Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Richard Widmark has died at the age of 93. Widmark made a splash with his movie debut in the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which he played a sniggering young gangster named Tommy Udo. Widmark shaved his eyebrows off for the role and cultivated a skin-crawling giggle that was all the creepier for the times he employed it: among the things that amused Tommy in the course of the movie were the chance to shove an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs and his own delivery of the line, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over." It was a supporting role, designed as a contrast to the movie's hero--a remorseful, older, family-man hood, played by Victor Mature in what was probably his best performance. Yet Widmark took the picture straight away from him, and Tommy Udo and his giggle entered permanent crime-movie folklore, referenced in the Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and the Kaleidoscope song "The Ballad of Tommy Udo", and reportedly serving as a role model for the New York mobster Joey Gallo. Widmark received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe for the new male star of the year. In later years, he would express mixed feelings about the attention the performance got: "It’s a bit rough, priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”

His career had its ups and downs, but he is remembered for a bit more than that. Predictably, he came out of Kiss of Death typecast as a hood, but he began to get to play good guys after Elia Kazan cast him in the 1950 thriller Panic in the Streets. And his edgy appeal proved ideal for the good-bad heroes of more offbeat noirs such as Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, in which he played a career pickpocket named Skip who reaches inside the wrong purse and finds himself in possession of some stolen microfilm coveted by foreign agents, and Jules Dassin's London-set Night and the City (later ineptly made as a vehicle for Robert De Niro); his performance there, as the doomed con man Harry Fabian, is probably the best of his career. As noir died out by the end of the 1950s, Widmark spent more and more time in Westerns; he was cast as Jim Bowie in The Alamo by his ideological arch enemy, John Wayne, whose battles with the actor over both politics and their shared profession were the stuff of Hollywood legend. He also turned producer in order to set up a few projects, including the submarine melodrama The Bedford Incident, in which the studios had little interest. His last big, attention-getting starring role was as the title character of Don Siegel's police drama Madigan (1968), which he later resurrected for a short-lived TV series. In the later stages of his career, he specialized in character turns as authority figures: presidents, politicians, millionaire string-pullers, etc. He retired from acting on- screen after playing a United States Senator in the 1992 True Colors. “The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he once said, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.

The Screengrab : panic in the streets

Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008

Le Bon Temps Roule!