TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is, for the First Time, Norman Foster, Leonardo Bercovici, Ben Maddow and Walter Bernstein’s Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) with Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, and Robert Newton

By David in TN and Nicholas Stix
saturday, february 11, 2023 at 1:18:00 a.m. est

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Norman Foster’s Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) with Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, and Robert Newton.

Film Noir Guide: “Despite the gruesome title, this is merely a slow-moving romantic melodrama about a love destined to fail.

“Lancaster is a disturbed American war veteran in England, who has a serious temper problem.

“After accidentally killing a pub owner, he breaks into nurse Fontaine’s apartment while hiding from pursuing bobbies. Fontaine, surprisingly sympathetic, doesn’t report him. Romance blossoms, but Lancaster must spend six months in prison for violent attacks against a police officer and a train passenger who wouldn’t fall for one of his con games.

“When Lancaster is released, Fontaine gets him a job at one of her clinics. He attempts to go straight, hoping the police will never suspect him in the pub killing, but a witness (Newton) blackmails him into helping him hijack the clinic’s drug shipment.

“Noir icon Lancaster, the lovely Fontaine, and Newton (terrific as the detestable small-time hood) do their best, but they can’t overcome the trite script. Newton went on to star in the syndicated TV series Long John Silver.”

David in TN: This is the first time this film has been on TCM. Red Eddie Mueller, in his outro last week, said Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is a forerunner to The Third Man.

N.S.: In Blood, Foster, Cavalcanti, Budd and Langley ripped off the powerful Trevor Howard vehicle, They Made Me a Fugitive/I Became a Criminal (the part where the fugitive breaks into the apartment of a woman who falls in love with him, even to the point of being willing to wait while he sits in prison.

In Treasure Island (1950), Robert Newton reportedly taught the world how to play a pirate (“Ay, me hearty!”) He became famous for playing heavies, most notably the murderous Bill Sykes in David Lean and Stanley Haynes’ version of Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1948). However, he was also splendid playing, in a completely unaffected manner, the stiff upper-lip family man in the wartime propaganda masterpiece of a young David Lean and Noel Coward, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan’s, This Happy Breed (1944). This is a prime exercise of Coward’s in “Britishness,” which some observers have claimed he invented. (Full disclosure: I am a Coward.)

Breed begins with the Armistice in 1919, and ends as WWII begins in 1939, during which interim nothing much happens, and yet whatever is going on, is beautiful. It didn’t hurt that the cast included Celia Johnson as Newton’s wife, Stanley Holloway as his next-door neighbor and best friend, and John Mills as the boy next door, i.e., the latter’s son.

Alas, Newton, who was mercurial in real life, drank himself to death in 1956, at the age of 50.