HIGHWAY 301 (1950)

“You cannot be kind to congenital criminals like these. They would show you no mercy. Let them feel the full impact of the law.”

Back in the days before the no-holds-barred speedway/parking lot that is Interstate 95, sun-seekers in their Nash Ramblers and Studebaker Champions trekked from Baltimore to Florida on U.S. 301. In the 1950 Warner Bros. noir, Highway 301, a ruthless band of killers known as the “Tri-State Gang” exploit the thoroughfare’s easy on-easy off access to engage in that most American of crimes: kicking over banks.

The leader of the outfit is played by Steve Cochran, a good-looking and underestimated actor who could do more than the critics of his day were willing to acknowledge. Cochran could be boyish and naïve in one picture and a greasy scumbag in another; in Highway 301 he creates a legitimately terrifying screen persona, most certainly influenced by Jimmy Cagney’s neurotic turn in the previous year’s White Heat, in which Cochran co-starred. Here, Cochran borrows from the older actor and still manages to keep him at arm’s length. Unlike Cody Jarrett, Cochran’s George Legenza murders so casually that the film’s heartbeat barely flutters whenever he squeezes the trigger. Yet despite the actor’s idyllic good looks and his wardrobe of switchblade-sharp suits, there’s zero glamour to be found in this evocation of the criminal life. The Tri-State mob live out their doomed lives in a series of cheap roadside flops, greasy spoons, and chop suey palaces. Hustling from place to place, all cigarette smoke and nervous sweat, crammed five or six to a car, going nowhere.

If you can get your hands on a copy (Warner Archive DVD), stick with it beyond the first five minutes—viewers must first endure a trio of warnings from the governors of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina about the perils of the criminal life. Juvenile delinquency was an ongoing national concern in the postwar period, as distressing as polio, the bomb, and Biro and Wood’s Crime Does Not Pay. Parents, teachers, and church groups wrung their hands over how all this glorification of crime might lead to a generation of profligates, so the brothers Warner must have been eager to let three pontificating politicians blow for a minute or two at the start of the picture. This is by no means a juvenile delinquency movie—that filmic fad was still a few years away—but given the gunfire about to light up the screen, it’s hard to blame them for welcoming any stripe of official endorsement.

Wait. Biro and Wood,* you say? Who? They were the boys behind the most brutal comic book ever made. You thought those 1950s EC strips were bad? Get wise. Crime Does Not Pay plumbed the depths of human depravity and put it all on display on the glossy covers and pulpy pages of a sensation that was devoured by millions of kiddies and adults each month from the 1940s to the early 1950s. The comic dodged censors (at least for a while) because its crooked culprits always got it in the end, but in the pages leading up to those last few panels, Biro, Wood, and company exalted in an orgy of tommy guns, nooses, shotgun blasts, short skirts, and shallow graves. They spilled buckets of blood; they jammed hypodermic needles in their characters’ eyes; they set women on fire. As a matter of fact, in their June 1948 issue they even told the story of notorious Depression-era gangsters Walter Legenza* and Bobby Mais, the same fellows whose capers loosely inspired Highway 301. The movie creeps right up on that same thin razor of a line between documentary and exploitation that Crime Does Not Pay gleefully spat upon. With the exception of, perhaps, The Phenix City Story, it comes closer than any other midcentury crime film to capturing the wanton lewdness of those comics.

Highway 301 opens in tobacco country, with the Tri-State crew taking down a Winston-Salem bank in broad daylight. One by one, as the hoods exit the idling getaway car and take up positions in the lobby, a narrator gives up the skinny on their respective yellow sheets. One henchmen boasts 21 arrests and zero convictions—accused of everything from arson to murder. Another has just as many collars, with nothing to show for it beyond a hundred-dollar fine. George Legenza himself is on the lam, having busted his way out of the state penitentiary some months ago—though if he’s worried about being nabbed it doesn’t show. Highway 301’s moralizing tone is front and center from open to close: the system treats crooks with kid gloves, and the boys and girls in the audience need to be scared straight before the George Legenzas of the world get their hands on them.

The robbery comes off fine—turns out the gang has been tearing up and down Highway 301 for a while, leaving the bluecoats in the lurch. Even the feds are in on it now, but, as it happens in so many mid-century noirs, the law is obliged to impotently wait on the crooks to goof up. Fate and Destiny are the twin puppet masters of the noir universe, and they don’t give a damn about making the police look smart. When noir screenwriters wanted to lay crooks low, they zeroed their scripts in on tiny mistakes that turned out to have big consequences—a cosmic, ironic brand of justice. Take, for example, a canonical picture like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing: karma comes not via the law, but rather from a discarded horseshoe in a parking lot, a cuckolded husband, and a gust of wind on an airport tarmac. In the noir universe, cops mostly chase their tails until the time comes for them to swoop in and pick up the pieces.

In Highway 301, fate comes with penciled eyebrows and a French accent. Lee Fontaine, (B-movie actress Gaby André), a recent conquest of Legenza’s protégé, is new to the gang. After she’s logged enough time to see what Legenza does to cops (shoots them in the back), armored car guards (shoots them in the back), and his girlfriends (shoots them in the back), she decides to beat it back to her native Canada. The film’s second and third acts take a detour from all that bank robbing and nestle into the shadowy confines of the Warner’s back lot, as the narrative shifts focus away from the gang’s crime spree to Legenza’s efforts to snatch Fontaine before she can blab. Don’t think too hard about why the Tri-State boys carpool to and fro with their girlfriends stashed at nearby motor courts instead of leaving them safe at home—the story falls apart if they don’t. But let’s at least acknowledge that in most other like-minded films (including Cochran and Cagney’s White Heat) the paramours don’t travel. I’ll back off that point as far as Hollywood lifer Virginia Grey is concerned. Her seen-it-all floozy steals every scene, and Highway 301 would be a lonely stretch of blacktop without her.

Yet the film’s tone is such that it barely resembles the iconic noirs from just a few years before. Double Indemnity, Laura, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, and many others class-up their violence under a veneer of lust and sex. That’s not the case here—Highway 301 is as brutal as it is detached. Its killings are more coldly matter-of-fact than any seen in the classics mentioned earlier, and more closely resemble those from another bank job picture, 1995’s Heat, release nearly a half-century later.

In the end, this is a low budget affair, but a stylish one. Yes, Richmond, Virginia has far too many palm trees and conspicuously resembles the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, but the serpentine streets of the WB back lot never looked better, doused in shadow and drenched with rain. The film’s final moments, including a fantastic car stunt and a hair-raising sequence set atop a train trestle, are not only worth the price of admission, but also render bearable all of the dreary semi-documentary bits that showcase law enforcement. •

Legenza in Crime Does Not Pay

 * Writer-artist Bob Wood beat a woman to death in New York’s Irving Hotel—she was “giving me a bad time” he bragged to the cabbie who drove him home—and did three years for first-degree manslaughter. Seem like a short sentence? Apparently in those days being drunk was a mitigating factor. Rest easy though: Wood signed some IOUs with the made guys at Sing Sing in order to make his prison stretch go easy. When he got out and the time came to pay the piper, Wood couldn’t find his wallet. He was murdered within a year of his release.

* The real-life Legenza would die in Virginia’s electric chair on February 2, 1935. A wealth of documents are available here.

Highway 301

Written and Directed by Andrew Stone

Produced by Brian Foy

Starring Steve Cochran, Virginia Grey, Gaby André, and Robert Webber

Cinematography is by Carl Guthrie

Released by Warner Bros. Pictures

Running time: 83 minutes

Deanna Durbin & CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944)

I became interested in classic film early in my teens. Able to stay up late during summer vacations I passed the time with American Movie Classics. (TCM was still more than a decade away.) Despite being weaned in a house where films such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Rebecca, and Laura were part of the vernacular, I didn’t truly begin to love old movies until those black and white summers of the early eighties. I vividly remember seeing Freddie Mac play the horn to Carol Lombard in Swing High, Swing Low and being astonished by Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives. It was back then that I first discovered and fell in love with Deanna Durbin, who from the mid thirties to the mid forties was, as TCM host Robert Osbourne recently described her, “The absolute queen of Universal Studios.” Durbin accomplished something that few touched by Hollywood success have ever done: she walked away at (practically) the height of her stardom and never looked back. Unlike Judy Garland, to whom her career is forever linked, she neither aged, faded away, nor fell victim to any of the cruel perils of fame — instead she became a different sort of legend.





In spite of the success of All Quiet on the Western Front, the Academy Award winner for Best Picture in 1930, Universal didn’t have much going for it at the outset of the depression beyond its burgeoning success in the horror genre. Carl Laemmle’s sprawling Universal City allowed the studio to bang out high quality fright pictures using the same sets and seasoned production teams. Audiences embraced Universal’s brand of gothic escapism, and the revenues generated by the horror unit were substantial enough to keep Laemmle’s head above water during the lean years of the depression. Yet these profits paled in comparison to those over at MGM, where Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer were setting the standard for box office returns through their star vehicles and prestige productions. Unlike the big studios, Laemmle never invested in theaters or distribution and consequently Universal was forced to rely on box office hits in order to remain solvent. The lack of a theater chain meant that all of Universal’s films had to have predictable box office potential in order to gain wide distribution. MGM, Paramount, and Warners could block-book their weaker features by packaging them with sure-fire hits and star vehicles — obliging their theaters to exhibit them and thus guaranteeing profits.


The desire to compete with and gain market share on the other majors led Laemmle to take another shot at the first-run picture market, but the studio simply didn’t have the cash reserves or the financial backstops to sustain more than one or two failures. Laemmle borrowed heavily in order to finance Frankenstein director James Whale’s 1935 big-budget production of the musical Show Boat, but Whale was out of his bailiwick and couldn’t deliver the finished film in time for boss Carl to cover the loan — so Laemmle lost his shirt. Ironically, Show Boat went on to be a big moneymaker — just not in time to save Laemmle. The studio went into receivership and was taken over by Wall Street creditors in 1936. They quickly ousted Carl and Junior Laemmle and put a new team in charge, who all but eliminated prestige production.


Enter producer Joe Pasternak and Deanna Durbin. Pasternak was a European émigré stationed in Berlin, producing German-language musicals for Universal’s European outfit. When the situation in Europe caused the subsidiary to shut down Pasternak returned to the States hoping to reestablish himself in Hollywood. At the time of his arrival Durbin was being groomed by MGM, but was dropped when Mayer decided to back Judy Garland instead. The circumstances surrounding Mayer’s decision are as murky as they are legendary, but no matter how the edict came down MGM dropped Deanna and Universal snagged her, giving Pasternak what he needed to reproduce his European successes. Working with a modest budget he assembled a team that would become known at Universal as The “Durbin Unit,” featuring himself, director Henry Koster, and cameraman Joe Valentine. Their first project was Three Smart Girls, which proved to be a runaway hit, earning Durbin a special Oscar and making the fourteen-year-old Universal’s biggest star. Pasternak understood formula filmmaking very well, and soon the Durbin unit was reliably churning out the hits, all based on the squeaky-clean formula established in Three Smart Girls. While many have suggested that Durbin single-handedly saved Universal from bankruptcy, it may be more accurate to say that in the years following the Laemmle debacle Durbin’s success insured that of the struggling studio.


By the beginning of the forties Deanna Durbin was a household name and bona fide Hollywood superstar. She was never comfortable with her success or the way in which her screen image was crafted, so as she matured she sought more dramatic projects that called for less and less singing. It’s important to remember that the Hollywood studio system was built around the idea of the star-genre combination, of which Deanna is a prime example: Deanna Durbin + musical comedy = audience appeal and studio profit. To put it simply, audiences went to Durbin pictures for laughs and songs, and as much as Deanna may have wanted to give them something else, they just weren’t inclined to see her that way. Nevertheless by the time the war started Deanna wanted to try more dramatic parts and had the clout at Universal City to make demands. After a few lukewarmly received dramatic pictures during those years, such as Christmas Holiday, a frustrated Deanna walked away from the film industry in 1948. She married and retired to France, where she lives today.





Christmas Holiday hit theaters at the height of the war in 1944, and its mood is as fittingly dark and unsettling as the time’s. The story opens with newly-minted Lt. Mason (Dean Harens) rushing home to San Francisco in lieu of a Dear John letter. He wants to have it out with his girl before he ships out, but weather diverts his flight into New Orleans, where he’s forced to take a cheap room. In the hotel bar he meets sleazy newsman (Richard Whorf) who hustles him to a nightclub / brothel where he meets “hostess” Jackie Lamont (Durbin). It turns out that not only was Jackie previously married, but her real name is actually Abigail Manette — her husband Robert (Gene Kelly) was famously convicted of killing a bookie and sent to Angola for life. She works at the club to punish herself for not seeing the truth about Robert or helping him when she had the chance. Based on a work by W. Somerset Maugham, Christmas Holiday is one of the most oddly titled films of the forties. There’s little to do with Christmas beyond a midnight mass at which Deanna breaks down and is motivated to share her story and real name with Lt. Mason, and any other evidence of the holiday season is conspicuously absent. Told primarily through flashback, the story details the strange course of the Manettes’ life together, from their meeting until Robert’s imprisonment and climactic confrontation between them in the wake of his breakout.


Durbin’s performance is memorable. She delivers as an actress in a few key moments, the first of which occurs in the Christmas Eve mass scene where Jackie / Abigail’s life overwhelms her and she confesses her past. The mise-en-scene is so spectacularly baroque that Deanna is able to give herself away to the moment without risk of going over the top. She moves from quiet weeping to openly sobbing on hands and knees — yet the scene remains affecting and believable. Later in the film a flashback details her first meeting with husband-to-be Robert. Ironically, they (Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly of all people) meet at a concert and get to know one another thanks to a shared passion for music. Durbin again deftly shows her ability to interpret the moment, as she handles the excitement of a first date by simply closing her eyes and being swept away in the music of the concert. As the story unfolds her performance takes on a progressively more world-weary and melancholic mood. By the denouement she’s frayed and exhausted. It’s reasonable to think that much of the credit for her work is due Robert Siodmak, but her performance begs one to consider how far she might have gone as a dramatic actress.


The film benefits greatly from iconic noir director Siodmak (Criss Cross, The Killers) and cinematographer Woody Bredell. Amongst fans of film noir Bredell doesn’t share his cohort’s level of name recognition, even though he filmed Christmas Holiday just after completing the highly stylized Phantom Lady with Siodmak and Ella Raines, and would work with the director again on The Killers. Bredell was also quite familiar with Deanna Durbin, having photographed her in seven films, including the forgotten Can’t Help Singing. Can’t Help Singing, Deanna’s follow up to Christmas Holiday, and surprisingly her only Technicolor picture, provides an interesting counterpoint to her two film noirs (the other being Lady on a Train). A musical western produced by Universal in an effort to cash in on the success of Broadway’s Oklahoma!, Can’t Help Singing offers a completely different look at Durbin and argues strongly that her star would have only risen has she stayed in her wheelhouse as a performer and continued to make romantic musicals. Can’t Help Singing was nominated for two Academy Awards and is a surprisingly good showcase for the 22-year-old star. (Also worth noting that Hans Salter received a score nomination for Christmas Holiday — Hollywood paid attention to Durbin films.)


Deanna Durbin’s place in history so unique that commentary about Christmas Holiday tends to focus solely on this movie’s role in her career path. What gets overlooked is the strength of the film’s noir statement. The film is mildly unorthodox in that its universe is more thematically than visually noirish, and even more so because its protagonist is a woman. Christmas Holiday is concerned with corrupt and perverse relationships and the absurd obligations that accompany marriage. The film is noirish not in the sense that these relationships exist, but instead in that Abigail, the protagonist, fails to see them — and consequently pays a terrible price. Her failure is characterized by melancholy, isolation, a severe sense of regret and alienation from the functional world that churns away outside the doors of her palatial antebellum home. When Abigail enters the sphere of Robert and his mother (the amazing Gale Sondergaard) she fails to grasp that the ticket is one way, despite Mrs. Manette’s weak attempts to warn her off. It’s in this determined failure to see what’s right in front of her that Abigail takes her place alongside all the other suckers and fools that populate film noir, whatever their gender. Yet it’s important to recognize the importance of gender reversal in Christmas Holiday. Turning the tables on traditional noir structure, Robert functions as a homme fatale. In an attempt to overcome the corruption of his own soul — gambling, sloth, and violence, possibly even incest — he reaches for Abigail. However instead of lifting him up she is drug down into his personal quagmire. Like the femme fatales of more well-known pictures Robert can’t help himself — he simply is what he is and can’t overcome his demons, no matter how much he hopes otherwise. In thinking Abigail can save him he damns her, and in failing to recognize Robert for what he is Abigail consummates her doom.


How ironic to realize that one of the fundamental inhabitants of the plastic world of film noir is the femme fatale, while with gender reversal comes a somewhat more familiar representation of life in the real world.


Lady on a Train Christmas Holiday




Christmas Holiday (1944)

Directed by Robert Siodmak
Cinematography by Elwood “Woody” Bredell
Written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham
Produced by Felix Jackson
Starring Deanna Durbin, Gene Kelly, and Gale Sondergaard
Released by Universal Pictures
Running time: 93 minutes.

MURDER IS MY BEAT (1955)

If we were going to debate the film noir credibility of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1955 picture Murder is My Beat, the argument would hinge upon whether or not Barbara Payton’s character, Eden Lane, is a proper femme fatale. If you read up on the picture, that subject seems to be the jazz. Payton’s Lane gets mixed up with some shady underworld types trying to work a blackmail scheme, and next thing she knows the cops are eyeballing her for a murder. By the time all is said and done and we learn she’s innocent, Detective Ray Patrick (Paul Langton) has already pissed his career down the drain in order to keep her out of Tehachapi. From one point of view it’s easy to say Murder is My Beat misses as a film noir because Eden Lane turns out to be a good girl — that’s an easy, uncomplicated position to take (and believe me, plenty have taken it). I’m not so sure though. One of the significant characteristics of noir is a milieu that is all at once complicated, uncertain, chaotic, and morally ambiguous. With this in mind is it not then enough to consider Beat a film noir simply because Detective Patrick gives up everything for a girl he thinks might be guilty? Whether Eden Lane is pure evil or merely pure turns out to be irrelevant — her power isn’t moral, it’s entirely sexual. Patrick doesn’t trip over his own feet to help her because she’s innocent — he just wants to score. That in the final equation she turns out to be innocent is, for him, nothing more than dumb luck — considering the fate of film noir protagonists who made similar choices, Patrick gets off lucky.


Make no mistake Murder is My Beat is a second-rate picture. Were it not for the presence of an interesting, much talked about director and an infamous leading lady the film would simply vanish into the haze — there’d be very little of substance left to make film aficionados seek it out. Paul Langton’s presence doesn’t help. If ever there were a guy less suited to take the lead in a feature film it’s him. Despite a long career as a character actor on a million different forgotten television dramas, Murder is My Beat represents one of Langton’s only starring roles, and he doesn’t make good. A tedious actor with a dead face and zero charisma, Langton comes off like a sack of potatoes in a JC Penney suit — the best thing about him is his haircut. Harold Wellman’s cinematography is equally unimaginative, though he at least could blame the film’s miserable budget. In Wellman’s defense many of the second unit shots are pretty good, in particular the naturally lit exteriors. There are some strong shots of period LA, including the ubiquitous City Hall building. There’s little to say on behalf of the interiors though — all shot with a single harsh light source against washed out, over-exposed backgrounds. Nevertheless, Murder is My Beat is a noir picture in spite of its lack of distinctive visual style.


So much has been made of Edgar G. Ulmer’s career, and rightfully so. While Murder is My Beat can’t be held up alongside Ruthless, Detour, or even The Strange Woman, it does offer some explanation of what made him a precious commodity on Poverty Row. Take for instance the train scene, in which Detective Patrick finally gives himself over to keeping Lane out of jail. The entire scene is played out on a single set, with the would-be lovers sitting opposite each other as a rear-projection landscape dances by through the window. The two spend the scene in conversation, but Ulmer uses a clever trick to keep things on the cheap: instead of showing the actors talking, he just as often shows them listening. He most likely shot the scene with two cameras — one for each actor, filming the speaker and the listener at the same time. In the finished movie the scene plays out in an unexpected way: we often see the listener while only hearing the speaker — we see Patrick’s passive face while hearing Lane’s spoken dialogue. The technique allowed Ulmer to correct himself in the cutting room and save quite a lot of time and money. If he didn’t like something about the actor’s expression or delivery, he’d just cut to the other person listening. If necessary he could even change the script and record different dialogue after shooting the scene.



Much has been written about how exploitative and cruel the Hollywood studio system was in its heyday, particularly concerning starlets. Actresses such as Barbara Payton, Gail Russell, and Frances Farmer are whipped out and dusted off as sad illustrations of beautiful and talented young women devoured by an insatiable machine. While it is true that show business is unkind to those who can’t cope with criticism and rejection (among other things), it’s also fair to say that self-destructive people tend to self-destruct regardless of their circumstances — it just makes for better gossip when it happens in Malibu. Yet the Barbara Payton story is certainly a sad one (if not quite on par with Russell’s). Payton turned to alcohol, drugs, and even prostitution after (or, if you like, because) her Hollywood star had fallen. Russell was a depressive who suffered from stage fright and abused substances in order to get up for her roles. Her star peaked all too soon. Murder is My Beat was Payton’s final grasp at the screen. She never had much of a career, and was known primarily for an ill-conceived and violent marriage with A-lister Franchot Tone. By the time she made this picture her M.O. was a shallow riff on Marilyn Monroe. With put-on breathiness in her voice and a puffy face she’s a shadow of the girl who starred opposite Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye just five years before. It’s clear that she’s working hard, but more telling that Ulmer regularly goes in tighter on the wooden Langton.


In the final analysis Murder is My Beat is one of those movies that is more interesting for the academic questions it poses and for the personalities involved than for anything that happens on-screen. It has its moments — like a grisly murder victim who goes face-first into a fireplace and a picture-snatcher in a dress more outrageously sexual than anything you’ve ever seen in an Eisenhower-era motion picture, but those lurid highlights arrive too early and too close together to carry the picture or capture the imagination for long.

Murder is My Beat (1955)

Director: Edgar Ulmer
Cinematographer: Harold Wellman
Screenplay: Aubrey Wisberg
Starring: Paul Langton and Barbara Payton
Released by: Allied Artists
Running time: 77 minutes

KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS (1948)

With such an evocative title, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands stood out like a beacon on my list of not-yet-seen film noirs. With A-listers like Burt Lancaster and Joan Fontaine at the top of the bill, I assumed it was locked up for legal reasons and would never be available for viewing. Thanks to the magic of bootlegs I’ve now seen it. My DVD copy (quite good) is a recording from American Movie Classics, circa 1990. It must have aired during prime time, because the recording included Bob Dorian’s introduction, as well as fifteen minutes of network promos at the end of the picture, before launching into the first few moments of “The Flame and the Arrow” with Burt and Virginia Mayo. Those were the days when AMC reigned, and few cable providers offered TCM. 

In Dorian’s introduction to Kiss the Blood Off My Hands he mentions that the film was made by Norma Productions, formed in 1948 by Burt and his agent, Harold Hecht, because the star was nervous about being typecast in the beefcake parts he was becoming known for. Norma’s first film was Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, for which Burt turned down the lead in a new Elia Kazan production that both the young director and Tennessee Williams thought he was the ideal actor for: A Streetcar Named Desire. With Lancaster not available, the part went to newcomer Marlon Brando. There are a million stories out there where an actor or actress famously turns down a landmark role (half of them seem to involve The Godfather), but this one resonates with me — what a picture Streetcar would have been with Burt in angst on his knees under that streetlamp. Misstep or not, things for Burt would turn out just fine. Norma productions made only five pictures, though that small number included important films such as Sweet Smell of Success, The Bachelor Party, and Birdman of Alcatraz.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands was a pleasant surprise, though I was initially skeptical as to whether or not it would live up to its salacious title. The film screams noir from the opening moments, as Burt, having accidentally killed a bartender, leads the Bobbies on a ten-minute foot chase through the maze-like London waterfront. He only escapes by climbing through an open window and forcibly shushing the woman he finds inside — a mousy blonde (Fontaine) startled from a restless sleep. The sequence plays without much dialog, and Russell Metty’s cinematography establishes the mood. Close-ups of a sweaty, terrified Lancaster abound. As do handhelds, chiaroscuro lighting, high angles, low angles, and seedy waterfront exteriors. The film’s noir motif is so strongly established that is compares favorably with Jules Dassin’s later London masterpiece Night and the City. 

The opening sequence alone isn’t enough to make this a bona fide film noir, but Kiss the Blood Off My Hands still rates. There are several stylish scenes, including a rain-drenched one where Burt dukes it out with some London riff-raff, and another where he mugs an elderly pub crawler. Regardless, the movie's primary noir statement is made through the characterization of Lancaster’s Bill Saunders. Having endured much of the war in a Nazi POW camp, and with no family to return to in the wake of his experiences, Saunders wanders aimlessly through postwar London. More than just alienated, Saunders is truly a man apart — precariously close to coming unglued. What’s most telling isn’t the ferocity with which he battles his demons, but how he reacts when things don’t go his way. Time and again when confronted with a difficult choice Bill lowers his head and flails until he’s the last man standing — then he runs. A heated exchange with Jane in the final reel is all noir: 

“You mean you can say it was self-defense and get it off. But if I go back I won’t get off — I’ll be sticking my head in a rope……listen, nobody gives anybody a break, not me anyway. It’s been run, run, run all the time — run from my old man, run from the kid I hurt in school. That’s why I didn’t mind the army — when you hit you didn’t have to run. Everybody’s against you, everybody!”

No actor of the classic noir period could project doomed angst like Burt Lancaster, and no actress wore empathy on her face like Joan Fontaine. It’s this damaged quality that draws her to him, and what keeps her around. She eventually pulls Saunders away from the abyss — metaphorically kissing the blood off his hands —and proves her love by waiting him out as he does a six-month stretch for punching a police officer.

In the noir tradition, Foster employs setting to visually reinforce his players’ emotional states. In an important scene early in their relationship, Bill and Jane meet at the zoo, where the caged beasts remind Bill of his imprisoned past. Lancaster plays it well, at first joining in with the school children who “ape the apes,” before realizing how much he has in common with the creatures on the other side of the bars. Another interesting moment happens when Bill goes to prison. In addition to hard labor, the judge also demands a flogging — yes, a flogging! The scene is brings to mind the inquisition, or something from Billy Budd, as Lancaster, bound by hands, feet, and neck to a torture device, is whipped mercilessly, while a bureaucrat at a desk ticks off strokes.

Another strong element is the presence of Robert Newton in a featured supporting role. Newton should be familiar to most film fans as either Bill Sykes in David Lean’s exquisite Oliver Twist, or as Long John Silver in Walt Disney’s Treasure Island. Here he plays a sleazy confidence man who witnesses Bill’s accidental killing at the beginning of the film, and holds it over him for the duration. His character at first appears to be nothing more than an amiable trickster — the kind of rascal who does nothing worse than claiming goods that have “fallen off the back of a lorry.” Yet when the stakes are at their highest at the end of the picture, he’s transformed into a grotesque, desperate ogre, and his welcomed fate foreshadows that of Anthony Dawson in Dial M for Murder.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is a fine noir — beautifully photographed, well acted, and assembled with great skill. With everything it has going for it I hope it becomes available on DVD in the United States soon. I can’t imagine that most noir fans wouldn’t join the queue to purchase a disc, and maybe even a tin of biscuits.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)

Director: Norman Foster
Cinematographer: Russell Metty
Writers: Bercovici (story), Bernstein (adaptation), Butler (novel), Gray (dialog), and Maddow (adaptation). (Yikes!)
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, and Robert Newton.
Released by Universal Pictures
Running time: 80 minutes