Hecht. Hathaway. Widmark. TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) with Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, Richard Widmark, Coleen Gray, Taylor Holmes, Screenplay by Ben Hecht

By David in TN
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:08:00 P.M. EST

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) with Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, Richard Widmark, Coleen Gray, Taylor Holmes, with screenplay by Ben Hecht.

Kiss of Death has New York locations with the documentary style Fox began in the late 40’s. There are scenes at The Tombs, Sing Sing, Chrysler Building (robbery takes place), and Astoria, Queens (Nick Bianco’s house).

Film Noir Guide: “Mature, a hood who gets nabbed after pulling a jewelry store heist, is offered a deal by assistant D.A. Donlevy if he’ll squeal on his partners. Mature refuses, even though it means facing a twenty-year stretch and leaving his wife and kids alone. The mob’s lawyer (Holmes) promises Mature that his family will be taken care of and that he’ll see to it that he’s paroled.

“While in prison, Mature hears that his wife has committed suicide and that his kids have been placed in an orphanage. So he contacts Donlevy and sings like a canary.

“Released on parole, he marries his daughters’ former babysitter (Gray) and tries to live a normal life. The D.A., however, has other plans for him—he wants to trap psychopathic killer Widmark.

“Filmed on location in and around New York City and upstate New York, Kiss of Death is a violent action-packed film. Mature gives one of his best performances as the ‘good’ crook turned squealer, and Donlevy is good as the persistent D.A. who makes Mature earn his freedom. But it’s Widmark, in his film debut, who steals the film with his impressive portrayal of the giggling psychopath.”

David in TN: Richard Widmark’s psycho portrayal in his film debut got him the only Academy Award nomination of his career. Tommy Udo Fan Clubs sprang up at college fraternities.

In Eddie Muller’s outro last week for The Burglar (1957), he repeated the old story that Jayne Mansfield had a “genius IQ,” but this time didn’t add that Mansfield never showed any sign of it in her surviving interviews.

N.S.: As a kid, Richard Widmark was one of my favorite actors, mostly in Westerns, though I did see him as Tommy Udo, also in Night and the City (1950), and recently saw him in Samuel Fuller’s A movie, anti-Communist masterpiece, Pick-Up on South Street (1953), as the pickpocket who serves as Thelma Ritter’s surrogate son.

Widmark was apparently such a natural, that the Academy took him for granted.

There’s one picture I saw Widmark in again, for the third time, about two years ago, for which I am convinced he should have been up for Best Actor: Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, which is on my Top 100 list.

The problem was, Spence and Maximilian Schell were the frontrunners in that category, and the Academy had only nominated three actors from the same picture for Best Actor, and that was for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)—Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, and Franchot Tone—the year before the Academy introduced the Best Supporting categories. (And I suspect, the fact that Tone was nominated for Best Actor was a factor in introducing the new category.)

At that point, Spencer Tracy’s acting ability was obscene. He made it look as if acting were the easiest skill in the world. If the Academy had given him the Oscar for Nuremberg, nobody could have argued with it. He played an old judge from Maine, who had been coaxed out of retirement for one last trial of some minor-league Nazis.

Maximilian Schell played the defense counsel, who aggressively defends his clients, with a strong and authentic German accent. He’s over the top, but that works via the contrast to Spence’s restraint.

(Anyone who finds himself in the dock should have such a zealous counselor!)

One of Schell’s most famous sequences was one from which I learned a lot. He has witnesses read from several infamous court decisions, justifying the forced sterilization of the feeble-minded. Each time, you expect to hear a notorious Nazi’s name declaimed at the end. But instead, the author’s name is always the same: “Oliver. Wendell. Holmes.”

Schell would drag it out.

Widmark’s role was presumably inspired by Telford Taylor, the chief U.S. Army Nuremberg prosecutor.

During every trial, the prosecutor would play the same documentary, shot by our troops under orders from Ike, when they liberated the death camps.

Ike knew that some day, some people would deny the Holocaust ever happened, and he made sure to have the evidence on celluloid.

But for people dealing with trial after trial, seeing the same film was tiresome, and they’d make sarcastic remarks about it. The prosecutor came off as a bit of a fanatic. Well, some jobs call for a fanatic.

And yet, Widmark’s performance never goes over the top. He neither over nor underplayed the role, going straight down the middle.

Say what you will about Stanley Kramer’s lack of a sense of humor; he elicited some of the greatest performances ever committed to film.

Now, it is easy to make courtroom scenes boring. It takes a special talent to make a trial story riveting. Abby Mann (he) wrote one of the greatest screenplays ever for Nuremberg, and won an Oscar for it.

The defense counsel is defending his clients, among other things, for the “war crime” of forced sterilization.

The prosecutor puts a man (Montgomery Clift) on the witness stand, who was a baker’s helper before the war, and who was forcibly sterilized.

The man seems normal enough under the prosecution’s softball examination.

Then comes the cross.

The defense asks the witness to formulate a sentence using three words: “Hare. Hunter. Field.”

The witness falls apart, and has to be excused.

(Stanley Kramer later said that Montgomery Clift—who had destroyed himself with pills and alcohol—had fallen apart, trying to deliver his dialogue. Finally, Kramer told Clift to forget the script, and go with his gut. The result was brilliantly moving. Clift got a nomination for Best Supporting Actor out of it.) The normally levelheaded prosecutor was so distraught over that day’s disaster in court that he got drunk that night out of his senses at the restaurant that was the social center of the story. On the way out, he sees Spence, and staggers over to his table. The prosecutor utters three words: “Hare. Hunter. Field,” as he slides off the table.