Kiss of Death
With David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Helen Hunt, Stanley Tucci, Michael Rapaport, and Ving Rhames.
With Peter Gallagher, Alison Elliott, William Fichtner, Adam Trese, Joe Don Baker, Paul Dooley, and Elisabeth Shue.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A taste for heartless, sociopathic hoods and sultry femme fatales–a desire to laugh at them and appreciate their outrageousness even as we flinch from them–is certainly part of what links several Hollywood crime thrillers of the 40s with many of those being made today, including such recent favorites as Pulp Fiction and The Last Seduction. The two most recent examples, Kiss of Death and The Underneath, are remakes of Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) and Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949). The sound-bite version of this is that both are recycled noirs with contemporary settings. But since “noir” isn’t a term American filmmakers or critics or spectators were using in the 40s–and changes meaning today just about every time an academic or a mainstream merchandiser thinks up a new reason for using it–this doesn’t take us very far, except perhaps to the point of suggesting that the flexible noir label serves to keep alive a few 40s Hollywood standbys, like misogyny, fatalism, paranoia, hard-boiled sadism, lyrical and romantic masochism, and a comedy of cruelty–as well as certain iconographic, lighting, and compositional schemes–within a stylish and socially acceptable contemporary context. Remove the noir context from The Last Seduction and the movie becomes misogynist plain and simple; remove it from Pulp Fiction and the movie becomes barbarically neofascist in its worship of the power accorded by guns. Put the noir context back and the stylish gloss renders the subject matter transcendent–sufficiently removed from reality to seem ironic, comfortably couched between smirking quotation marks.
What survives is a caustic feeling for the corruption of the legal system today that occasionally evokes Deep Cover and was only faintly hinted at in the first version. “Your side of the fence is almost as dirty as mine,” Mature said to Brian Donlevy as the assistant DA 48 years ago. “With one big difference,” Donlevy replied. “We hurt bad people, not good ones.” In fact, Mature wound up getting hurt plenty, but there was only a smidgeon of irony intended in that exchange. Today nobody could buy such a line, yet such is our cynicism that the happy ending manufactured here is even phonier. We don’t believe it, but we want to go home with it anyway.
Proceeding gracefully and without difficulty through three or four time frames at once, The Underneath alternates between an armored-car robbery carried out by the hero as an inside job and various stages in his past leading up to it. Criss Cross tells substantially the same story, but more simply, with a single extended flashback planted in the middle of the movie–a sad tale about a divorced lug who can’t get over his wife two years after they’ve separated, even after leaving town for a spell to work at odd jobs. They meet up again and are still attracted. But his former wife, hankering after money, has latched onto a local hood, whom she eventually marries, and things only get stickier.
