Kiss the Blood Off My Hands

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is directed by Norman Foster and adapted to screenplay by Leonardo Bercovici and Walter Bernstein from the novel of the same name written by Gerald Butler. It stars Joan Fontaine, Burt Lancaster and Robert Newton. Music is by Miklós Rózsa and cinematography by Russell Metty.

It's a film that has a very up and down relationship among film noir aficionados, which is perfectly understandable. In many ways it's a frustrating viewing experience, because it has some truly great moments and from a visual perspective it's moody personified. In fact the back drops are pure noir dressage, even if the American studio recreation of post war London doesn't exactly look as it should.

Things start brilliantly with a brooding Lancaster accidentally killing the landlord of a public house with one punch, and then subsequently he is pursued through the dank streets of London in a chase sequence of some gusto. Upon entering a bedroom window he is met by a startled Fontaine, and thus begins a love affair between two opposites.

We learn that Lancaster's character is a scarred man from the war, that he was in a Prisoner of War camp, and that he just can't catch a break. Hanging around the vicinity is Newton's cockney low life, who witnessed the killing of the publican and uses this fact to blackmail Lancaster into doing an illegal job for him.

Film is 98% shot at night time, Metty's black and white photography tonally oppressive, this marries up nicely with the trials and tribulations of Lancaster throughout the picture. Fontaine is a radiant foil (this in spite of her suffering morning sickness as she was in early pregnancy), in fact both leading actors work very hard to make the thin screenplay work. But thin it is, and it sadly doesn't deliver a whammy at the finish.

It's a shame that the writing couldn't do justice to the themes of the plot, this is after all a story involving killings, violence, corporal punishment and dissociative disorder. What promises to be a tale of doomed lovers, ends up being a troubled romantic melodrama dressed up in noir clobber. That said, it's never less than enjoyable and the high points (visuals, acting, Rózsa's score) make it worth time invested. 6.5/10

Film noir tended to flaunt provocative titles, but few of them have set sail under a banner so arresting as Kiss The Blood Off My Hands. Parsed down, this translates simply as Redemption Through Love. Hot-tempered American seaman Burt Lancaster jumps ship in London and kills a man in a pub brawl. Chased through the labyrinthine byways of the postwar city, he climbs into Joan Fontaine's life. A spark ignites, but, terrified by his rages, she leaves him -- to a spell in prison for robbery and assault as well as a graphic lashing with a cat-o'-nine-tails.

Six months later they meet again. Fontaine finds him a job as a lorry driver for the clinic where she works as a nurse. But a slithery Cockney (Robert Newton), witness to the unsolved pub killing, blackmails him into to helping to hijack his cargo of penicillin, worth a fortune on the black market. Fontaine's unexpected presence throws a monkey wrench into the scheme, and Newton decides to use her as his instrument of revenge. But it turns out that she, too, can lash out when cornered....

In its setting more congenial to Sherlock Holmes than to Philip Marlowe, Kiss The Blood Off My Hands lacks something in the way of snap and sass, though its fog-bound nightscapes spook up the story. More romantic and, ultimately, upbeat than its transatlantic cousins, the movie upholds its noir pedigree by abandoning its protagonists to desperate circumstances. But it's a pity that Fontaine is kept such a saintly helpmate; in Ivy and Born to Be Bad, she showed her dark side, too.

Before he lost his soul, his mind, his spirit in lousy, stupid Disney production craps, Norman Foster was a good film maker, for instance this solid noir crime flick, and also WOMAN ON THE RUN or JOURNEY INTO FEAR; let's put besides some Mr MOTO or CHARLIE CHAN junk. So this one, starring Burt Lancaster sounds familiar if you already saw CRISS CROSS; same kind of character for Lancaster. It is rough, brutal, full of violence and passion. THEY LIVE BY NIGHT revisited and taking place in a big city. Efficient, tense, poignant, with a Burt Lancaster already on his rise to full stardom. And in rocket speed mode.

Kiss The Blood Off My Hands was the first film that Burt Lancaster had a hand in producing, it was the first for his personal company Norma Productions. In fact to get Joan Fontaine as his co-star he had to cut her in and her production company for half and give her top billing. Lancaster would later do that with Clark Gable and Gary Cooper when he co-starred with them, this according to a recent biography on Lancaster.

This was a frustrating film for me because I think it had the potential to be a real classic. Lancaster is a disturbed World War II veteran with issues we later find out did not come from just his military service. He's got a quick temper and a propensity to use his fists first. He accidentally kills a bar owner and happens to flee into Fontaine's apartment.

Joan is a repressed woman very much akin to the character she played in her Oscar winning performance in Suspicion. She works as a nurse and has no social life. Lancaster's animal magnetism both frightens and attracts her.

Unfortunately Robert Newton playing one of his patented evil characters is a small time crook who sees what Lancaster did. His attempt to blackmail Burt into a life of crime sets the tone for the rest of the film. Newton also steals the film from both stars in the scenes he's in.

A forced and contrived Hollywood ending really ruins this film. I'd like to rate it better, all the players did their job more than competently. But if you see Kiss The Blood Off My Hands I think you'll agree with me.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)

This is a surprisingly vivid movie. Some will find the plot a little canned, a vehicle for quick appeal, not quite a B movie enterprise. But I enjoyed so much the two leads--Joan Fontaine as ever luminous and sympathetic, Burt Lancaster in his tough yet lovable best--I loved the whole movie. Furthermore it is photographed, mostly at night, with amazing fluidity and drama, another high point in the film noir style.

Though this is a British-feeling movie set in London, it is topped out with American actors and directed by an American, too. It is a great example of that American archetype known as film noir. It even has the standard core of the best of them, a returning soldier struggling to make sense of normal life. Lancaster has a past that includes two years in a Nazi prison camp. He has the mental scars to show for it (as the text at the beginning explains needlessly for the time, but maybe helpfully for a viewer now).

It is the at first highly unlikely but increasingly plausible relationship between two lonely people that commands the movie. The less compelling plot line of a somewhat stereotypical blackmailer and the associated crimes is handled well in each case, though more about action than psychological depth. You get frustrated when Lancaster never tells Fontaine what is going on in his shady moments, but that's part of his problem and we are to go along. He trusts no one for good reason.

The finale? A bit hasty, maybe, the way that other famous Fontaine thriller is ("Suspicion"), but it's satisfying, too, and not quite a "Hollywood" ending.

The director is little known Norman Foster, who made a bunch of Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto films in the 1930s, and the quite good "Rachel and the Stranger." Another example of how teamwork lifts even less inspired aspects higher. This has a great cast, excellent music (by the dependable romantic whiz Miklos Rozsa), and great filming (with Russell Metty behind the camera).

The hardest thing about this film is finding it. I bought a really lousy DVD copy of a lousy tape made years ago off an AMC broadcast, and even so it was terrific watching, visually. It has been broadcast on TCM and I think their version would be superior, if you can find someone who has copied it (legality aside, though it might be past copyright).

It's not a masterpiece of a film, but it looks so darned good it should be released in full Blu-Ray and now. Meanwhile, happy hunting for a better copy than mine. It's worth it!