Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) on Netflix
NR19481h 19mCrimeDramaRomanceThriller
Bill Saunders, a Canadian former prisoner of war living in England, kills a man in a pub fight and flees. A nurse, Jane Wharton, lets him stay in her apartment.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.8/102,474 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
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Plot summary
Unstable and quick to violence since his time as a prisoner of war, Bill Saunders lives in England. A pub fight ends with him killing the publican, and he runs. The police chase him and he takes refuge in a nurse's apartment, where Jane Wharton is asleep. She lets him stay the night. In the morning she goes to work and he returns to his own apartment. He waits at the hospital to meet her, then tags along to a zoo, which annoys her. The noise of the animals upsets him, so they go away together. He gets her interested in a horse race, and she wins a bet.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- On March 1, 1948, two weeks before filming, Charles K. Feldman named ten people and companies, including Universal-International, Norma Productions, Burt Lancaster and Joan Fontaine, in a $1,000,000 damage lawsuit, claiming his company owned the novel's filming rights and demanding the production be shut down.
- Universal-International ignored the lawsuit and kept filming; Judge Stanley Barnes eventually ruled in favor of the defendants on July 6, 1948, long after shooting had wrapped.
- Burt Lancaster wanted the cat o' nine tails whipping scene to be authentic, so he insisted actor Harold Goodwin really lay it on him; the weapon was a split leather belt, but Lancaster's back was so blistered and welted the next day he could not wear a shirt.
- Joan Fontaine's sick days forced Burt Lancaster to shave the four-day stubble he wore in nearly half of the film so he could shoot a later scene; growing it back always took him a weekend.
- Harold Hecht tested thirty girls for the leading lady, and Lila Leeds was his top choice before Joan Fontaine, already under contract with Universal-International, came in on the project.
- Art directors recreated thirty blocks of London's East End waterfront on Sound Stage 21, with thirty-two settings and twenty street combinations interchangeable through a monorail crane; one setup served a twenty-nine block chase.
- Fundamentalist groups objected to the gory title, so some markets released the film as The Unafraid in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and smaller U.S. towns, or Blood on My Hands in the United Kingdom.
- Burt Lancaster got the idea to revive his old acrobatic vaudeville duo with Nick Cravat after watching monkeys swing on bars and twirl around a pole at Griffith Park Zoo during filming.
