Kiss of Death

"I'm through trusting you, the police, or anybody but me. There's only one way to get Udo; that's my way."

The most well remembered scene in Kiss of Death is Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo pushing a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, and in a way it should be. Widmark's performance proved to be his breakout, pushing him towards being probably the most adaptable of noir actors. His roles in Night and the City and Pickup on South Street helped, if not to define, than to clarify the noir anti-hero, and yet his performance in Kiss of Death is perhaps one of the most violent and sociopathic performances ever seen by scholars of a genre full of violent and sociopathic characters. That Widmark was able to change his image and present characters who were, at their core, good people, is a testament to his talent. He was lost this year, and that saddens me. Richard Widmark is one of the most underutilized of all time, and his pure skill and range has been responsible for many of my favorite films. Yet as much as this is his best remembered performance, it is not the key performance in the film. Widmark is functional at best, but the scenes that truly form the overall theme of the film happen between Victor Mature and Brain Donlevy as the informant Nick Bianco and the Assistant District Attorney Louis D'Angelo respectively.

Something obvious to those who watch pre-war film noir is that the police function as something akin to a deus ex machina. They show up at the end of the film to let the protagonist off the hook or to punish him for his sins. In this film, they do not act as the oppressive authority figure or the saving grace. Instead, they simply fail him. It is because of a faulty legal system that he is forced to be a visible witness against Tommy Uto, and Mature's character's violent refusal of their offer of a safe haven depicts a true view of the utilitarian relationship between the police and the criminals who can help them. To believe that D'Angelo truly wishes to save Bianco is naive, and Bianco is aware of this. It is outside forces that make Bianco turn against his fellow criminal, not a genuine belief in the honesty of law and order, and his knowledge that the aforementioned law and order will undoubtedly fail him causes him to act rashly, sending his family away, assaulting an officer of the law, and taking several bullets in order to allow the arrest of Udo. Bianco knows that he is a small fish, and that the law is putting him on a hook in order to catch a bigger fish, and as a career criminal since the beginning, he acts according to his own knowledge. This is a film that acknowledges a legal system that disavows the safety of its own informants in order to help its case against more important criminals, and Bianco represents that pull, and though there is a happy ending, it is tenuous and unbelievable to anybody who has ever seen a Scorsese film or an episode of the Sopranos. Bianco will die for his reliance on the police, as sad as that may be. If anything, this films will show the side of the snitch-mob relationship that is ignored by more modern crime films.

Bianco and Udo's relationship is incredibly important, though, if only because it is the perfect dichotomy. Bianco is a family man who allows himself to fall for the powers of law, order, and family, while Udo only falls because of his own drive to destroy those things. By killing Rizzo's mother by throwing her down the stairs, he has already shown his intentions: to demolish familial relationships. Because he is never shown relating to another person, including his own crime boss, it is acknowledged that he possesses none of those connections himself. He demolishes the archetypal nuclear family because he has no relationship to it. Bianco, on the other hand, is a family man through and through. It is his family that causes him to snitch, as well as to be shot at the end. He is the defiant patriarchal figure, providing for his family through information and self-sacrifice. Widmark is the detached madman, while Mature is the typical 40's family man.

In a similar sense, Widmark and Mature are a dichotomy when it comes to their performances. Widmark acts to the rafters while Mature is restrained. Widmark later proved that he was capable of much more as an actor, while this film goes down in history as Mature's best performance. Mature shows all of the range he is capable of, and Widmark only gives a hint of things to come. This is surely intentional. Victor Mature's restrained, almost bored, performance exemplifies Richard Widmark's insane cackle, accent, and almost psychotic delivery. One is pure evil, while another is a sort of reformed, 40's culture given language. It's your guess which is which.

Basically, for those looking at this film: you may come for Widmark's Tommy Udo, but you'll stay for the iconoclasm and societal deconstruction.

God bless.

The Naked City

Jules Dassin's The Naked City is, visually, a masterpiece of noir film making. Dassin, who also directed Night and the City, the film that gave this site its name, uses real locations in New York City in order to create an experience that immerses the viewer in its world. From shooting on location, Dassin is capable of creating stark, beautifully composed shots. It seems to be no coincide that Dassin's two best films both contain the word "city" it their titles. Both Night and the City and The Naked City make use of real world locations, London in Night and the City, and because of this, these locations become more than a backdrop. The most important relationship in the noir genre is the relationship between its characters and the city in which they live, and as Don Taylor's Detective Halloran combs New York in search of suspects and evidence, he wanders between pawn shops and apartment buildings, hoofing it through the streets, questioning witnesses, these become the film's most important scenes. New York becomes whole, an interactive setting, where his travel between places is more important than his destination. These shots are captivating in their reality, separating The Naked City from its peers.

It shouldn't be surprising that the scenes are so effective. The film is inspired by, and shares its name with, a classic book of photography by news photographer Weegee published in 1945. Within Weegee's book, his dark, often strikingly violent work, paints New York as a dangerous place, a morally ambiguous world of thieves and murderers, serving as a template for the film, a suitable companion to the film noir movement as a whole.

Though the film's visual style remains wholly within the genre's parameters, as well as its story, police searching for the murderer of a playgirl, it takes several departures from the norm. It's heroes are not the hard-boiled detectives of Humphrey Bogart films, nor are they the anti-heroes of films such as the aforementioned Night and the City. Instead, they are the affable Irish Lieutenant Muldoon, played by Barry Fitzgerald, and Detective Halloran, an upbeat family man. Now that's not to say that duty bound police officers aren't stock characters in film noir, but they are never the main characters. Especially in a story that also contains an almost sympathetic thief, an older victim being used by said thief, and a femme fatale with whom they are both infatuated. In a more textbook genre film, these would be the people on which the film focuses. In The Naked City, though, the femme fatale's death begins the film, and the older man, Dr. Stoneman, played by House Jameson, doesn't really appear in an important scene until the end. The Naked City essentially takes what would be the last half an hour in a normal film noir and stretches to an hour and a half.

This brave turn actually helps to separate the film from other noirs. The characters who the viewers follow throughout are happy and intelligent. Writers Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, who wrote the original story on which the film was based, fill the hour and a half with a detailed look at the procedures that Muldoon and Halloran use to capture the killer, which adds realism and insight to the film. It helps that the characters don't dumb down the police terminology that they use. Details such as this help the inventive cinematography create a believable world, a film version of New York that actually feels true in its own way.