Les amants traqués

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.

The leads do an adequate job with the material they are given, and they are at the height of their physical attractiveness, charm and star power.

This film was written by three people. That might have been part of the problem. It just doesn't build up enough tension or suspense for my taste. The antagonist just isn't given enough leverage, power or menace.

This is a bit of an Offbeat noir, even original. The stars are so watchable they make up for the inadequacies and simpleness of the script. Had the script and story been fleshed out more into a 90 or 120 minute film this might have ended up a classic.

In post-war London, an ex-soldier hides out in a strange woman's apartment in Kiss the Blood off My Hands, a 1948 film starring Burt Lancaster Joan Fontaine, Robert Newton, and Jay Novello.

A man with violent tendencies (or perhaps PTSD), Bill Saunders (Lancaster) gets into a bar brawl and is chased by the police. He opens the window of a lonely woman, Jane (Fontaine) and stays there until the next morning. If she's scared, she manages to keep her cool.

Bill seeks her out later and convinces her to go to the races with him. While on the train going home, he gets into another brawl - and then attacks a police officer. This time, he gets a prison sentence of six months.

Upon his release, the kind-hearted Jane gets him a job as a medical supplies driver at the clinic where she works. Unfortunately for Bill, a man named Harry Carter (Robert Newton) saw the bar fight and blackmails Bill.

Harry and his gang want to steal valuable penicillin that Bill is carrying which is supposed to be administered to sick children. Bill agrees, but changes his mind, and more violence ensues.

Jane and Bill are in love, but he needs to leave town in a hurry and believes he has no place in her life. She doesn't want him to go. Soon she's up to her neck due to his difficulties.

Handsome, hunky Burt Lancaster gives an excellent performance as a man who's had no breaks and whose hair-trigger temper lands him into trouble. Joan Fontaine is lovely, with a gentle, sweet but strong nature.

Decent, atmospheric noir with performances that make it involving. It doesn't live up to its wild title. It's basically dressed up as romance.

Set in England, it features some atmospheric film noir sequences, Burt Lancaster as an American soldier who's been in a Nazi prison and has what we would now call PTSD, Joan Fontaine as the upstanding woman whose apartment he sneaks into when he's running away from the cops, and Robert Newton as a thoroughly enjoyable over-the-top villain. Did I mention Burt's shirtless scenes? His eyes are photographed extremely well; I'm not sure if he looks more handsome in any other movie, even TRAPEZE. We even see (or rather, hear) Burt being flogged as part of the English justice system.

Fontaine and Lancaster make a reasonably good romantic couple. Director Norman Foster and his cinematographer, Russell Metty, add some noir styling. I found it a very entertaining film noir plus romance. The "oops, gotta follow the Code" ending seems tacked on, but it doesn't spoil the film. Burt Lancaster fans will certainly enjoy it.

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.