He had that face, that laugh, and that coast-to-coast grin that was a little aw-shucks humility and all sinister intent underneath. Richard Widmark often played characters so far in shadow they were invisible, yet your eyes were always searching for him in the frame. An innocuous 'come on' or 'heya, pal' had you leaning forward in your seat, rapt and unblinking, simultaneously fascinated and worried about what he would do next. Widmark possessed a delicious, contradictory combination of boyish charm and roiling tension, all delivered with an attitude that could out-swagger Sinatra.

Born in the tiny town of Sunrise, Minnesota, Richard Widmark spent his childhood moving across the Midwest. He attended Lake Forest College in Illinois with the intent of studying law, though his pursuit of a law degree did not last long. Many years after college, after he had become a star, Richard would admit that he had fallen in love with movies when his grandmother took him to matinees as a child, and his secret goal had always been to make it to Hollywood. After graduating with a degree in Theater, he headed for New York City in 1938, where he quickly made a name for himself in radio soap operas such as 'Joyce Jordan, M.D.' and 'Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories.' By 1943, he was also appearing in a series of successful Broadway plays.

His career was solid by the time he auditioned for a small role in Kiss of Death (1947), a film he only considered because it was to be shot in New York City and wouldn't require him to travel out to California. Widmark was nervous as he auditioned, and when he was nervous, he let out a disquieting, almost nerdy little giggle. That laugh caught the producer's attention, but director Henry Hathaway took one look at the actor's blonde hair, blue eyes and high forehead and proclaimed him 'too intellectual' for the role of the 'ratty, hopped up' villain. Widmark ruffled his hair, gave a great big toothy grin and let loose with a chuckle that made Hathaway shudder: Richard Widmark was his Tommy Udo.


It was Widmark's first film role, and it was a smash. In Kiss of Death, Nick Bianco, played by a terrific Victor Mature, is an ex-con saddled with the intense, misguided respect of the wiry hoodlum Tommy Udo. When Bianco decides to name names and go straight, Tommy is homicidally disappointed that his friend has turned squealer. But even when he idolized Bianco, Udo's voice told you that he was more than a star-struck young thug. High pitched and with an irregular, childlike cadence, the timbre of his voice took on a metallic shrill when he got excited. Then there was his face: Barely-there eyebrows and that big, toothy grin with the unnatural upturn at the corners. From that grin came the giggle, the horrifying, unnatural sound of a man who unabashedly enjoys pushing a wheelchair-bound woman down the stairs.

The infamous staircase scene in Kiss of Death was a sensation, and it made Widmark an instant celebrity. But beyond the scene's iconic representation of film noir psychopaths is its importance in both the context of the film and in post-war American cinema. Kiss of Death may have been released a decade after the implementation of the Production Code, but that scene is a quintessential example of a pre-Code staple: the singular moment of shocking violence. It was the 1947 version of Cagney being returned home at the end of The Public Enemy, of Rico gunning down the crime commissioner in Little Caesar, of Paul Muni falling in love with a Tommy gun in Scarface.

This callback to classic gangster films was no accident. Kiss of Death opens with the New York City skyline and the gorgeous art deco of a department store. It's all straight out of a pre-Code gangster flick, and so is Tommy Udo; his hats were a decade out of date and his suits were modeled on George Raft's signature wardrobe. Widmark's performance and that moment of undigestible violence was no mere callback, but a sign that even if cinema had been forcibly toned down, nothing in the real world had changed. Evil still existed, and this time, there was no convenient Prohibition boogie man to blame it on, just a cheap hood's pure, psychopathic glee.

The New York Times review for Kiss of Death called Widmark 'a real find,' and the public agreed. Twentieth Century Fox offered Widmark a contract, and he embarked on a series of villainous roles in noirs and melodramas. His second film was in William Keighley's The Street With No Name (1948). Less manic than Tommy Udo but no less dangerous, Widmark plays mobster Alec Stiles, a gangster so determinedly urban that he's afraid of fresh air.

A third role in the same sociopathic vein came in the form of Jefty Robbins in Road House (1948). This time, Widmark's charm and boyish good looks were used to great effect. He delivers a brilliant bit of acting in this phenomenal, slightly off-kilter rural noir, where he makes it all too easy for the audience to understand how people could be fooled by the vengeful Jefty. And there was more than a hint of sympathy for the man, too, a veteran of the war, cheated by his closest friend and rejected by his beloved Lily. When he realizes Lily will never be his, Jefty's eyes fill with pain and betrayal and broken daydreams of a future he will never have, and we hurt with him. It's no fleeting moment of sympathy with the Devil, but a tugging at the common strand of empathy we all share, and as Jefty embarks on his sadistic plan of revenge, we become emotionally disoriented, frightened of the man but unable to completely shake our concern for his soul.

In many ways, the American cinematic successor to film noir was Westerns. Film noir is famously difficult to define, and is often considered more of an aesthetic or cycle than a full-fledged genre unto its own. The criteria that make up film noir were popular in a variety of genres; arbitrary cruelty, bleak endings, violence, romantic ambiguity, and other characteristics of noir appear frequently in melodramas and Westerns, for example. As the audience's tastes changed over the years, studios took noir-esque plots and moved them off the city streets and into the small, dust-covered towns of the Old West. Richard Widmark's talents worked just as well in Westerns as in noirs, as audiences quickly discovered in William Wellman's Yellow Sky (1948), a loose remake of The Tempest.

Though Widmark would later say he didn't want to be typecast as a psychotic noir villain, he gives a remarkably urban performance in Yellow Sky. His greedy outlaw, known only as Dude, was little more than a gangster given cowboy duds and plopped down in the middle of the harsh Western desert. It's a compelling performance in a unique Western noir, and soon after filming, he was profiled in Life Magazine. Comparing him to Lon Chaney as a possessor of 'an unexplained, unprovoked, wholly natural depravity,' it was clear that Widmark had become an audience favorite after only two years in Hollywood, and this was entirely due to his particular take on the cinematic villain. He excelled at the harder roles, not just darker characters but men with complex emotions, and unlike other actors who needed dialogue or some particular bit of business to help convey emotional depth, Widmark played it all on his face.

A quick glance at that Life Magazine article reveals no quotes from the actor himself. 'I think a performer should do his work and then shut up,' Widmark said in a rare interview decades later in 1971. He valued his privacy, rarely acquiesced to interviews, and once proclaimed he would never appear on a talk show, though he did sit in on Merv Griffin's show a couple of times in the 1970s. It was always his assertion that a celebrity, no matter how famous, could live a normal life if they really chose to, and Widmark chose to. Richard may not have publicly spoken to outlets like Life in the 1940s about his fear of being typecast, but in later interviews he remarked that after Yellow Sky, he wanted to try some sympathetic roles. He did, but noir called him back.


(Reading a book with daughter Anne)
In 1950, Widmark landed what many consider one of his finest roles: Harry Fabian, the hapless American expat in the crumbling post-war Britain of Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950). He's 'an artist without an art' as Hugh Marlowe aptly puts it in the film, a grifter grabbing at every opportunity he sees, until finally, through luck or maybe just the law of averages, he touches upon success. Fabian is breathless and pursued throughout the film, a desperate tumble of emotions, a man with more love and luck in his life than he ever realizes, at least until it's too late. Widmark rendered Harry Fabian so iconic, so representative of film noir that his picture was used for the first book ever written on film noir, the seminal 1955 edition of Panorama du film noir americain.

Quintessential though it may have been, Night and the City hardly marked a grand finale for the noir cycle. The 1953 noir Pickup on South Street is a crazy near-satire of noir, the genre skewed so far off the mark by director Sam Fuller that is perilously close to becoming anti-noir. Pickpocket Skip McCoy, played by Widmark, is an antihero so vile he cannot be sympathized with by any sane human being, but he has the literal fate of the world in his hands; thus, a loser who in a just society would be rightly ignored is instead at the center of it. Pickup received mixed reviews on release, with critic Bosley Crowther famously unable to come to terms with the fact that Fuller had intentionally mixed noir with farce. But Widmark, an actor eager to stretch the limits of his craft, was gleefully along for the ride.

As the 1950s continued, Widmark found himself in war movies such as The Halls of Montezuma (1950) and The Frogmen (1951), and more Westerns as well, like Broken Lance (1954) and The Last Wagon (1956). By 1958 and The Law and Jake Wade, Widmark had gone from somewhat mimicking his Kiss of Death performance to cleverly utilizing a select few of Udo's characteristics, and in wholly unexpected ways. Still sociopathic, Widmark's Clint Hollister in Jake Wade is far more pragmatic than Udo ever was, cool and businesslike, almost reasonable. Some terrifically sarcastic dialogue makes the character pop; these were the kind of lines that Widmark always nailed, but here he delivers the lines straight, as though Clint Hollister doesn't realize there is any irony to be had in what he says.

The most remarkable thing about Widmark's performance is his treatment of the requisite subtext of this late-50s Western. Widmark steadfastly refuses to dwell in mere implication. Another actor, like Glenn Ford in 3:10 to Yuma (1957), would grin and almost wink right at the camera, and it works for him. Jimmy Stewart in Rope (1948) seems to steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the subtext of Hitchcock's film, and that also works. Widmark, however, saw no need to hide how the character of Clint Hollister felt about Jake Wade. He turns what is usually implied into straight narrative, and it is fascinating, especially when playing off co-star Robert Taylor, an actor from a cinematic generation prior when anything even remotely untoward was hidden in a dozen layers of narrative gauze.

The next year, Richard Widmark was given top billing over Henry Fonda in the exceptional Warlock (1959). Another Western with unquestionable noir roots, Widmark plays Johnny Gannon, a member of an outlaw gang, though always an outsider. He's the kind of guy who only reacts to what others do and never moves on his own, until he finally has enough of the lawless life. Here Widmark plays a conflicted antihero caught in the middle of a psychological power struggle between two hired gunmen, and he gets to use his boyish charm straight, not just as an ironic companion to an underlying psychosis. By 1954, Widmark's hair was just turning grey, the glorious CinemaScope rendering it literally silver and gold, setting off his surprisingly blue eyes; his striking appearance gives him an almost default vulnerability. Though Johnny Gannon has a checkered past, he is a very sympathetic character, and Widmark is tremendous in the role.

Widmark began the 1960s playing real-life hero Jim Bowie in the acclaimed The Alamo (1960), as well as featured roles in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and How the West Was Won (1962). By the middle of the decade, he had moved on to mostly military roles, and in the 1970s, had a well-received career in television. When asked in 1977 if he wanted to go back to try one more great role like those he had earlier in his career, he said no: 'Just say that I'm not a great artist… at my age, I'm grateful if I wake up in the morning and am still breathing.' He worked into his mid 70s, taking a well-earned retirement in the early 1990s and living out his life in privacy, just as he wanted it.

Though Richard Widmark played down his own accomplishments, he was one of the most influential actors of the era, yet astonishingly underrated; despite the litany of terrific performances, he received very few awards over his lengthy career. Awards or no, that little boy from Sunrise had become one of the best character actors to appear on screen, subtly changing expectations and pushing the boundaries of American cinema in ways almost no other actor ever had. He could play crazed or gentle, horrible or heroic, and always remain believable, even in the most exceptional of cinematic circumstances. The laugh of a psychopath may have started the career, but it was Widmark's immense talent that kept it going for five decades.

When not watching classic movies, Stacia Kissick Jones is writing about them, dreaming about them or complaining about them. Her ruminations are there for all to see at She Blogged by Night.