Kiss of Death (1947)

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947) Another of Henry Hathaway's neo-realist film noir's that aped the post-war Italian film penchant for shooting dark themes in real locations without glamour and emphasizing the grit.  This one, about the rise and fall and rise of heist-criminal Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), starts out in the sky-scrapers, jail-houses, and police offices that reverberate with the realistic sound that you can't acquire in a sound-baffled soundstage, but once the mayhem starts, the film scurries back to the safety of studio sets.  It's rough in the mean streets of noir.  Safer to make your own.

Bianco is an ex-con who can't find a job, and with a wife and two kids to support, he decides to make his own work—robbing a jewelry business in downtown Manhattan.  The job goes South and he ends up on the street with a police bullet in his leg and a stretch awaiting him at the gray-bar hotel.  He's offered a chance by assistant D.A. Louis D'Angelo (Brian Donlevy) to supply evidence on his cronies, but Bianco sticks to the criminal code—he won't squeal, sing, or rat, even when D'Angelo offers him an early parole so he can see his kids.  But Bianco won't bend.  His family is being "taken care of" by his sheister of a lawyer (Taylor Holmes), who visits him in prison to keep tabs on Bianco's loyalty.

But, in prison, Bianco gets wind that things aren't going so well.  And a visit to the prison library newspaper galleys tells him his wife has committed suicide, his kids are now orphans, and his silence has bought him nothing.

Hathaway's direction is no-nonsense throughout, but stylistic, anyway, and the scenes in the initial robbery, in the D.A.'s office and the lock-up have a drab, utilitarian look to them—the robbery has a nice touch in it, as the crooks' target is on the 44th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, and the post stick-up elevator ride (with plenty of stops) provides a particularly teasing kind of tension.  Mature is fine, Donlevy's abilities aren't taken advantage of, and there are bit parts by Karl Malden and one of my character actors, the short-lived Millard Mitchell (who played Gene Kelly's producer buddy in Singin' in the Rain).

But Kiss of Death is also the feature debut of Richard Widmark, who plays the cheap gangster killer Tommy Udo.  You don't see him kill too many people, but one of them is indelible in its cruelty and vicious enthusiasm.  Widmark's performance is amazing, looking like a wire-thin Dan Duryea, with Cagney's ability to hold the eye in every scene he's in.  His dialogue isn't the greatest (even though the script is by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) and limited, and repeated over and over, but Widmark punctuates it with a goonish laugh that implies a sarcastic inner amusement that he knows he's stringing you along.  Hathaway, knowing what he was getting from the young actor, pulled out all the stops for his performance.  There's one scene where someone's waiting for udo, who's holding court in a curtained-off restaurant back-room.  Hathaway holds on the curtain, elongating the wait, then cuts to a close shot of the part in the curtains, where all you can see is the glint in Udo's eye before he gets up and makes his way to the camera,  It's an amazing shot and one that shows the director's confidence in his young actor's ability to hold an audience's attention, even when he isn't actually seen.

It's curtains for Widmark's Tommy Udo

The Shanghai Gesture

The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941) So, what would happen if a film-stylist like Josef von Sternberg had directed a programmer like Casablanca? It would be a lot like The Shanghai Gesture (made a year before Ilsa walked into Rick's), with a disparate group of diaspora all gathered around a central community house—but, instead of Rick's Cafe Americain, it's Mother Gin-Sling's Casino, a casino of ill-repute that the Shanghai city-fathers (all white, all Brits) frequent with abandon, even while they're plotting to get rid of it ("I am shocked, SHOCKED that gambling is going on in this establishment!") The script is by von Sternberg, Gerza Herczeg, and Howard Hawks' scripter Jules Furthman, with emphasis on the smart-aleck remark, witty patter and easy irony.  The script is smart, the acting mannered (but in the von Sternberg manner of haughtiness and exaggeration for effect), and everything else from costuming, set design, and photographic style is elaborate.

Boris Leven's design for Mother Gin-Sling's Casino resembles a multi-level Pit of Hell

The men are von Sternberg's collection of stiffs, drones, and leering rakes (heck, von Sternberg turned Gary Cooper into one of the latter in Sahara). Walter Huston plays the stiff, a reforming developer who runs afoul of Mother Gin-Sling, while the latter is in the form of Victor Mature's "Dr. Omar," a Muslim "doctor of nothing," except one assumes, for a memorized expertise on "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam."

The women are von Sternberg's complicated, well-lit archetypes, more devils than angels, the way he used Marlene Dietrich.  They had to do a lot of cleaning up of the original play by John Colton, resulting in a "coded" film that "suggested" what was really going on.*  The original location was a house of ill repute—a brothel (hinted at by the caged women ringing the casino's playing area, which, as designed by Boris Leven, looks like the Pit of Hell), the floosie (Phyllis Brooks) that Omar picks up in the street is a hooker, not a "dance-hall girl, in the play "Mother Gin-Sling" is named Mother Goddam, and the addiction the young thrill-seeker Gene Tierney plays isn't gambling (as in the film), but drugs, as suggested by her name "Poppy."  So, yes, a lot of self-censorshp, but sophisticated audiences could see through the veiled references to see what the issues were.

Von Sternberg was a stylist with an emphasis on glamor photography—his work with Dietrich is some of the most scrupulously accomplished shadow work in movies—and his capturing of Ona Munson, Brooks, and especially Tierney is a tightly controlled use of light to emphasize the contours of the face.  Munson's wild hair-styles suggest nothing so much as a medusa, and Tierney, once she slides down the slippery slope of..."too much gambling" begins, in her body language, is all broken doll, a marionette with some strings broken (something foreshadowed by von Sternberg early on)

Both Curtiz and von Sternberg had penchants for filling up the screen-frame, but Curtiz kept things naturalistic, with his performers squarely rooted in specific places.  Von Sternberg's close-ups are frequently floating heads, backed by a light pattern that has nothing to do with their surroundings.

But, that's where comparisons end: The Shanghai Gesture is a bizarre bazaar of weirdness, a combination of kitsch and creepiness, a glamorized descent into degradation and venality (beautifully shot, though!), with possibly the worst example of mother-love demonstrated on screen.  It is the dark side of entertainment, gussied up with glamor to make the proceedings seem tolerable, something that could be said for all of the work of von Sternberg, master of both light and darkness.

The Shanghai Gesture is also unique for giving a credit to the extras.

 * Furthman was great at that: in The Big Sleep he and Hawks suggested nymphomania by having the character suck her thumb.