"It is clear that murder is one of the
kindest things he is capable of."
James Agee on Richard Widmark
Richard Widmark and I go way back, at the movies, anyway.
Widmark's fiendish debut, as the giggling psychopath in "Kiss of Death", came in 1947, the year I was born. That's the movie where Widmark scared the crap out of half the country by tying Mildred Dunnock to her wheelchair with a lamp cord and shoving her down a flight of stairs, an act of depravity rarely matched on film, before or since. Anton Chigurh, meet Tommy Udo.
The first movie I remember seeing as a kid was a Richard Widmark movie, a whaling adventure called "Down To the Sea In Ships", costarring Dean Stockwell and Lionel Barrymore. I probably watched it through the windshield of my parents' 1948 Plymouth, at one of the Madison drive-ins. It would've been a second-run movie by then. I was about five. I might've seen it again a few years later on television. I don't remember now. But the thing that stuck with me from that first viewing was Widmark's face: the high forehead, the cheekbones, the narrow, deep-set eyes, the mouth that went slightly crooked whenever he smiled. Feral and haunted, it was a face made for the black-and-white movies of the late 1940s, especially film noir. Nobody else looked like that.
He specialized in lowlifes early on - he could play cockiness and paranoia with the best of them - then branched out to take on a wide range of roles over the next 40 years. To sample a few, and to get a sense of Widmark's versatility, watch him as the pickpocket in "Pickup On South Street", the dauphin in "Saint Joan", the prosecutor in "Judgment At Nuremberg", the Cold War Navy captain in "The Bedford Incident", and the frontier lawman who has outlived his usefulness in "Death of a Gunfighter". He never really stopped playing bad guys, though, and the more loathsome his characters were, the more he seemed to enjoy them.
"Kiss of Death" invariably gets singled out as a testament to his viallainy, but his scariest performance might be in "No Way Out", Sidney Poitier's first film. In that one, Widmark plays a hate-mongering bigot who's brought into a city hospital with a gunshot wound after a failed gas station robbery. Poitier's the young emergency-room doctor, and through the course of the film, which culminates in a race riot, Widmark throws out every vile racial epithet you could get away with on screen in 1950, and probably some you couldn't. The language still has the power to shock, but what's disturbing, even more than the slurs, is the relish with which he uses them. There might be movie characters more nakedly abhorrent than this, but not many.
I ran into Widmark again on a Saturday night in 1964. This time we met at the Eastwood, a much-loved and seriously run-down palace on Madison's East Side. The movie was "The Long Ships", a swashbuckling yarn shot in Yugoslavia, about some Vikings and Moors who team up to go after the world's most fabulous treasure, a great golden bell. The Eastwood showed mostly second-run double features then. A movie that had its Madison premiere there, like "The Long Ships", was plainly being dumped. That didn't matter to the gang of teenagers I was with, as we cruised over to the Eastwood in a rust-prone 1955 Chevy to see the show. We couldn't quite picture Richard Widmark as a Viking, but we figured it had to be fun.
The movie was (and is) monumentally silly, like a Monty Python movie, but without the all-out Monty Python zaniness. You can't always tell whether it's trying to be funny or not, but Widmark, who gets most of the good lines, plays it knowingly tongue-in-cheek. For an actor who played more than his fair share of liars, Rolfe the Viking stands out as a study in epic deceit, and Widmark is having a blast. (Poitier, playing a Moorish potentate, barely avoids total embarrassment. This is not the picture he wants to be remembered for.)
What made the experience memorable that night was the audience. They were into it, and then some. About 20 minutes in, somebody yelled something at one of the characters on the screen. Then somebody else did. And everybody laughed. From that point on, it was a two-way street, the actors in the film brawling, carousing and plundering their way to the bell, and the fans in their seats helping out with advice, encouragement, critical commentary and script doctoring, as the need arose.
Long before "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" was a gleam in anybody's eye, and decades before "MST3K", "The Long Ships" and a receptive Saturday night crowd gave us an early introduction to the goofball potential of interactive cinema. Richard Widmark was there.
He kept working well into his 70s, as the hard-drinking rodeo hustler in "When the Legends Die", the murder victim (who deserves it) in "Murder On the Orient Express", the cagey Southern sheriff in "A Gathering of Old Men", and the small-town widower who takes up with Faye Dunaway in "Cold Sassy Tree". He was 93 when he died last year. His last acting role was in 1991.
He's not the last great actor, or great villain, the movies will ever see. There might even be an actor someday who can dispatch crippled old ladies with the same gleeful conviction Widmark brought to "Kiss of Death".
But there won't be another Richard Widmark.
There was only one of those, and he was it.
