The New Pictures, Sep. 15, 1947

Kiss of Death (20th Century-Fox) illustrates a new and vigorous trend in U.S. moviemaking. One of the best things that is happening in Hollywood is the tendency to move out of the place—to base fictional pictures on fact, and, more importantly, to shoot them not in painted studio sets but in actual places. In making this kind of realistic “locale” movie, 20th Century-Fox has been the leader—with The House on 92nd St., 13 Rue Madeleine and Boomerang.

Boomerang achieved a physical and moral portrait of an entire community. Kiss of Death, working in a darker, narrower field, among the criminals and policemen of a great city, lacks the older picture’s richness of theme and its warmth, variety and brilliance. But in its own way it, too, is a clean knockout. It is also something new and welcome in U.S. crime movies. None of its criminals is glamorous, nor does anyone piously point out that crime does not pay. Nobody has to. The whole picture amply demonstrates the fact.

Kiss of Death is the story of a burglar named Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), and of the difficulties he encounters first as a criminal, then in trying to extricate himself from the underworld. Nick is paroled from Sing Sing when his wife’s suicide, his love for his small daughters, and a partner’s treachery cause him to turn state’s evidence. Thereafter he belongs, body & soul, to Assistant District Attorney D’Angelo (Brian Donlevy). His liberty depends on his cooperativeness as a stool pigeon. His life, and the safety of his children and his second wife (attractively played by newcomer Coleen Gray) depend much too precariously on secrecy and on police protection. Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), against whom Nick is forced to appear in court, is unexpectedly acquitted; and Udo is a sure killer. The rest of the picture shows how Nick, with the help—and hindrance—of the law, tries to win permanent safety for himself and his family.

The fright and suspense of the closing sequences depend largely on the conception of the pathological Udo and on Richard Widmark’s remarkable performance of the role. He is a rather frail fellow with maniacal eyes, who uses a sinister kind of falsetto baby talk laced with tittering laughs. It is clear that murder is one of the kindest things he is capable of.

The earlier sequences of Kiss of Death are as hard, cold and clear as so many sheets of glass; but these relatively quiet scenes, too, are fascinating. They were well photographed (by Norbert Brodine) entirely in actual surroundings—Manhattan’s Tombs, Sing Sing, an orphanage, Manhattan’s streets and tenements and dives, even a Chrysler Building elevator—with none of the overhead lights which bathe all possible reality out of most Hollywood movies.

This bleakly beautiful actuality is so valuable to the movie that the writing (by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer), the direction (by Henry Hathaway) and the playing all take their measure against it. With hardly a moment’s exception, they measure up. Particularly good are the performances of Taylor Holmes as a crooked lawyer, and of Victor Mature, who apparently needed nothing all this time but the right kind of role. For once, he has it.

Lured (Stromberg; United Artists), an agreeable, tongue-in-cheek murder mystery by Leo Rosten, enlists an American taxi-dancer (Lucille Ball) in the service of Scotland Yard (Charles Coburn). A maniacal killer of women, at large in London, lures his victims through want ads. It is Miss Ball’s precarious business to follow up all ads that seem to promise danger. One of her narrow squeaks is Boris Karloff, a decaying impresario who turns out to be mad as a hatter. In the course of her researches she also tangles with some shady characters who ship girls to South America, with a highly suspect wolf (George Sanders) and with his mousy associate (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). The picture is too busy with laughs to worry much about chills, but no one ought to complain about that.

I Know Where I’m Going (Rank; Prestige) doesn’t even try to be a great movie, but it is a very good one in its charming, unpretentious way. It was written, directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (out of J. Arthur Rank’s pocket, of course), who made Colonel Blimp and Stairway to Heaven.

The story: an imperious English girl (Wendy Hiller), very sure of what she wants out of life, is sure that she wants to marry one of England’s richest men. The wedding day is set; they are to marry on an island he has leased—Kiloran, off the Scottish coast. She has only to get there; her itinerary, like everything else in her life, is planned to the minute. But neither Nature nor True Love sees it quite her way.

Nature sends a fog, and strands her on the nearby island of Mull. When she prays for a wind to lift the fog, she prays up a gale that frustrates her for several days more. True Love, meanwhile, takes every gentlemanly advantage. An impoverished laird (Roger Livesey), who owns Kiloran, squires her all over the beautiful island, and deep among the equally attractive natives. Their Scottish virtues, and his own, get implacably under her hide. Her struggle to keep her will and her pride on their course involve her and the laird in a thrilling piece of melodrama. She never does get to Kiloran. But she does find out where she is going.

The love story develops, deftly and gently, not between the customary movie paper dolls, but between two sympathetic, strongly individualized human beings, beautifully embodied by Miss Hiller and Mr. Livesey. It is no mere ripening towards a clinch. Before she is capable of love, the heroine has come of age by learning how much better a woman she is than she had ever realized. In the course of watching her grow up, Messrs. Powell & Pressburger achieve, unobtrusively, a remarkable study of a place and a people. This study is never quaint, traveloguish, educational or condescending.

The film is an achievement in civilized comedy; even in its grave and noble moments it preserves a graceful, tender gaiety.

Deep Valley (Warner) is a story about lonely people, and what the breakdown of their loneliness does for them—and to them. A remote California farm is abruptly opened to contact with the world when a convict road gang bulldozes its way into the neighborhood. The daughter (Ida Lupino), a loveless, stammering slavey, runs off and hides in the woods with a fugitive convict (Dane Clark). Her malingering mother (Fay Bainter) and her embittered father (Henry Hull), forced to depend on each other, strike off the shackles of their years of hatred. The main story centers, of course, on the transfigured Miss Lupino, her violent sweetheart and their hopeless romance.

It is a rather pathetic picture because everyone concerned with it is obviously trying very hard to do something good, powerful and out of the ordinary. Occasionally, this effort brings the picture to life. There are also a few good flashes of melodrama. But on the whole, Deep Valley is reminiscent of many of the solemn little-theater plays of the early ’20s: i.e., it is lost in mawkishness and pseudopoetic feeling masquerading as art.