Images die hard, especially in crime and movies. It’s said that Cosa Nostra kingpin Joseph Gallo-who exited this world in a hail of lead while dining at Umberto’s Clam House in New York City’s Little Italy-was so enamored of Richard Widmark’s remarkable movie performance as giggling gangster Tommy Udo in 1947’s “Kiss of Death” that he copied it in real life. Gallo, whose nickname was “Crazy Joey,” apparently stole it all: Widmark’s natty posture and smirk, and the “falsetto baby talk laced with tittering laughs”-about which James Agee wrote memorably in his “Kiss of Death” review.
Will some current bad guy be seized with a similar fixation after watching Nicolas Cage’s equally scary hood Little Junior Brown in the new “Kiss of Death?”
It’s possible. Surly Junior-who bench presses strip-teasers, kills without emotion and can’t stand the taste of metal-is the counterpart of Widmark’s Udo in director Barbet Schroeder’s tense, mordant update/remake. And in this new thriller-which repeats the basic plot of the original while getting very terse and knowing about the mechanics and psychology of modern big-city crime-Cage gives a terrifying, transfixing portrayal of a killer pro. Playing Junior, the over-achieving son of a dying crime boss (played by Philip Baker Hall, the Nixon of Robert Altman’s “Secret Honor”), he’s somber, dark, ferociously wired.
But though Cage, in a supporting part, swipes Schroeder’s movie as thoroughly as Widmark did Henry Hathaway’s, he doesn’t play another maniac. Widmark’s Udo-in the first film’s most famous scene-shoved an old woman in a wheelchair down a staircase, but Cage’s Junior Brown is the hood who’s scary because he isn’t wild and unpredictable, because he has a code. He’d kill the old lady, too-but only after giving it some careful thought. There’s a methodology, even a twisted morality, behind his vicious rages and cold-blooded murders.
It’s a blow-out role, an amazing job by an actor successfully turning 180 degrees from his wonderful part as the ultimate likable New York cop in last year’s “It Could Happen to You.” And, along with others in “Kiss”‘ excellent cast-including Michael Rapaport as Ronnie the chop-shop operator (an ultimate sleazeball), steady Samuel L. Jackson as a wounded cop whose eyes always tear up, and star David Caruso as Jimmy Kilmartin, the convict forced by a manipulative district attorney to inform on Junior Brown and his gang-Cage’s role reverberates in your mind long afterward.
This movie isn’t a formula ’90s cop crashathon like “Bad Boys.” Instead, like the 1947 “Kiss of Death”-one of a handful of big studio films shot in real New York City locations in the ’40s-it aspires to interior and exterior verisimilitude, a real viewpoint. And it gets one; a pessimistic take on modern society, much darker than its source.
You’d expect that from the Swiss-French-German director, an urbane observer of obsessions and underworlds in films like “Maitresse,” “Barfly” and “Reversal of Fortune.” Certainly, Schroeder-a good director but a great producer-has a resume as strange as it is sophisticated. Who could have expected the producer of such uncompromisingly intellectual French art films as Jacques Rivette’s “Out One” and “Celine and Julie Go Boating”-and almost all of Eric Rohmer’s chatty gems-to become, with Louis Malle, the only French “New Wave” veteran to successfully crash Hollywood?
But, somehow, the movie still feels incomplete. In this modern film noir, it’s the traditional aspects that limit it and make it predictable-especially the bone-crushing climax.
The film’s flaws are not obvious at first. As in the earlier “Kiss of Death”-which this movie follows in outline but not in specifics-Caruso’s Jimmy is a crook, an ex-car thief trying to go straight but pulled inexorably into a trap, caught nightmarishly between rock (the district attorney) and hard place (the car-robbery ring).
Talked into taking part in a botched stolen-car transport by his old buddy Ronny, who works for Junior Brown, Jimmy ends up taking the fall. But once district attorney Zioli (Stanley Tucci, oozing arrogance) gets his hooks in and Jimmy turns informer-to avenge wife Bev’s (Helen Hunt) death-he can’t quit. The cops turn the screws to get more evidence and his gangland cronies are a step away from finding him out.
Caruso’s Jimmy-like Victor Mature’s Nick Bianco in the original-is Everyman as stoolpigeon. Ultimately an idealist who just wants to settle down and lead a simple family life with his second wife Rosie (Kathryn Erbe) and daughter, Jimmy is plunged by the law into a perverted embrace with the very underworld he wants to escape. The deeper he goes, the worse it gets.
Caruso, a slight, red-headed, Queens, N.Y.-born actor who radiates machismo, made his first mark by playing psycho gangsters (in “China Girl”) and tough cops (in “King of New York” and TV’s “NYPD Blue”). He must have guessed Cage had the prize role here. But Caruso gives the movie something vital: a quiet, nervous, emotionally reliable observer. Playing against showy villains-not just Cage, but also Rapaport, Tucci, Hall and Ving Rhames as Omar the heavy-Jimmy’s center of gravity is crucial.
Writer Richard Price’s second stab at recycled, updated film noir works better than his first: the 1992 remake of Jules Dassin’s 1950 “Night and the City” (which starred Widmark). It’s cleaner, more organic. The biggest difference between the old “Kiss” and the new, in fact, lies in the kind of underworld and legal system it shows. In the earlier movie, the cops seemed callous but more neutral. Here, Tucci’s Frank Zioli is himself corrupt, opportunistic, frying his own fish.
And the modern milieu Price has recreated is a rich one, vividly detailed. It centers around the streets, the legal headquarters, chop-shopper Ronny’s auto-repair yard (a ragged region of gutted hulks behind Shea Stadium) and Junior’s surrealistically bare and sleazy strip club, Baby Cakes. The crime hangouts are shown with a paralyzing clarity-not in the old noir style, through tilted camera angles, draped with shadows-but in a harsh light and deep focus (courtesy of the great cinematographer Luciano Tovoli) that helps strip bare the characters, the crimes, the rotten world.
That’s perhaps the key to Schroeder’s method. He shoots this nightmare with a straightforward, seemingly uninflected super-real style that makes the story, if possible, more nightmarish. There’s an unamazed gaze in Schroeder’s movies that cools down even the most horrific material. But this movie might be better-maybe even a classic-if it were less urbane, if the New York tiger that Nicolas Cage and Richard Price unleashed could bare all his fangs, and not just fill the theater with his magnetic growl. Then “Kiss of Death” might really be a killer.
”KISS OF DEATH”
(star) (star) (star)
Directed by Barbet Schroeder; written by Richard Price, from a story by Eleazar Lipsky, based on the screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer; photographed by Luciano Tovoli; edited by Lee Percy; production designed by Mel Bourne; music by Trevor Jones; produced by Schroeder, Susan Hoffman. A Twentieth Century Fox release; opens Friday at Burnham Plaza, Biograph, Lincoln Village. Running time: 1:41. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Jimmy Kilmartin ………. David Caruso
Calvin ………….. Samuel L. Jackson
Little Junior ………… Nicolas Cage
Bev …………………… Helen Hunt
Frank Zioli …………. Stanley Tucci
Ronnie …………… Michael Rapaport
