A lot can change in 50 years. To be more accurate, a lot can change in 50 years of recent history. If you go back in time, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between living in 1127 AD and 1177 AD. If you were poor and powerless, your life sucked in pretty much the same way. If you were rich and powerful, your life sucked slightly less in pretty much the same way. In the last century and a half, however, five decades could see a person raised in a home without indoor plumbing grow up to watch a man walk on the moon.
This edition of KIMT’s Weekend Remake Throwdown is going to delve into this era of progress, and consider how much it’s also an era of regress, by pitting “Kiss of Death” (1947) vs. “Kiss of Death” (1995) in a battle that will show we’ve come a long way, baby…but not always in the right direction.
The original is based on a story from a New York prosecutor, likely drawing on his real life experiences, about a career criminal who turns informant. Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) wants to leave his life of crime and just take care of his wife and two daughters but no one will hire an ex-con like him. Joining a jewelry store robbery, Nick is the only one caught by police. A street tough guy who refuses to rat out his fellow robbers or the crooked attorney (Taylor Holmes) who organizes much of the crime in the city, Nick rebuffs the appeals of Assistant District Attorney Louis D’Angelo (Brian Donlevy) and decides to serve out his sentence.
When his wife commits suicide and his children are sent to an orphanage, Nick decides he has no choice but to cooperate with D’Angelo but too much time has passed. The DA insists that Nick rat out the people involved with him on another crime, which Nick does, and D’Angelo decides they’ll put the blame on one of the other criminals involved, a man who also happened to have raped/had an affair with Nick’s wife before she killed herself. And I put those two very different things together like that because the 1940s were so sexually repressed that it honestly is impossible to tell from the film which it was or which would have been considered worse back then.
Nick ultimately gets paroled and emerges from prison to reclaim his children and marry their former babysitter (Coleen Gray), who has been in love with Nick from the first moment she saw him, but D’Angelo informs him that he’ll need to continue being an informant to maintain his new life. Nick is ordered to buddy up to Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), a giggling maniac of a gangster, and get the evidence to put him away. Nick does, but D’Angelo is unable to convict Udo of murder despite Nick’s testimony.
Sure that Udo will seek horrible revenge and that the authorities can’t protect his family, Nick eventually comes up with a plan. He provokes Udo into shooting him, but had previously called D’Angelo and told him to be at the scene and catch Udo with the gun in his hand. A “three time loser” already, one more conviction would send Udo to prison for life, which is exactly what happens. And even though he was shot point blank multiple times, Nick survives to live happily ever after with his family because even in 1940s film noir, Hollywood has the good guy usually win in the end.
“Kiss of Death” (1947) is widely regarded as a classic, with Richard Widmark’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of Tommy Udo being one of the main reasons. The direction of Henry Hathaway should also not go unnoticed as this initially unheralded film is filled with some fantastic images and dramatic scenes. And it’s doubtful the movie would work nearly as well without strong and surprisingly nuanced performances from Victor Mature and Coleen Gray to carry the non-Udo majority of the story.
The 1995 remake got some critical acclaim but, despite an outstanding cast and decent direction by Barbet Schroeder, was a box office bomb. It kept only the bare bones of the original’s plot and none of its depth in crafting the tale of Jimmy Kilmartin (David Caruso), an ex-con who finds his life destroyed by one bad decision. His cousin (Michael Rapaport) comes to him in the middle of the night and begs Jimmy to help him drive some stolen cars to the docks. Jimmy doesn’t want to but agrees in order to prevent his cousin from being beaten half to death by Little Junior Brown (Nicolas Cage), a musclehead thug with a liking for white clothes and personally affirmative acronyms. The cops raid the docks and Jimmy is the only one arrested, though after he is shot in the hand trying to save a police officer (Samuel L. Jackson) from being killed.
Jimmy refuses to cooperate with the ambitious DA (Stanley Tucci) and rat out anyone else involved in the stolen car delivery and gets sent to prison. While inside, his wife (Helen Hunt) is killed thanks to Jimmy’s cousin, which motivates him to approach the DA and turn informant. But this time it is Jimmy who carefully gives the authorities just enough information to frame his cousin as a stoolpigeon and the cousin gets beaten to death by Little Junior Brown.
Emerging from prison, Jimmy marries his former babysitter (Kathryn Erbe), who hilariously moves from the city to the country to help Jimmy’s mother-in-law care for his children after his wife’s death. I mean, she’s introduced as the girl who simply lives in the upstairs apartment in Jimmy’s tenement, with no connection to his family beyond that, and then she’s suddenly leaving her entire life behind to move in with Jimmy’s resentful mother-in-law while he’s in prison. It makes not a lick of sense and is emblematic of a problem in modern cinema. There were, of course, badly written motion pictures in the past but today’s films seem to have a unique screenwriting problem in that otherwise competent scripts will often have one or two things about them that are completely stupid. The majority of the story will work and demonstrates the people who wrote it knew what they were doing, but then there’s a gaping plot hole, bit of illogic or terrible characterization that wouldn’t pass muster in a junior high creative writing assignment. I don’t know enough about the inner workings of Hollywood filmmaking to theorize why that happens but it’s freakin’ annoying.
Anyway, the ambitious DA is still forcing Jimmy to work as an informant and orders him to get close to Little Junior Brown. Jimmy does, eventually giving the police evidence that Junior murdered a criminal named Omar (Ving Rames). But it turns out that Omar was an undercover federal agent and while you would think that would guarantee Junior’s conviction, it turns out the feds are so corrupt they not only let Junior go, they promise the ambitious DA a federal judgeship if he will drop state charges.
So once again, Jimmy concocts a scheme to implicate Junior. He gets him on tape again confessing to killing Omar, then uses another tape of the DA admitting to the corrupt deal that let Junior go in the first place to force the DA to prosecute. Jimmy then packs his family and a surprisingly small amount of possessions into an SUV and leaves the city to live happily ever after.
“Kiss of Death” (1995) is far from a classic but is, on the whole, a more than serviceable crime drama. Its greatest value is in comparing it to its predecessor and noticing the remarkable differences visible from one era to the other.
“Kiss of Death” (1947) was created in a world where it was expected that every able bodied man, even those who worked as robbers or bricklayers, would wear a suit, tie and a hat. It was a world where able bodied young women were expected to live in boarding houses with den mothers to watch over them. It was a world where even the forces of law and order considered criminals who informed on other criminals to be vaguely contemptible. Heroes could be ordinary men subject to forces far more powerful than they could ever hope to overcome. Sadism in villains was considered strikingly unusual. And no one EVER used bad language. It was a world of conformity and structure that, while too restrictive, was not entirely without its merits.
“Kiss of Death” (1995) was made in a world where most men only wear suits when they go to funerals. It’s also a world where black people in movies get to be something besides musicians or waiters. And it’s a world where people think nothing of using the F-word, even in front of small children. It’s somewhere people have more freedom to live their lives and filmmakers have more freedom to tell their stories.
But it’s also a world where the cult of the hero has utterly consumed popular fiction. Nick Bianco is a hapless mutt who spends most of his story doing what other people tell him to do, only to break free and take action on his own when he’s desperate. Jimmy Kilmartin is a badass mastermind who spends most of his story defying authority and being one step ahead of everybody else. It’s kind of astonishing how much more dominant the character of Jimmy is in the remake. Nick was a part of the story in 1947. Jimmy IS the story in 1995, which throws the whole picture off when Nicolas Cage largely steals ever scene he’s in. Widmark does much the same in 1947 but it doesn’t disrupt anything because there’s room in the story to accommodate him. Because the original allows Nick to be weak, there’s space for Udo to be strong. The remake is so focused on making sure the audience knows Jimmy is the smartest, toughest, bravest and most honorable guy in the film, it feels intrusive when Little Junior Brown blows him off the screen.
And this Throwdown yet again illustrates the paradox that as the status of women has improved in American society, their status on screen in Hollywood has actually diminished. Coleen Gray’s character in the original only exists to give Nick someone to love and care about, but at least she’s given a chance to act the hell out of that limited role. There are a few scenes where Gray is allowed to show the viewer the intense, youthful passion of this girl and make the viewer believe that she loves Nick with all her heart and soul. It makes a girlfriend/wife role a little less thankless and helps the audience invest a little more emotion into the story. The remake has far more female roles but most of them are nameless strippers and Helen Hunt and Kathryn Erbe are given nothing to work with in their parts. Hunt might as well be playing Jimmy’s sister as his wife and Erbe’s character is so blandly, ineffectually subservient she might as well be the doormat upon which Jimmy’s wipes his feet. And with all the additional parts in the remake for secondary law enforcement and criminal characters, not one of them could have been cast as a woman? The sexist popular culture of 1947 kept women in sharply defined roles but at least it sometimes let them flourish within those boundaries. The popular culture of 1995 would claim to be less sexist but leaves its female characters barely any room to breathe.
It’s also somewhat poignant to watch the remake and be reminded of when Nicholas Cage was an incredible actor instead of a laughingstock and how David Caruso went in just a few years from being the hottest thing on television to a spectacular failure in movies and back to being a shopworn TV hero who became most popular as an internet meme.
And it’s inexplicable how director Henry Hathway working with vastly inferior resources and technology was able to make a film that looks and moves better and more distinctively than director Barbet Schroeder could almost half a century later. There’s a scene in the original after the jewelry store heist where Nick and his fellow crooks are trying to get away, cutting back and forth between them in the elevator going down and the store clerk struggling to reach the alarm, that is more tense and suspenseful than anything in the remake. And shots where we see Udo approaching through a tiny gap in a curtain or shadowy figures around Nick’s home will be remembered long after you see the film. Barbet, meanwhile, opens his movie with a pointless tracking shot and the rest of it is so predictable and automatic it could have been directed by one of the non-player characters in a video game.
“Kiss of Death” (1947) takes this Throwdown but does 1947 beat out 1995? No. We don’t have to go beyond the whole “black people being able to vote” thing to decide that. Watching both movies, though, is a reminder that not every change is for the best and not every step forward truly takes somewhere better than where we’ve been.
Kiss of Death (1947)
Directed by Henry Hathaway.
Written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer.
Starring Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, Coleen Gray, Richard Widmark, Taylor Holmes, Howard Smith, Karl Malden, Anthony Rose and Mildred Dunnock.
Kiss of Death (1995)
Directed by Barbet Schroeder.
Written by Richard Price.
Starring David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Helen Hunt, Kathryn Erbe, Stanley Tucci, Michael Rapaport, Ving Rames, Philip Baker Hall, Anthony Heald, Angel David, Anne Meara, Hope Davis, Hugh Palmer, Edward McDonald, Alex Stevens, John C. Vennema and Richard Price.