A Film Canon

Despite Kiss Of Death's opening insistence that all scenes were shot on the "actual locales associated with the story", Hathaway's most striking move is his strategic use of real time, which fulfils noir's peculiar ability to transform tension into an interminable, unbearable waiting, recalling The Woman In The Window, but translating its reification of circumstance into a more legal, less ethereal register, as ex-con Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) agrees to testify against psychopath Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), only for the supervising district attorney (Brian Donlevy) to lose the case, and so necessitate a clumsy attempt at witness protection. Not only does this provide a delightful opportunity for Donlevy's trademark performance of thwarted, frustrated authority, but it artfully elaborates all those spaces beyond the purview of the police, or conventional justice - and it is these spaces that benefit most from Hathaway's use of real time, as well as the pregnant silences that accompany it, such that the ultimate impression is of a criminal underworld that is both as pervasive and invisible as time itself, only measurable in terms of its elusive, untraceable impact upon its victims. The result is a series of prototypical encounters between a psychopath and the spaces inhabited by those victims - and, more generally, a foundational elaboration of the psychopath himself, beautifully embodied in Widmark's anxious, hyperactive body - which provides a counterpoint to Hathaway's environmental criminology; or, rather, radically dichotomises criminal behaviour in terms of psychopathological and ethical motivations, Bianco only having become a criminal in the first place to buy Christmas presents for his family - a gesture that spurs the district attorney's trust, and softens the idiosyncratic presence of a sympathetic female voice-over.