A kiss before death

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Movie
German title A kiss before death
Original title A Kiss Before Dying
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1956
length 95 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
Rod
Director Gerd Oswald
script Lawrence novel
production Robert L. Jacks
music Lionel Newman
camera Lucien Ballard
cut George A. Gittens
occupation

A kiss before death (original title: A Kiss Before Dying , reference title kiss before death ) is an American thriller from 1956 based on a novel by Ira Levin , whose work was first published in 1953 in New. The director was Gerd Oswald , whose directorial debut was the film. The leading roles are Robert Wagner , Jeffrey Hunter , Virginia Leith and Joanne Woodward .

James Dearden made a remake of the story in 1991 for Universal with Matt Dillon and Sean Young in a double role, in which she played both Dorothy and Ellen as their twin sister. The film was released in Germany under the title The Kiss Before Death .

action

When the young Dorothy Kingship, who comes from a very wealthy family, tells her friend and fellow student Bud Corliss that she is pregnant by him and talks about marriage, he tries to stop her. Dorothy, who broke up with her dominant father, is unwilling to reconnect with him. Bud sees his plans in jeopardy because he approached Dorothy with the ulterior motive of finding entry into the class of society to which he wants to belong at all costs. He is not interested in a marriage without acceptance into the Kingship family, which owns the prestigious Kingship Copper Mine. So he ponders how he can get rid of the problem "Dory", as he calls her, which threatens his career. In the library at Stoddard University he reads up about poisons. Unnoticed, he managed to get hold of two bags of poison powder from the chemistry faculty laboratory. His next step is to cover up any traces that could connect him to Dorothy. He insists that she tell no one about her pregnancy, not even her sister Ellen, with whom Dorothy has a very good relationship. Under a flimsy reason, he demands a photo back of himself, which Dorothy always carries with her. Since both have kept their relationship a secret, he is sure that he cannot be associated with the young woman.

At a meeting with Dorothy, he gives her prepared poison pills that have been declared a vitamin preparation, and asks her to take them later. When asked by phone in the evening, he asked Dorothy to confirm that she had taken the pills. When Dorothy is not in the lecture the next day, he already feels confident of victory, but then doesn't believe he can believe his eyes when she appears at the last moment. He put a letter in the mailbox for Ellen the night before that contained handwritten lines from Dorothy suggesting suicide. He had slipped these lines on his unsuspecting girlfriend as a translation of a Spanish text.

In cold blood he changes his plans and urges Dorothy to marry today. Knowing that the registry office is closed at lunchtime, he guides the young woman onto the roof of the skyscraper. Before he pushes it down, he asks about the poison pills. Dorothy had recently confessed that she hadn't taken this because she was afraid that it would end her pregnancy. After giving the deadly blow to the completely unsuspecting person, he takes the poison pills from her handbag without any visible emotion.

After the letter reached the Kingship family, and Dorothy's autopsy revealed a pregnancy, it is believed that she committed suicide. Her father reacts coolly as usual, but Ellen doesn't believe that her sister killed herself. So she exchanges ideas with the part-time lecturer Gordon Grant, who has offered her his help. In doing so, she realizes that her sister should not only have jumped from the skyscraper, in which the registry office is also located, but was wearing something old, something borrowed, something new and something blue. This suggests that Dorothy went to the registry office to get married, not to die. Since Gordon's uncle Howard Chesser is the detective in charge of the case, the young man who works for him wants to speak to him again, while Ellen does further investigations.

After Ellen identifies a suspect, she calls him to a club by telling him on the tape that she knows what he did to Dorie. That's how she meets radio host Dwight Powell. He admits that he was close friends with Dorothy, but he never called her Dorie. However, he had the name and address of a man with whom she had been with him after the time. Since he doesn't have this note with him, he wants to fetch it. All of a sudden in his room he is faced with Bud Corliss, who threatens him with a gun and asks him to type a prepared confession into the machine that says that he has killed Dorothy. After Bud Powell shot dead in cold blood, he disappears unnoticed. Chesser is convinced that Dorothy's killer has self-judged and closes the case. Ellen now also believes that it was so.

Bud has now approached Ellen and believes he is on the right track this time. Although he is only friends with Ellen so far, he does everything in his power to make more of it, as her father does not stand in the way of this connection either. And so they both become a couple. On the day of the engagement party, Gordon Grant appears to Ellen to tell her that Powell cannot possibly have been her sister's killer. It turned out beyond any doubt that Powell was at a tennis tournament in Mexico City, far away from the crime scene, at the time of the crime. When Grant then faces Bud Corliss as Ellen's fiancé, he remembers seeing him with Dorothy. He not only shares this knowledge with his uncle by phone, but also with Leo Kingship. When Ellen learns of the suspicion in the room, she reacts icily and doesn't want to know anything about it. Shortly thereafter, Chesser Leo Kingship confirmed that there was now evidence that Bud Corliss was Dorothy's friend.

During a trip to the copper mine of her father's company, Ellen manages to speak to Bud about the suspicion. He tells her a fairy tale that although he knew Dorothy briefly, he didn't talk about it so as not to hurt her. "Dorie" had dozens of friends, he says. "But only one who called her" Dory "," replies Ellen flatly. Bud knows that she saw through him. "Your father and I will mourn for you, and that will be a solid bond between us," he says, before leaving Ellen, who is desperate and defending herself with all her strength, from the edge of the cliff and then wants to come across an approaching transport vehicle. But when Bud tries to avoid the car that Ellen is avoiding, he plunges himself into the abyss.

prehistory

An abridged version of the novel A Kiss Before Dying was published in Cosmopolitan in July 1953 . According to a report in The Hollywood Reporter in the same year, Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights to Ira Levin's story and intended to entrust their contracted actor Robert Wagner with one of the leading roles. The producers were Robert Parrish from Crown Productions, Robert Goldstein and Robert L. Jacks. Martin Milner was intended for the role of radio presenter Dwight Powell, but that fell apart. The film marks Gerd Oswald's directorial debut. Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Jeffrey Hunter were loaned to United Artists by Twentieth Century Fox for the film .

In 1956, Robert Wagner decided against his boyish, neatly drawn picture of his previous roles and first took on the role of the pillaging brother of the character played by Spencer Tracy in the film drama The Mountain of Temptation , only to go one step further in this film and playing a cold-blooded psychopathic killer just to not be a "nice boy" anymore. Controversy arose from the fact that, in the Eisenhower era, anything related to the term “celibate pregnant” was barely censored, let alone used in advertisements.

Production, background, publication

It is a film by United Artists Corp., Crown Productions Inc. It was shot in Tucson , Arizona , at the University of Arizona and in a mine owned by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company . The shooting time extended from the beginning of June to July 7, 1955 in the RKO-Pathé Studios .

On the positive side, it was noted that production went smoothly, which was also due to Mary Astor, Joanne Woodward, Jeffrey Hunter, George Macready and Virginia Leith. It was a fresh start for Astor after their last film made in 1949. In her autobiography, A Life on Film , she revealed that an unnamed colleague told her when she was introduced that he thought she was already dead.

Joanne Woodward, who played the somewhat smaller, unfortunate role of the ignorant victim, was only at the beginning of her career on the screen. This was her second film; She was anything but happy about her role, later she often referred to it as one of her worst. Even back then, the actress had an aversion to Hollywood glamor, but she managed to appear in pin-up poses in a sexy, sleeveless dress on a promotional tour in New York.

The film features the title A Kiss Before Dying , music Lionel Newman , text Carroll Coates, vocals Dolores Hawkins.

In the United States, the film was released on June 12, 1956. It was published in the Federal Republic of Germany on September 28, 1956. It was first seen in Austria in January 1957.

It was also marketed in the following countries: Finland, Portugal, Australia, Denmark, Spain, Greece (premiere on DVD), Brazil, Canada, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Turkey.

DVD

The film was released for the first time on August 18, 2003 with a German soundtrack by the Twentieth Century Fox studio on DVD. On September 3, 2007, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released an improved version on DVD under the heading "Hollywood Insider Tip".

Review

Anyone who has seen the remake of the 1991 film with Matt Dillon and Sean Young will recognize that the original from 1956 is the better version. The film suggests a certain distrust of strangers, especially attractive men who appear to be charming and considerate. In a sense, Robert Wagner's role can be said to be the prototype for all devilishly good-looking men in the roles of murderers, from Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell in the court film The Compulsion to Evil (1958) to Christian Bale in the thriller American Psycho (1999).

criticism

“On average in terms of direction and presentation, psychologically too simple, the film only achieves sound tension and deeper human interest in a few places. Debut film by Gerd Oswald, the son of the Austrian film pioneer and emigrant Richard Oswald [...]. "

- Lexicon of international film

For the industry journal Variety , the way the murder story is told was rather unconventional. The mood spread by the film fits Gerd Ostwald's restrained direction. Robert Wagner pulls out all the stops in his role as a killer, Joanne Woodward is particularly good as a pregnant girl and Virginia Leith is acceptable in her role as the victim's sister. Jeffrey Hunter almost drowned in his role. Mary Astor and George Macready are okay, as is Mary Astor as the murderer's mother.

Jeff Stafford, on the other hand, was of the opinion that Mary Astor in particular, as the mother of the psychopathic murderer, was "unforgettable" in her role.

For Dennis Schwartz, the story had many holes, so the explanation why Bud wanted Dorothy's death so badly was rather inadequate. However, in his role as a villain, Robert Wagner is a change from the usual good guys he used to play.

Crazy4cinema believed that Robert Wagner was perfectly cast in his role as a handsome, ambitious, soulless killer who would do anything to gain entry into the world of the privileged. If he were a better actor, he would be truly scary in his role. Joanne Woodward is very good in her victim role, you can feel her precision in this, her second film. It could have been even more impressive if it had been a better film. Virginia Leith lacks the strength and conviction necessary to carry the rest of the story.

The United States Bishops' Conference found that the tension was effective until the first murder, but then subsided considerably. The film offers stylized violence, some scenes of intense threat and instinct-driven situations. It was classified as an adult audience only and was declared “morally offensive”.

Film Noir could hardly gain anything from the film adaptation and wrote: “The film is so mediocre that it is plain when you look at the original book by Ira Levin, whose debut of the same name (EA 1953) was turned into a script by Lawrence Roman and filmed by Gerd Oswald Hurts. ”It was criticized that you hardly learn anything about the characters and that the chemistry between Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward just isn't right. Wagner's less multi-faceted acting was also criticized, as was Woodward's even paler, who later regretted this role. Virginia Leith's performance as Ellen Kingship did not raise the level either - quite the opposite. Character actor George Macreadys potential is given away "for lack of an interesting role". Mary Astor is "barely recognizable in her non-role". It went on: “Gerd Oswald succeeds in turning Levin's novel, which offers an involuntary pregnancy and a bottomless materialism - explosive topics for the mid-fifties - as the driving force of a dark fable about the amorality of the American upper class, into a flat one from the very beginning To transform a predictable thriller, which takes a lot of talent. "

Deepreds-kino.blogspot.de , where Robert Wagner was certified that he shines as a “soulless murderer” in this “classic of the thriller” , saw a completely different view . “His horrified facial expression is priceless when Joanne Woodward suddenly shows up at the university lecture, although she should have been dead long ago.” Joanne Woodward was certified that she played “extremely sympathetic” and the film through “numerous deviations in content and ideas bribe [e] ”. In conclusion, it said: "In addition to [...] small bumps, 'A kiss before death' offers very exciting, for a film from the 50s unusually cryptic entertainment with good actors, an excellent villain and an extremely sophisticated script."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Kiss Before Death Illustrated Film Stage No. 3434
  2. ↑ A Kiss Before Dying (1956) script info at TCM - Turner Classic Movies (English)
  3. ↑ A Kiss Before Dying (1956) Notes at TCM (English)
  4. ↑ a b c d e Jeff Stafford: A Kiss Before Dying (1956) Articles at TCM (English)
  5. ↑ The Kiss Before Death DVD
  6. ↑ The kiss before death at filmundo.de
  7. ↑ A kiss before death. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 24, 2019 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  8. ↑ Review: 'A Kiss Before Dying' at variety.com (English)
  9. ↑ Dennis Schwartz: Review: 'A Kiss Before Dying' In: Ozus World Movies Reviews (English)
  10. ↑ A Kiss Before Dying (1956) ( Memento of the original from November 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Review at crazy4cinema.com (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.crazy4cinema.com
  11. ↑ A Kiss Before Dying at usccb.org (English)
  12. ↑ Kiss before death at der-film-noir.de. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  13. ↑ A kiss before death (1956) at deepreds-kino.blogspot.de. Retrieved November 8, 2016.