Kiss of Death (1947) on Netflix
Ex-convict Nick Bianco and three men rob a New York jewelry store on Christmas Eve. Wounded and arrested, he is asked by Assistant District Attorney Louis D'Angelo to name his accomplices.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.4/1010,711 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
On Christmas Eve in New York City, ex-convict Nick Bianco and three accomplices rob a jewelry store. The wounded proprietor sets off an alarm, and Nick assaults a police officer during the escape, is wounded and is arrested. Assistant District Attorney Louis D'Angelo offers him a lighter sentence if he gives up the men who took part in the robbery. Nick refuses, trusting that his lawyer, Earl Howser, and his partners will provide for his wife and his two young daughters while he is locked up. The court gives him twenty years. Nick also knows Tommy Udo, a killer he served time with.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Kiss of Death (1947)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
A scene in which Nick's wife Maria, played by Patricia Morison, is raped by a gangster played by Henry Brandon and then kills herself with the gas oven was cut at the censors' insistence; Morison's name stays in the credits although she never appears in the film.- Tommy Udo was a role originally announced for Richard Conte, and Richard Widmark got his film debut in it only after a Fox production manager sent his test to studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, who immediately signed him. Hathaway had withheld the test because he wanted nightclub piano player "Harry the Hipster" to play Udo.
SPOILER
Nick Bianco was originally supposed to die after letting Tommy Udo shoot him repeatedly so Udo could be prosecuted for murder, but the ending was deemed too depressing: narration by Nick's wife Nettie says he survives.- College fraternities formed Tommy Udo clubs "with the intent of putting women in their place", and for years people handed Richard Widmark blank phonograph disks so he would record the maniacal laugh he used in the film.
- Widmark's performance inspired the name of mystery and crime writer Donald E. Westlake's best-known pseudonym, Richard Stark, under which he wrote some of his darkest, most violent books; Westlake wanted his prose to be "crisp and lean, no fat, trimmed down ... stark."
- Richard Widmark was a fan of the Batman comics and modeled Tommy Udo after the Joker; in turn, Frank Gorshin, who played the Riddler in the 1960s Batman television series, modeled his deranged cackle after Widmark's Udo.
- Henry Hathaway said Ben Hecht came up with the idea of pushing the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Rizzo down the stairs, and Hecht wanted Tommy Udo to be a "hophead" because drug users are "so unpredictable. They'll shoot you or stab you, they'll do anything."
