Richard Weedt Widmark

As the saying goes "You never forget your first time." and that is certainly applicable to the gangbusters debut of Richard Widmark, when he came replete with blazing guns as Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway's aptly titled Kiss of Death (1947). With the laugh of a sociopath and his anxiety-riddled eyes that darted, it was clear you were now privy to the most disturbingly unpredictable criminal that ever graced the screen. And that memory-staining moment of a  compunction-free Udo, pushing a wheelchaired woman to her death, you would be hard-pressed even by standards of this day, to witness such a hair-raising sequence.

In fact, that very performance set the bar and would be the new standard, and the criminals of yesteryear would seem as innocuous as a Disney film, by the time Richard Widmark shuffled in.
The 1914 born actor came from fine theater and radio stock, and had an affinity for being typecast
as the archetypal baddie, ever leaving behind his signature scent with gangster roles that were similar to his Tommy Udo, but
nowhere near the velocity of the role that pretty much defined Mr.Widmark.

                             Oh but my mother loves this face.




He had quite a bit of unfinished business and would not disenchant with William Keighley's The Street With No Name (1948) and William Wellman's 1948 stunner Yellow Sky. Widmark's next
Sgt Pepper moment would ensue with him playing a fish out of water in an interpretation of British cult crime author Gerald Kersh's lauded novel Night And The City (1950) Widmark portrayed the progressively terrified small potato criminal, menaced on all sides in a provoking London, and few thespians of the day could have articulated the tension and paranoia with such  skin-crawling vividness. But he was no less magnetic when he was under the heading of the heroic protagonist, as he was with the character Lt Clinton Reed, a role he executed with utmost 
elan in Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950) where Widmark is a doctor, desperate to trace the steps of criminal carriers of a plague. Another celebrated director Joseph L Mankiewicz brought out the very best in the actor in No Way Out, which underlined one of Widmark's pointed studies in bigotry.

                  See, I told ya, I can do tender too, not your everyday palooka am I?







A few years later, Widmark worked for American cinema's truest maverick Samuel Fuller. in Pickup On South Street (1952) in which his pickpocket precariously out of his depth is one of the actor's most potent performances. He would play another hoodlum in the Henry Hathaway segment of the portmanteau film O. Henry's Full House (1952) and was a discreet support in Don't Bother to Knock for its leading lass Marilyn Monroe.

Middle age would approach and in that juncture, Widmark proved that he could easily supply a series of all-purpose authority figures that were corrupt or not so corrupt., in a lengthy string of productions. While his success as a jobbing actor was sure as nails, he also ventured into production with several Cold War thrillers, the first of which was Time Limit in 1957. His association to crime cinema had an eminent late-1960's revival with Don Sieigel's Madigan (1968) in which Widmark's streetwise anti-authoritarian policeman, was a test run for Siegel's upcoming, later entry Dirty Harry.