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By
NICK ZEGARAC
Henry Hathaway's Kiss of
Death (1947) may be Victor Mature's finest hour as
an actor, but the tale does tend to get a bit long
in the tooth long before the final credits roll.
All about small time hood, Nick Bianco (Mature)
who, after fowling up a jewel heist, gets a second
chance at being the good guy by playing stool
pigeon for the sympathetic Assistant District
Attorney Louie DeAngelo (Brian Donlevy, hopelessly
miscast). Arranging his bail, Nick reunites with
his two young daughters after their mother sticks
her head in a gas oven. No, she wasn't baking
cookies at the time. The script by Ben Hecht and
Charles Lederer plays fast and loose with the
character of Nick. Did he love his kids? Well, yes
-- but not enough to not jeopardize ever seeing
them again by giving up haplessly botched
robberies and going legit. Was he a faithful
hubby? Well, yes…but when babysitter Nettie
(Coleen Gray) inexplicably turns out, and all
grown up, to visit Nick in prison, the two become
lovers and eventually man and wife.
But now I am leaving out the other half of this
equation -- the manically inspired
characterization of Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark).
Pre-his stint as the Joker on the old Batman
television serial starring Adam West, Widmark
delivers a chilling concoction of giddy effeminate
laughing-boy meets murderous cutthroat. Tommy and
Nick were sent up the river together. But Tommy
seems to have gotten out ahead of Nick. Reuniting
on the outside, as per the D.A's instructions,
Nick sets into motion a plan to get Tommy and his
cohorts arrested. The scene where Tommy visits the
invalid mother of one of his former colleagues,
finds him gone, then decides to tie up and push
the wheelchair bound old hag down a flight of
stairs to her death is justly famous. In the end,
Nick gets the short end of the stick again.
Smelling a rat, Tommy fills Nick full of bullets.
The ending is benign. We see Nick getting shoved
into an ambulance with his head uncovered. Is he
going to live through this to see Nettie and the
girls again? Maybe, though with six slugs in him
there's little to hope for a carefree future of
health and vitality.
Fox's DVD transfer on Kiss of Death is, in a word
-- awful. I am at a loss to explain why studios
(and all the studios releasing DVD's today are
guilty of this) continue to release films with so
much aliasing, shimmering of fine details and edge
enhancement present throughout. Honestly, there's
not one scene that is free of these disturbing and
distracting digital anomalies. The B&W image is in
a constant state of motion with spectral
highlights on everything from picture and door
frames to curved chairs and car hubs
uncontrollably bouncing about. The grayscale is
reasonably clean with minimal film grain and
age-related artifacts, but again, the digital
disturbances are distracting. Extras include audio
commentary, stills gallery and theatrical
trailers. |
