The best answer to your question is the article in NYT
yesterday...and the assesment of The Night & the City is
perfect...probably the most accomplished noir film of that
era...(cast/direction/DP/locations-decors/themes/script-screenplay....you
name it)
Montois
March 29, 2008 AN APPRAISAL A Star Who Mastered a New Moral
Ambiguity
By DAVE KEHR Of the generation of leading men who emerged in
the aftermath of World War II, quite a few began their
careers playing villains. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Robert
Mitchum, Jack Palance and Lee Marvin were among the postwar
stars who served apprenticeships ‹ some long, some short ‹ as
outlaws gunned down in the last reel of westerns or as
hoodlums crumpling under police fire in crime pictures.
Richard Widmark, who died at 93 on Monday, was another.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Widmark never quite
shook the dark associations of his early roles, even after
his studio, 20th Century Fox, rehabilitated him as a leading
man. The obituaries that followed Mr. Widmark¹s death almost
invariably began by evoking his first and still most famous
film appearance, as the psychotic killer Tommy Udo in Henry
Hathaway¹s 1947 film noir, ³Kiss of Death² ‹ a role that
required Mr. Widmark to giggle and grin as he bound an old
woman (Mildred Dunnock) to her wheelchair and shoved her down
a flight of stairs.
The sadistic, unhinged Udo was something new in American
movies, and the impression he left was indelible. ³Mr.
Widmark runs away with all the acting honors,² The New York
Times said, and Mr. Widmark was rewarded with an Oscar
nomination for best supporting actor ‹ the one and only time
the Academy took notice of him. (On Friday night, Turner
Classic Movies is set for a Widmark triple feature: ³Alvarez
Kelly,² ³Take the High Ground² and ³The Tunnel of
Love.²)
Mr. Widmark, then 33, had fourth billing in ³Kiss of Death²;
his Oscar nomination earned him better billing but similar
roles in three 1948 films: William Keighley¹s ³Street With No
Name,² Jean Negulesco¹s ³Road House² and William Wellman¹s
³Yellow Sky.² Only with Hathaway¹s ³Down to the Sea in Ships²
(1949) did Mr. Widmark get a heroic role and his name on top,
but the public didn¹t seem interested in this bright, blond,
squeaky-clean figure: they wanted their morally flawed,
unpredictably violent Widmark back.
And so, through much of the 1950s, Mr. Widmark moved back and
forth ‹ shuttling between heavies and heroes ‹ with a freedom
mostly unknown to other performers of the period. He was a
selfless Public Health Service doctor searching for a
gangster (Jack Palance) infected with plague in Elia Kazan¹s
1950 ³Panic in the Streets²; that same year found him as a
racist street punk taunting a black doctor (Sidney Poitier)
in Joseph L. Mankiewicz¹s ³No Way Out.²
Mr. Widmark¹s richest roles were those that placed him
somewhere in the middle ‹ in that great swamp of moral
ambiguity that four years of active conflict and a shadowy
new cold war had made Americans ready to acknowledge.
In Samuel Fuller¹s ³Pickup on South Street² (1953) Mr.
Widmark is Skip McCoy, a New York pickpocket who unknowingly
lifts a microfilmed roll of government secrets from a fallen
woman (Jean Peters) working for a cell of Soviet agents.
Smirkingly antisocial to the last (Skip has learned to taunt
cops into hitting him, as a way of invalidating arrests), he
ends by lending his criminal skills to the side of law and
order, motivated less by patriotism than by a desire for
revenge.
In ³Hell and High Water² (1954) Mr. Widmark again worked with
Mr. Fuller, and the film helped to move Mr. Widmark¹s screen
personality in a different direction. In this slightly mad
cold war fantasy, he is a former Navy officer hired by a
group of civic-minded scientists to pilot a submarine to the
Arctic Circle, where, they suspect, the Red Chinese are
constructing a nuclear missile base. The military lent a new
context to Mr. Widmark¹s moral equivocality: in films like
³Halls of Montezuma,² ³The Frogmen,² ³Take the High Ground!²
and ³Destination Gobi² Mr. Widmark played hard-bitten
commanders whose apparent coldness and cruelty masked a
deeper concern with the safety of their men.
His psycho killers and military leaders shared one prominent
character trait: callousness, a quality Mr. Widmark portrayed
with disdainful ease. From the mid-¹50s on, his filmography
was filled with colonels, captains, lieutenants and even a
couple of generals.
In Robert Aldrich¹s 1977 ³Twilight¹s Last Gleaming² Mr.
Widmark had his last great role, as a senior officer whose
job it is to persuade a renegade general (Burt Lancaster, Mr.
Widmark¹s contemporary and fellow recovering gangster) to
relinquish control of the nuclear missile silo he has taken
over as a political protest. The casting is impeccable: here
are two actors whose careers have run in parallel, just as
their characters¹ lives have.
As an actor, Mr. Widmark fell between the presentational
style of prewar filmmaking and the inner-directed,
psychological focus of the Method actors, who came into vogue
in the 1950s. With his prominent teeth and tight skin, his
face had a certain skull-like quality that suggested Conrad
Veidt in the German Expressionist films of the ¹20s, yet
there was a watery, vulnerable quality in his large blue eyes
that could sometimes make him seem almost childlike.
The role that best combined these two sides of Mr. Widmark
was, perhaps, that of the naﶥ American boxing promoter, Harry
Fabian, who is devoured by the London underworld in Jules
Dassin¹s 1950 noir masterpiece, ³Night and the City.²
It¹s hard to imagine another tough-guy actor of the period
allowing himself to come as close to tearful impotence as Mr.
Widmark does at the end of that film, at the moment his
character realizes that there is no escape from the vengeful
associates he has betrayed. Running toward the camera, as
well as toward his death, Mr. Widmark allows his face to go
slack and his limbs to loosen; he seems to become a panicked
child before our eyes, shrinking into infantile helplessness.
A jump cut might take us to the opening scene of
³Rebel Without a Cause,² when James Dean¹s drunken teenager
collapses on the sidewalk, playing with a toy monkey.
A great star, perhaps, is someone who embodies a cultural
moment while nudging us on to something new, to feelings not
yet explored and contradictions not yet expressed. By that
definition, as well as by many others, Richard Widmark was a
great star.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
On 3/30/08 9:41 AM, "Jack Bludis" <
buildsnburns@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Eric Chambers said:
>
>>> >> ... I would have expected, in a
forum dedicated to Noir amoung other
>>> things, that more would have been made of
Richard Widmark's passing.<<
>
> Mea Culpa. You're right, Eric.
>
> Widmark could get as down, dark, and dirty as any of
them, and we certainly
> owe him the honor of a mention.
>
> Sorry.
>
> I'm curious to know if Widmark was a tough "little
guy" a la Allan Ladd?
>
> Anyone?
>
> Jack
>
> http://crimespace.ning.com/profile/JackBludis
>
>
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