Usually, when a classic-period noir is singled out for praise, it’s because it’s lean, rapid-fire machine gun entertainment – a high-style, high-energy crime picture achieved on a low-rent budget.  1947’s Kiss of Death has none of those qualities.  After opening on a botched Christmas Eve jewel heist in a tense, largely wordless sequence, the film’s urge to entertain goes dark.  This is an oddly leisurely, somber noir about the jail-sweat struggles of one of those failed jewel thieves (played by the aptly named Victor Mature) as he’s pressured to rat on his accomplices who got away.  At first, he refuses to squeal, but threats against his family change his tune, and he reluctantly becomes an undercover rat helping cops bust the crime rings that used to supply his income, much to his personal shame.  Watching this family man squirm under police pressure in his jail cell is far from the perverse sex-and-violence pleasures audiences usually seek in classic noir, so most of Kiss of Death ends up feeling limp in its genre payoffs.  It’s still worthy of all its praise & attention, though, thanks to a maniac villain by the name of Tommy Udo.

Richard Windmark’s performance as the sad-sack squealer’s charismatic, villainous foil heroically brings Kiss of Death back to life after the much more reserved Victor Mature drowns it in moralistic tedium.  Windmark’s infamous gangster Tommy Udo is a murderous sociopath whom the D.A. wants the jewel thief to snitch on as a fellow convict, but he proves too dangerous to be around, even for a minute.  Windmark is such an energizing lunatic in the role that he earned an unlikely Oscar nomination for it, presumably for being the only sign of life in an otherwise plodding picture.  Along with the likes of James Cagney, Peter Lorre, and Ann Savage, he gives one of the all-time great unhinged noir-villain performances, often credited alongside Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs for inspiring the look & persona of The Joker.  When a cop asks Udo if he has a minute to talk, he spits back “I wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape.”  He condescendingly refers to his fellow gangsters by the uniform nickname “Squirt.”  He pushes wheelchair-using biddies down the stairs just for rubbing him the wrong way.  He is the entertaining volatility that most noirs exude in their filmmaking personified in a single movie-stealing character.

Besides the dark, revitalizing energy of Windmark’s performance, Kiss of Death is most commendable for its early use of location shooting around 1940s New York City, including prison scenes shot at Sing Sing.  Shooting outside of a Los Angeles studio lot was atypical for a small-scale crime picture at the time, which you can tell as soon as an opening-credits title card brags about the novelty.  It’s also unusual for a noir of this kind to be narrated by the doomed antihero’s love interest (and, weirdly, his kids’ former babysitter, played by Colleen Gray), but I can’t say her voice adds as much interest or texture to the picture as the location shooting, except maybe in softening the genre’s macho tendencies.  Otherwise, Hollywood workman director Henry Hathaway (True Grit, Niagara, Call Northside 777) brings a controlled, level-headed approach to the production that keeps it from achieving anything especially flashy or memorable within its genre template.  Only Tommy Udo breaks through that containment of Old Hollywood professionalism, transforming a cozy afternoon watch into a momentarily thrilling freak show.  He is the spectacle worth seeking out here, the only reason the film is remembered at all.

-Brandon Ledet