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In which sympathetic crook Victor Mature meets and befriends psycho gangster Richard Widmark while doing time, only to be used by the cops when he gets out to bring Widmark down. This is a fairly routine thriller that became a classic by accident. It doesn't have the pervasive ambience of doom that enlivens most Film Noir, nor does it have the dialogue or visual poetry. Oh, it gets points for actually filming on location in Sing Sing for the prison sequences, but in point of fact, it's kind of a corny movie, complete with the bad man redeemed and a happy ending. The voice over narration by Colleen Gray at the beginning of the movie, pointing out that our protagonist is "only trying to put food on the table for his kids," is just so much meally-mouthed liberal propaganda about the roots of crime. It is so self serving and so ham-fisted that one wonders if the filmmakers didn't trust Victor Mature's limited range to evince the audience's sympathy the way a better movie would do it. Interestingly, there are no such excuses for Richard Widmark's gangster. Somehow, I don't think even Hollywood could stretch things THAT far.

Which begs the obvious question: If this film is as unremarkable as all that, WHY is it a classic? Like I said, by accident.

The accident is that it has one of the most memorable villians in movie history in Richard Widmark (his first film role, by the way). There isn't another scene in all of movies that compares with the scene in this movie where Widmark ties an old lady to her wheelchair and pushes her down a flight of stairs, giggling madly all the while. That one indelible image has etched Kiss of Death onto the public's memory for all time. And well it should have. There are so few depictions of absolute evil in film that when it happens that a film DOES depict that level of evil, it makes a strong impression.