Kiss of Death is matched by the actions of its characters. Brian Donlevy, in the role of Assistant D.A. D'Angelo, is neither a hero nor a villain. When he tells Nick that he's going to have to testify in court after all, and later that it was all for nothing, and that Tommy Udo was acquitted and is probably coming after Nick, the viewer gets the sense that D'Angelo genuinely cares for Nick, but that at the same time, putting Nick's life in danger is just part of the job. D'Angelo might not like it, but he accepts it as a necessary evil.

Interestingly, the fictional Kiss of Death comes off as a more realistic film than either The House on 92nd Street (1945) or 13 Rue Madeleine (1947), both of which touted the "true" stories that were their inspirations. Although not every scene in Kiss of Death was shot on the actual locale associated with the story, as the title card promises (some of the interiors were clearly shot in a studio), the use of real New York City and Upstate New York locations coupled with realistic dialogue, understated performances from all the cast besides Widmark, and extremely sparse use of background music makes for a powerful, engrossing drama. There are standout set pieces, like the jewel heist in the Chrysler Building that opens the film, and spectacular shots of the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building, the Tombs, and the 59th Street Bridge from the Queens side of the East River, but there are also lots of little touches that give the film its sense of realism. When Nick watches his daughters during their music lesson at the Academy of the Holy Angels in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the piano is slightly out of tune. When Nick sits in his cell at Sing Sing, the toilet in the cell is clearly visible, which is something you'd never see in a prison cell built on a Hollywood soundstage in the '40s. (Incidentally, prior to shooting the scenes in Sing Sing, Hathaway had both Victor Mature and Richard Widmark processed through the system to give them a better sense of the characters they were playing.)

Kiss of Death isn't a perfect movie, but it stands up to repeated viewings, and its use of music and location are both revolutionary. If you don't believe me, take it from Walter Winchell...

[cigar joe]

Though not as quite as stylistically dark visually as The Dark Corner or Where The Sidewalk Ends, Kiss Of Death is one of my favorite New York Noirs. Addressing the visuals it has about a 2/3rd's light to dark Classic Noir ratio. The above reviews pretty much cover nicely all the bases. The Fox DVD has an entertaining commentary from both Silver and Ursini, though for the record they do make one mistake.

When Nick finds out that Udo was acquitted and sends Nettie and the kids away on the train, the commentary suggests that they are still in Astoria, Queens, New York, and the station is near the house. The station is actually along the Hudson River about 30 miles North of New York City, it looks like the Scarborough/Briarcliff Station, about 2.5 miles from Ossining (Sing Sing Prison), NY., which makes sense from an economy in location shooting, but no sense geographically wise.

It also makes no sense from a railfan's POV. All passenger trains South of the Croton-Harmon Station are/were electrified into Grand Central Terminal since 1912, if you freeze frame the shot you can see the "third" rail along the short fence beside the tracks.



To have a steam locomotive approaching is anachronistic for 1947, I'm guessing here, but I'd bet that was a freight train that was approaching and they used it, as it made for a more dramatic picture rather that use a passenger boxcab electric locomotive, you notice there is a quick cut and in the next shot has the train already at the station, movie magic.

This film is a particular treat for me since Astoria is where I grew up as a kid and I spent some nice summer days on the lawn in Astoria Park between the Triborough and Hellgate Bridges watching the (now long gone) heavy ship traffic go by on the East River (this park and both bridges are viewed in the b.g. when Nick arrives home from work and his two kids greet him on roller skates).

Adam, you may want to correct the post just above to change 59th Street Bridge to Triborough Bridge (though its recently been renamed the RFK bridge) Any way some images from Astoria below:



This above is the Triborough Bridge from the platform of the closest actual station to Nick Bianco's House, (Astoria Blvd,-Hoyt Ave.) its an El Station on the Astoria Line, this is the closer of the two bridges you see in the park behind Nick as he greets his kids.

Here below is the Hellgate Bridge, its an arch RR Bridge across the East River this shot is from the Ditmars El Station the next and terminal station on the El North of the Astoria Blvd.-Hoyt Ave. Station.



This shot below is in fact actually the reverse angle from the shot in the film its taken from Astoria Park from beneath the Hellgate Arch along the East River looking towards the Triborough Bridge and looking generally towards 14th St Astoria, Nick's street in the film.



Below so you don't get confused is the 59th St. (Queensborough) Bridge from the Manhattan Side top, and the Queens side, below:

[Adam Lounsbery]

Adam, you may want to correct the post just above to change 59th Street Bridge to Triborough Bridge (though its recently been renamed the JFK bridge) Any way some images from Astoria below:

Aw man, did I screw those up? I think I was going by someone else's review, because I watched this on TCM. I took notes, but I didn't have the film to refer to when I was writing the review and trying to remember all the locations.

A correction right back atcha, though, it's the Robert F. Kennedy bridge now, not the JFK. JFK already has an airport.

[Adam Lounsbery]

Yeah, I think it was this review I was going by ... the mention of the bridge is at the end: http://www.tcm.com/this-month/articl...-of-Death.html

[cigar joe]

I'll fix it I knew it was one of the Kennedy's, lol.

[NOTW comment bot: comments from Noiroftheweek.com]

I've recently blown out my noir collection thanks to Amazon and especially the invaluable guidance of this great site. I'm presently working my way through the films in chronological order and I got to Kiss of Death last night.
With The Blue Dahlia, Gilda, The Big Sleep and Out of the Past still fresh in my mind, Kiss of Death's understated dialogue works with the location shooting and less stylised lighting and camera work to make it seem a much more modern film than its contemporaries.
Mature and Widmark are quite amazing and I can imagine Widmark's performance impacting audiences the same way Heath Ledger's Joker did not long ago.
The scene's with Nick and his kids are genuinely affecting, Mature is wonderful with them and had me choked up several times. As you've noted, not sappy or manipulative, rather the reason you become so invested in Nick's fate.
Good to see Donlevy in a much different role than The Glass Key, and the great Karl Maulden in a small part too.
The editing is often quite startling. The elevator sequence: the camera staying on Nick's face, a bead of sweat on his temple as we watch the door opening and closing between floors in the mirror behind his head; and near the end when Nick is sitting at the table glancing nervously at the curtain waiting for Udo to emerge - like something out of a nightmare.
Many thanks
-Chris

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2012-10-04T22:50:48.815-05:00