Richard Widmark: Rebel With a Cause

In 1983, the Telluride Film Festival was known to film aficionados as much for its annual tributes to cinema greats as it was for being a showcase for emerging talent. Arriving in the thin Rocky Mountain air 25 years ago, I was pleased to discover that one of the tributees was to be the Russian writer-director Andre Tarkovsky. But I was ecstatic about the other honoree: the American actor and sometime producer Richard Widmark. Beginning Monday, Widmark, who was 93 when he passed away in March, will be the posthumous recipient of a three-film mini-retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Cinemátek.

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Tarkovsky's brooding, dolorous, gradually paced films that the writer and director of "Stalker" and "The Mirror" was far from a ray of sunshine when he accepted his award honors that year in Telluride. Onstage at the Sheridan Opera House, the director held forth, via translator, on the sorry and corrupt state of cinema — a "high poetical discipline of art" that Tarkovsky declared was approaching aesthetic extinction as a result of marketplace materialism and the tyranny of audiences' unjust and irrelevant need to be entertained.

When Widmark took the same stage the following evening, he did not begin his remarks with perfunctory thanks to the festival organizers or a homily about working with John Ford, Elia Kazan, Sam Fuller, or John Wayne. In the same measured, faintly unctuous, and impatient sepulchral semi-growl he'd lent to the particularly anxious strain of anti-hero for which he will always be best remembered, Widmark began his short and pointed speech with, "I'd like to say a word in defense of entertainment," before demolishing the Russian director's tirade more or less point by point without once invoking his name.

It was incisive, low-key showmanship and a great performance. The actor spoke the truth as he felt it, using a few carefully chosen words and a minimum of gesture to transmit powerful emotions. Vanity Fair later reported that Widmark's sole direct statement about his co-honoree that night was delivered out of the spotlight, off the cuff, and in the vernacular of the street-life characters he often played during his first decade in Hollywood. "Tarkovsky," the actor was heard to say, "he's a phony. He stinks."

By 1983, Widmark was in the twilight of a career built on giving voice to the indignity of loners pushed to act, and of the narratively damned — crooks and cops, soldiers and sailors — risking tragedy by courting righteousness with palpable desperation. Like his contemporary, Robert Mitchum, Widmark had an easy way with the camera and did a lot with a little. But unlike Mitchum, Widmark's stock-in-trade characters personified the anxieties of leadership, love, lawlessness, masculinity, and the other boilerplate themes common to the genre pictures that both actors made. Mitchum was a cool, deep reservoir. Widmark was a riptide.

The Minnesota-born, Illinois-educated radio and stage actor, and sometime acting teacher, was already in his 30s when he signed his first movie contract with 20th Century Fox in the mid 1940s. Over the objections of the film's director, Henry Hathaway, Fox's very hands-on studio head, Darryl Zanuck, chose Widmark to play mob assassin Tommy Udo in his first big-screen appearance: 1947's "Kiss of Death." With his waxen features framed by a slouch hat and high collar, and emitting a blood-curdling, infantile nasal giggle, Widmark's Udo is one of the most seductively abhorrent homicidal misanthropes ever committed to celluloid. The actor's performance in "Kiss of Death" remains one of the most unforgettable debuts in the history of American movies.

It took Widmark a few years to escape typecast roles as the personification of everything loathsome about the American male. That is likely why BAM will showcase the pre-heroic, reptilian Widmark persona in William Keighley's rarely screened 1948 gutter melodrama "The Street With No Name."

"The motion picture you are about to see was adapted from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wherever possible, it was photographed in the original locale and played by the actual FBI personnel involved," a title card informs us at the beginning of the film. Like its predecessor, "The House on 92nd Street," "The Street With No Name" was part of Fox's influential run of crime films that used location filming to add a realistic layer of sleaze to what were otherwise fairly strident and inelegantly cautionary potboilers about cops and robbers. With Widmark purring and prowling through the central villain role, director and former stage actor Keighley was free to energetically evoke his filmmaking roots at depression-era Warner Bros. "The Street With No Name" is more a guiltless and fast-moving throwback to '30s gangster pictures than a self-conscious bid to capture the post-World War II location shooting zeitgeist.

Jules Dassin's "Night and the City" (1950) combines the sordid London underworld and professional wrestling trappings with an ingeniously tumbling house-of-cards plot made of lies and yearnings and cut-rate martyrdom. Currently lost in the shadow of Dassin's Paris-set follow up, "Rififi," "Night in the City" is nevertheless one of the most ingeniously downbeat and romantic crime pictures ever made.

The third film in BAM's Widmark trifecta, Sam Fuller's berserk 1954 CinemaScope red-scare oddity "Hell and High Water," plays like a live-action, Cold War-era Steven Canyon comic strip. Taken together, the three films on display showcase the darkly shaded, uneasy, and shifty-eyed take on human strength and weakness that Widmark so effortlessly employed in pursuit and defense of entertainment.

A Tribute to Richard Widmark will run between Monday and Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).