Kiss of Death (1. Grinning gangster Tommy Udo was the role of a lifetime for Richard Widmark, however atypical the characterization now seems in the context of the late actor's long and distinguished career. Many fans of Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1. Odd Man Out (1947, UK). Greta tried to keep their marriage going by buying her husband's loyalty. Kiss Of Death 1947 Film Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. The Company You Keep (2012) Reuniting the Rubins (2012) Take Shelter (2011). Kiss of Death I wouldn't give. Post; More; SUPPLEMENTARY: Kiss of Death (1947) end title card. Credits; Title Designer. HELP ART OF THE TITLE KEEP GOING. Widmark's screen debut. A Minnesota native whose first career goal was to be a lawyer, Widmark drifted from campus debating into student theatrics at Lake Forest College outside Chicago and became the prot. After his 1. 93. 6 graduation (and a bicycle tour of Europe, where Widmark and a friend shot footage of Adolf Hitler's youth camps), he returned to Lake Forest for a job as the Assistant Director of the Speech and Drama Department. Widmark's academic career proved short- lived and he was soon bound for New York. A perforated ear drum keeping him from military service, Widmark's career benefited from the shortage of actors during wartime. He made his Broadway debut in George Abbott's 1. Kiss and Tell and was soon dividing his time between the stage and radio. Widmark was performing in an episode of the NBC radio drama Inner Sanctum when he was handed the script for Kiss of Death. The actor read the part aloud to his friends, laughing at the ridiculousness of Tommy Udo, never suspecting how a nervous laugh would help define his best- known character. When Widmark made his first New York audition in 1. Buy Kiss Of Death Coleen Gray 1947 Tm & Copyright CBS Radio's Aunt Jennie's Real Life Stories, he won the part of a hayseed gas station attendant by braying like a jackass into the microphone. The laugh had been an eruption of nervous tension on his part but the show's producers were thrilled. Prior to seeing Widmark's screen test for the part of Tommy Udo, Henry Hathaway had entertained the notion of casting rubber- faced piano player Harry . A discovery of Fats Waller, Gibson (1.
Jerry Lee Lewis. The white, fair- haired but jive talking Harlem native (who claimed to have coined the term . Zanuck, who likely cast the swing vote.) To meet Hathaway, Widmark had dressed for the part, wearing a big- brim Fedora, a black shirt and a white tie. Kiss Me, Kate; Music: Cole Porter: Lyrics: Cole Porter. In 1947 he asked the Spewacks. Fred tries to keep Lilli from reading the card that came with the. True to his reputation for being a bully to his actors, Hathaway was rough on the Hollywood newcomer but Widmark had the guts to hit back. Hyde (1. 93. 1), complete with the crooked smile and tombstone dentition (to which Widmark added a mad titter worthy of Dwight Frye's Renfield from Dracula . The character was a big hit with moviegoers (college fraternities allegedly formed Tommy Udo Clubs) and Widmark spent the next couple of years playing the same guy, in Jean Negulesco's Road House, in William Keighley's The Street with No Name and even in Hathaway's western Yellow Sky (all 1. Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets and the tragic protagonist of Jules Dassin's Night and the City (both 1. Although Tommy Udo doesn't enter the picture (apart from a 3 minute introduction early on) until forty minutes into Kiss of Death, he became the focal point of the film's re- release. Exhibitors were exhorted to . Viewers coming to the film afresh over sixty years after the fact are just as likely to be impressed by early supporting turns from future big stars Karl Malden (as an in- your- face prosecutor) and John Marley (as Mature's cell block neighbor) some twenty years before his work for John Cassavetes and a quarter of a century before his own role of a lifetime as ill- starred movie producer Jack Woltz in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1. Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer's screenplay for Kiss of Death was adapted from an original story by Eleazar Lipsky. An amateur novelist, Lipsky toiled by day as a Manhattan assistant district attorney while also serving as legal counsel for the Mystery Writers of America. Lipsky signed the nom de plume . The title was changed during production on the order of Darryl F. Zanuck to the rather incongruous Blind Date, before Zanuck stamped the film with its definitive title, a phrase that had jumped out at him from Hedda Hopper's gossip column. Although a credit card crows that all shooting, interior and exterior, was captured in New York, some studio interiors are obvious late in the film. Nonetheless, Kiss of Death has a you- are- there freshness typical of the . Hathaway and crew shot in such standing New York City locations as the Chrysler Building (where the opening jewel heist is set), the Bronx House of Detention for Men, the Criminal Courts Building in lower Manhattan and The Tombs, as well as on a stretch of 1. Street in Astoria, Queens (under the impressive span of the 5. Street Bridge) and across the river at the Academy of the Holy Angels in Fort Lee, New Jersey. During location shooting at Sing Sing Penitentiary in upstate New York, Hathaway gave the order that Mature and Widmark should be processed through the system as incoming convicts to give the actors a true feeling for their roles as society's outcasts. Watson Webb, Jr. Cast: Victor Mature (Nick Bianco), Brian Donlevy (Assistant D. A. Louis D'Angelo), Coleen Gray (Nettie), Richard Widmark (Tommy Udo), Taylor Holmes (Earl Howser - Attorney), Howard Smith (Warden), Karl Malden (Sgt. William Cullen), Anthony Ross ('Big Ed' Williams).
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