Noir Nasties: Richard Widmark in DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK, PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, KISS OF DEATH
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by Kevin Murphy, Staff Writer
Richard Widmark appeared alongside Marilyn Monore in Don’t Bother to Knock
There’s a good number of nasty characters in film noir; it’s a genre that is immersed in shadow and grime, backstabbing and double-crosses, and there’s few ways to come out of it clean. Many of the most notable are the ones who are either unable or, worse, unwilling to try to find that path out–which aren’t just antagonists like Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter (1955), but also femmes fatale like Ann Savage in Detour (1945), and even leading roles like Humphrey Bogart in In A Lonely Place (1950). Kiss Me Deadly (1955) has Ralph Meeker playing the nasty P.I. protagonist Mike Hammer, and there’s few villains in the subgenre easier to despise than Hume Cronyn’s version of Nurse Ratched in a prison guard’s uniform in Brute Force (1947). The Old Sport has also discussed several nasties played by Dan Duryea. But I want to talk about one actor who is memorably unpleasant in so many performances throughout his career: Richard Widmark.
Widmark played heavies and nasties in a lot of his roles, from films noir to westerns to murder mysteries; his characters varied in how sympathetic they were, but many were unlikeable. Johnny Gannon in Edward Dmytryk’s western Warlock (1959) is a reformed gang member who never fully sheds that skin, despite demonstrating how much nobler he is than Henry Fonda’s black hat gunman. In William Keighley’s FBI spokespiece The Street With No Name (1948), Widmark plays a neurotic mob boss with tendrils spreading everywhere and a heavy hand with his wife. And in Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974), embodying a role that seems to have distilled every bitter drop from all the others, Widmark plays a murder victim who is shown to be so despicable that any one of the other characters would’ve had motive to kill him. Even his more heroic turns, like the prosecuting Army captain Tad Lawson in Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), still hold the sense of unpleasantness even when it’s redirected to better use.
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