Widmark recorded 13 episodes of radio drama (well, melodrama) for Suspense! one of which has unfortunately been lost. It's not easy to search for episodes that you particularly want, so these are the numbers.
Rope - missing episode (sadly) Too hot to live - 378 (an ex-soldier goes on the run - barefoot - when his lover is found dead.) Tell you why I shouldn't die - 409 (A cheating friend explains to his friend why he double-crossed him and why the friend shouldn't kill him). The hunting of Bob Lee - 422 (Grim Western manhunt) A Murderous Revision (1951) - 423 (Excellent murder story set in a radio drama show where the scriptwriter takes his job rather too literally). Track of the Cat - 433 (Hunting a legendary big cat amongst the snowy wastes with a bit of Indian magic thrown in). Mate Bram - 441 (Unresolved murder mystery aboard ship, apparently a true story. Widmark is the eponymous First Mate, a man with a troubled past. Includes his participation in an Autolight advert afterwards.) How long is the night - 453 (A soldier finds himself abandoned on a radioactive island and starts hearing things). The Spencer Brothers - 468 Othello part 1 - 482 Othello part 2 - 483 A message for Garcia - 488 The card game - 519 (A compulsive two-bit gambler is convinced he can make it big and make a happy family life for himself and his heavily pregnant wife).
All available to listen to (complete with irritating adverts) at https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Suspense_Singles
Charlton Heston, Richard Widmark: Tough guys, strong presences
byRoger Ebert
Recently we lost two American actors who embodied widely different styles, and their passing is a reminder that the very presence of an actor can suggest everything about a film. Charlton Heston was tall, outward, masculine, exuding bravado, often cast in larger-than-life roles. Richard Widmark was lithe, inward, sardonic. Heston's characters stood on mountaintops and divided the Red Sea. Widmark's often lived in the shadows. Heston played some smaller roles, but there was always the danger he would be too big for them. Widmark often played mainstream roles, but was always more interesting when he was an outsider on the run.
Heston made at least three movies that almost everybody eventually sees: "Ben-Hur, "The Ten Commandments" and "Planet of the Apes" (1968). Widmark occupied smaller, darker pieces, and embodied film noir. Many filmgoers may not have seen "Night and the City" or "Panic in the Streets" (both 1950) or "Pickup on South Street" (1953), but if they have, they remember him. All the TV obituaries used that same clip of him pushing an old lady in a wheel chair down a flight of stairs in "Kiss of Death" (1947), his first film, but there was so much more than that.
Heston, raised on Chicago's North Shore, wanted to be an actor almost from the get-go, and made a 16-mm version of "Julius Caesar" in college. "We used all actual locations," he told me in a 1968 interview. "The steps of the Art Institute, the Elk's Temple, the Field Museum, the beaches of Lake Michigan. You would have sworn it was the real thing, except for the acting."
He was "tabbed for stardom," as they used to say, by Cecil B. DeMille, who cast him as him the ringmaster in "The Greatest Show on Earth." which many argue is the worst movie to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, and in 1956 established himself forever in DeMille's "The Ten Commandments." From then on he was often in epics of the sort called "towering," and began to be the victim of self-parody, even though he was always on pitch, and had the heft to carry roles others would have disappeared in. His firm authority makes "Planet of the Apes" (1968) a better film than many, including me, thought at the time.
Widmark's roles were in the middle, not the epic, range. He played cops, robbers, wise guys, military men, horror characters and cowboys, figuring importantly in some of John Ford's elegiac last films. His characters never saved the world, but they usually saved their own skin, and that was the point. He kept a low public profile, made few statements, endorsed few causes, retired so successfully some people were surprised, at the time of his death, that he was still alive. Why did the Academy never honor his lifetime achievement?
Heston was very public, very political (first liberal, then conservative), a willing spokesman for what he believed. In early days he led the charge against racist Hollywood hiring policies. In later years he was the voice of the National Rifle Association. It is always tragic when someone suffers from Alzheimer's, but his bravery and grace in publicly acknowledging his illness was dignified and touching.
What intrigues me about Heston is what he might have done had he never met the bombastic Cecil B. DeMille. Seek out a little film named "Will Penny" (1968), which he told me was his personal favorite, to see an entirely different side of his abilities. Or see him in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 "Hamlet," where he embodies the Player King with astonishing invention, transforming conventional ideas about the role.
Probably, DeMille or not, Heston would have found himself in roles of heroic stature; in an industry that focuses on appearances, he looked like the hero, not the best buddy. It took another larger-than-life figure, Orson Welles, to find a channel for that presence, in his "Touch of Evil" (1958).
Widmark stayed within a narrower, more realistic range. He told me in 1968 he treasured his work with the great John Ford in "Cheyenne Autumn" (1964) and "Two Rode Together" (1961). "I'm glad I got him as a director at all," he said almost wistfully. We were speaking at the time of the ascendency of James Bond, and he defended his own pure, straight-ahead film noir: "I have this kind of nostalgia for crime films," he said. "I think we've about exhausted the fancy angles and trick cigarette lighters. Hollywood developed the crime film almost into an art over the years, and it hurt me to see all that work thrown away on spoofs and put-ons."
If Widmark was guarded and private, Heston was outgoing, good company. I remember drinking with him one night at O'Rourke's, the legendary Chicago newspaperman's saloon. He was introduced to Mike McGuire, the military editor of the Chicago Tribune. "Ah, yes," he said. "You supported my policies in the 'Ben Hur' campaign."
Speaking of "Will Penny," he said, "It's one of my favorite roles, because it is real, you see, and not all faked up to make it nice. It even has an unhappy ending." Left unsaid was how many of his films such qualities did not apply to. "I always get the super-hero parts," he said. "That's one nice thing about 'Will Penny.' I'm just an ordinary cowboy, not Ben-Hur in the saddle."
Compared to today's superstars, who are so cosseted and idolized, actors like Heston and Widmark went at their craft full-bore, as solid professionals. They expected to be surrounded by supporting actors, did not monopolize a film, and were not marketed as the whole product.
Listen to the gassy profundity of so many of today's stars, analyzing their techniques, and then listen to Widmark describing why John Ford liked making Westerns: "He enjoys working in the fresh air." Or listen to Heston, describing how he mastered the art of Ben-Hur's chariot driving: "Actually, I played it by ear."
Have to say, Amazon is remarkably thorough sometimes. When it says it's going to deliver, it delivers. I pre-ordered this film as it's a new release and it was hand-delivered yesterday - on a Sunday! Such a shame the film doesn't warrant such special attention.
It's one of Widmark's later films - 1972 - so he's pretty old in this, but frankly it's just rather dull. It goes on for far too long. There's a hefty chunk of backstory about the Ute Indian kid, Thomas Black Bull (Frederic Forrest), living in the wilderness with his pet bear, who gets dragged off to school and learns how to be good with horses. (The kid, not the bear. Now that would have been interesting). Black Bull then gets noticed and taken on by Red Dillon (Widmark) who wants to promote him in rodeo. Cue lots of shots of Black Bull falling off horses (some stunt men had their work cut out for this film, I imagine) and then lots of shots of lots of different rodeos. It didn't hold my interest and I don't think this film will be going high up the watch list. The relationship between them sours of course. Dillon takes all the money and either drinks it or spends on women until one day Black Bull dumps him and takes off alone. There are a couple of fights but nothing too exciting. Black Bull comes back in time to see Dillon die and then he returns to his roots. A slow film, a very long film - or at least it felt that way. I'm afraid this one is just going to sit on the shelf now.
Richard Widmark stars as they psychotic crime-writer pushed to the edge by a radio director who keeps changing his plots. Really good baddie character, dripping with menace. Of course he was well established as a movie villain by this time, but I suspect there may be other radio plays out there which I've yet to track down or listen to.
Update - there's a lot more plays out there! See this link.
And this gives a definitive list. Not only did Widmark do Shakespeare (and what an excellent bad guy to do - Iago of course - but it seemed also found time during what must have been a pretty hectic filming schedule under his Fox contract in the late 1940s and 1950s to still produce radio drama.
Richard Widmark and Suspense
This week saw the passing of actor Richard Widmark (1914-2008), who died at age 93. Though he is known primarily for his film and television work, he began his career in radio and left behind an interesting collection of performances.
Richard Widmark made thirteen appearances on Suspense between 1942 and 1954. His first appearance occurred as early as episode #4, when he appeared in Suspense's presentation of "Rope," Patrick Hamilton's 1929 play about the Leopold and Lobe murder case. On Suspense he played roles that ranged from Iago in Shakespeare's Othello to a radio-script writer gone mad in "A Murderous Revision."
Here is the list of episodes in which he appeared:
1) "Rope" (07/08/1942) - Considered a lost episode. No known recordings of this broadcast exist.
The first movie star I ever saw in person was Richard Widmark. He had appeared in perhaps a dozen movies that I had seen mostly playing a bad guy who seemed to take great delight in not just being evil but unspeakably so. Therefore when at the end of the movie and he got his comeuppance it was not just satisfying but cheer inducing.
He was thin and sly. His smile was crooked and it quickly turned into a sneer. He couldn't be trusted even when he was being sincere. You could tell that from his eyes. They were always darting about searching for corners or dark places. Other performers had strong steady eyes, Widmarks' was always flashing around nervously. He kept us on the edge of our seats with those eyes because you never knew what he was up to. He was unpredictable and dangerous. But our favorite part was not his eyes but his hair. It was blond and sat relatively lifeless on his head until he was punched or slapped. Then it would come alive. It would fly like a wave breaking over a rock and that would tell us that the blow really hurt. This bad guy was finally getting what he deserved. And if the guy administering the beating was big and beefy as Victor Mature then we really went crazy. “Hit him again!…Slap him, slap him, make his hair fly!” we would scream. And invariably the movie would grant our wish. The hero would punch and slap him, cowardly Widmark would whimper and whine and we loved it. We loved Richard Widmark, loved him more than we loved our own parents and went to see every movie he appeared in.
It was a Saturday afternoon and the sun was as usual high and bright in the sky. We kids were standing in front of The Center Theatre waiting to go in and see the triple bill of action films they were playing when someone, one of our other friends said: “Hey, you know who down on the waterfront?”
“Who?”
“The movie star man. The one who does do the giggle.”
“Who you talking about?”
“Richard Widmark man. Don’t you know nothing?”
“Richard Widmark?! Oh my God!”
And with that we took off running all three of us.
And there he was. There he was in sunglasses wearing a sport shirt with tan slacks. Richard Widmark, our favorite bad guy and God. He was standing there talking to some people and pointing to something out at sea. He wasn’t physically that big but he looked like he looked in the movies kind of wiry and hard. He was saying that he was just on the island for the day and that the island was beautiful. We didn’t want to hear any of that. We wanted to hear him giggle that evil giggle of his. But as he stood there and talked to the small crowd that had gathered around him it was clear that he wasn’t going to unless someone had the daring to ask him. And even then he might not but somebody had to take the chance and ask.
“You ask him……No, you ask him…..Why me? No, you ask him!” We kept pushing each other and quarrelling. Then for reasons I don’t remember it fell to me to do the asking. I couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve at the time. None of us were. It was a tough job but someone had to do it. I borrowed a pen and a piece of paper and asked him for his autograph. And while he was signing his name I said quietly: “Sir, you think you could do that laugh for us?”
“What laugh?”
“The one you does do just before you beat a woman or kill a man.”
“ You want me to do my evil laugh, huh?”
“Yes, yes that’s it. Your evil laugh.”
“Well”, he said “Heh…heh…heh…heh…heh…heh. I can’t do it for you because it’s in my contract that I can’t laugh unless it’s in a scene and a camera is turning. You follow?” And then he did that incredible giggle again. And we just froze where we were standing, we practically wet our pants because he had taken off his sunglasses and was looking straight at us while he was doing it.
He left after a few minutes because he had someplace to go I suppose but we just stayed there. We forgot about the movie we were going to or that we had already bought the tickets. This was better than any triple bill could be. Richard Widmark standing there talking to us and doing his giggle. We spent the rest of the afternoon going minutely over everything that was said right up to the moment when he did his laugh. For weeks and months after we recreated word for word the whole episode for our friends.
In the course of a long career Widmark did some wonderful work in films and also on TV and not always as the villain. He played many a hero and men of integrity but we liked him best as a villain.
He died in 2008 at the age of 93 and I whispered a quiet “Thank you” that I hope he heard. It went something like this.“Thank you Richard Widmark for your talent and career. And thank you particularly for that Saturday afternoon giggle. You’ll never know what years of pleasure you gave to those three West Indian boys that day.”
1959's The Trap is an efficient thriller with an all-star cast and a melodramatic script. The Paramount production in Technicolor may never have been released on home video until now. Popular star Richard Widmark was at the height of his acting career, and also producing and directing. Stage great Lee J. Cobb had been in movies since the middle thirties and had long been a respected featured player. Co-writer, director and (with his partner Melvin Frank) producer Norman Panama began as a comedy writer and was noted as a gag man for Bob Hope; he and Melvin Frank wrote the hit Broadway play Li'l Abner. Panama directed mostly comedies for big names like Hope and Danny Kaye. He also directed the key Cold War drama Above and Beyond, a revisionist view of the Paul Tibbets/Enola Gay Hiroshima mission. The Trap is a second non-comedy directing effort.
The story unspools in the fictitious California desert town of Tula, a tiny spot just big enough to have a downtown and its own airfield. A motorcade from the city arrives bearing the notorious underworld chieftain Victor Massonetti (Lee J. Cobb) and his entourage of hoods, including Victor's close associate Davis (Lorne Greene). The subject of a widespread manhunt, Massonetti has a plan worked out to leave the country, avoiding blocked roads and watched airports. Mob lawyer Ralph Anderson (Richard Widmark) just happens to have kin in Tula. His father Lloyd (Carl Benton Reid) is the Sheriff, and his brother Tippy (Earl Holliman) a deputy. Ralph has been given no choice -- he's here to ask his father allow a chartered plane to spirit Massonetti away to Mexico.
Ralph runs into nothing but trouble. He finds Tippy, now an alcoholic, sleeping in a jail cell. Tippy is estranged from his beautiful young wife Linda (Tina Louise), who was Ralph's girl long ago, before he left town, running away from the responsibility for a cheap crime. Sheriff Lloyd knows how Ralph makes his money now, and at first refuses to listen to him. Tippy is convinced that Ralph has come back for Linda, who is fed up with Tippy's irresponsibility and Lloyd's abusiveness. The family's dirty laundry gets an agonizing airing before Linda decides to leave town. When Ralph finally gets a chance to explain what is happening, Lloyd decides to cooperate and let Massonetti escape. It seems the only way to avoid a bloodbath: the gangster's heavily armed henchmen have already cut communications to Tula and can easily overwhelm Lloyd's lawmen. But the signals get crossed. Eyeing the sizeable reward on Massonetti's head, Tippy and two deputies disobey Lloyd and attempt an arrest. After an initial shootout Ralph has no choice but to use Massonetti as a shield. He and Tippy undertake to drive the gang leader to the county seat across a treacherous road. Spotted by the mob's airplane, the lone car is soon under attack by Massonetti's unseen marksmen. The brothers pick up Linda on the way. Have they a hope to get through?
A transposition of Key Largo to the desert setting of Bad Day at Black Rock, The Trap is a good but not exceptional thriller. Fine second-unit location work on the high desert cannot hide the fact that much of the show is filmed on sound stages. Downtown Tula is the familiar Paramount western town set, the one backed by a painted cutout of a hill to disguise the Hollywood soundstages and palm trees.
The serviceable story follows the family dramatics in the Anderson house with a third-act flight across the desert. The screenplay by Richard Alan Simmons and Norman Panama is no gem, as the characters never seem more than shallow sketches. Richard Widmark's Ralph is supposed to be a corrupted mob mouthpiece, forced against his will to bring armed killers to his hometown. Yet he's also a nice guy and an ethical hero type. His Cain/Abel relationship with Tippy is just a mechanism to poison the family relationships; it provides a character reveal twist that only makes Ralph seem even more of a hero. Carl Benton Reid's Sheriff is a bitter hothead; if he's really so rigidly ethical his decision to break his oath of office and let Massonetti escape seems wholly inconsistent. Poor Earl Holliman doesn't always do well outside a comfortable envelope of rustic nice guy parts. The script lumps so many loathsome hats on Tippy - weakling, alcoholic, abusive husband, treacherous brother, greedy deputy -- that his character turns into a joke. When not double-crossing somebody, Tippy is whining like a bratty little kid.
This leaves the pro contributions of Lee J. Cobb and Tina Louise. Cobb overplayed his share of film roles but keeps the pragmatic Victor Massonetti pitched at just the right level of ironic detachment. The mobster dismisses the local hicks while demanding total obedience from his gang, especially the efficient fixer played by Lorne Greene. Victor figures he's bought and paid for Ralph and trusts him because the lives of his family are at stake. During the highway escape the prisoner is suitably frightened but also confident that his captors haven't a chance.
Third-billed Tina Louise played on Broadway in Li'l Abner and had some TV exposure before her filmic debut inGod's Little Acre. Despite her good performance, that picture didn't set Hollywood on fire. After The Trap Louise found herself in two good westerns (Day of the Outlaw and The Hangman). Louise is credible as the town beauty that settled for second best. Linda's initial scene greeting Ralph is so good that it holds out hope for more interesting character developments. Given less emphasis, Linda holds her own and better in the family showdown.
The film's action sequences are logical enough. The unseen mob snipers must have had a lot of experience in the desert, for they appear out of nowhere to harass the fleeing heroes. At one point a construction machine is used to block the escape route, and the group can find no place to hide from the high-powered rifle bullets. No knockout stunts crop up but a showdown between a car and an airplane is nicely handled. The film's best surprise comes when our heroes are met by Highway Patrolmen, who take Massonetti into custody.
The Trap is an undemanding and reasonably tense thriller, smartly acted, that might have fared better with a little more thought given to its character dynamics. At a certain point we feel as if we're watching an updated western with just enough dramatic logic to motivate the shootouts and ambushes, and give us a poster image of Widmark holding a rifle. It is recommended, for the good turns by Lee J.Cobb and Tina Louise.
Olive Films' Blu-ray of The Trap has two near-flawless transfers of this production, one in 1:78 widescreen and one in open-matte 1:37. The image is sharp overall. Those lonely stretches of desert highway look quite good in long shots. Original prints were in Technicolor but since the camera negative was conventional Eastman stock, restoration issues that plague older 3-strip IB Tech shows do not pose a problem.
A music strike hit town in 1958, which I'm assuming accounts for Paramount's decision to use stock music onThe Trap. I'm not so attuned to various composers that I can recognize every individual style, but I am certain that I heard a cue from one of Miklos Rozsa's Paramount noirs of the late 1940s. According to the IMDB my guess was correct, and Rozsa's work is accompanied by recycled tracks composed by Daniele Amfitheatrof, Gerard Carbonara, Bernard Herrmann, Alex North, Walter Scharf, Leith Stevens, Van Cleave, Franz Waxman and Victor Young. The title theme is not bad; it might be fun to find out from where it was sourced!
RICHARD WIDMARK of the sharp fedora and clammy brow: the image has been indelible since his 1947 movie debut in ''Kiss of Death,'' as the killer who giggles over his victims with tongue poked lewdly through his teeth. ''SELL RICHARD WIDMARK!'' read the publicity manual that an alert 20th Century Fox sent to theater owners, advising them to have a local printer make up ''Wanted'' posters for the actor.
His role as Tommy Udo in ''Kiss of Death'' was small, but it put Mr. Widmark into the generation of American actors who became stars after World War II: Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck. Like them, Mr. Widmark was to work steadily in the movies over the next several decades. Unlike them, he would win his most enduring fame for crime pictures with low budgets and (initially) low prestige. It took the critical and popular re-evaluation of film noir to turn Mr. Widmark into a cult figure out of the past, which he became, paradoxically, while he was making new movies. Today, in retirement, he remains famous for two noirs in particular, in which he played the kind of guy who rifles through purses.
The character's interest in handbags was professional in ''Pickup on South Street'' (1953). With three prior convictions and a smirk, his Skip McCoy picked pockets on the New York subway, blundering into espionage and sadomasochistic romance. In ''Night and the City'' (1950), the pilfering was more of a lifestyle choice. Too hopped up for steady labor, Mr. Widmark's Harry Fabian capitalized himself by filching cash from the women he knew. It was a way to finance his dream of becoming someone more respectable, like a wrestling promoter.
Richard Widmark's nervy performances in these roles were pure cinema -- as essential to our notion of the movies, in their way, as the image of John Wayne on his horse or Marilyn Monroe on a subway grate. Yet to honor him solely for these portrayals is to miss a great deal. He has also done remarkable work playing cowboys, naval commanders, public health officers, psychiatrists, police detectives and a New England whaler -- and that's only the short list.
Fortunately, an intelligent summary of Mr. Widmark's achievements is available at Lincoln Center, where, from Friday to May 31, the Walter Reade Theater is presenting a well-deserved 16-film retrospective. Come during the first days, when he's scheduled to appear, and you might even run into Mr. Widmark himself.
You will notice the disparity between Tommy Udo and the cordial, thoughtful man who was his creator. Welcoming a visitor to his airy apartment in downtown Manhattan -- he comes in occasionally from his Connecticut home -- Mr. Widmark proves to be lean, tall and unstooped at 86, his hair thinner now but the forehead only a little higher than when he first alarmed moviegoers. In place of the famous edginess is a gentlemanly reserve, which allows him to describe all other Hollywood figures as terrific but forestalls self-analysis. He'd rather talk about Spencer Tracy.
''To me, Tracy is still the ultimate movie actor,'' Mr. Widmark says at the first opportunity, his voice slightly lower than in the old days and a shade more serrated. ''Total concentration, total simplicity. You never saw the wheels grinding. He just was.''
Did Mr. Widmark ever attain that kind of sureness? ''No,'' he shoots back, almost before the question is out. ''I always tried. But I was never satisfied. I hate to look at my old movies now, because I can't make it!''
Not a single scene, out of all that film work?
He thinks back to a little-known movie from 1972, which he has cited as a favorite. ''There were a couple times in 'When the Legends Die,' just moments, where I felt pretty good.'' Then: ''No. I never really clicked, the way I wanted to do it.''
It's true: Richard Widmark never had the ease of Spencer Tracy. Nor did audiences want him to.
''Kiss of Death'' got Mr. Widmark stuck in playing what he calls ''psychotic tough guys'' -- although these ''nutballs'' had become astonishingly complex by 1948, when he alternately courted and threatened Ida Lupino in ''Road House.'' By then the head of Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, had begun to give him roles that emphasized his brains and not just his nerve. When he made his first western, William Wellman's muscular ''Yellow Sky'' (1948), Mr. Widmark still played a villain, but one called Dude, who menaced people with his mirthless smile and insinuating singsong.
In 1949, Mr. Widmark got his first role as an intellectual, as a boy's tutor and surrogate father in Henry Hathaway's ''Down to the Sea in Ships,'' a story about 19th-century whalers. Then came Elia Kazan's ''Panic in the Streets'' (1950), in which Mr. Widmark played a quick-tempered doctor fighting an epidemic; ''Garden of Evil'' (1954), a Technicolor western in which he was a gambler and self-styled poet; and, after leaving Fox, ''The Cobweb'' (1955), an obsessively stylish melodrama by Vincente Minnelli in which Mr. Widmark portrayed a psychiatrist who was caring and liberal with everyone except his ever-more-furious wife.
I notice the intensity in these roles but also Mr. Widmark's vulnerability. The way the world pressed on him, you wouldn't have known he was a six-footer. [Ed: He wasn't! ] His body seemed slight, his brow was perpetually knit, and the voice could rise to a quaver. He was always failing to measure up to some heftier guy: Gregory Peck in ''Yellow Sky,'' Gary Cooper in ''Garden of Evil,'' Paul Douglas in ''Panic in the Streets,'' Lionel Barrymore in ''Down to the Sea in Ships.''
For all these reasons, I used to worry that Richard Widmark had something to tell me about my parents. He was around their age; so when I was 11, and a group of his Fox movies showed up on television, I watched with apprehension. Was it possible that grown-ups could feel so fragile, so inadequate, despite their racy privileges of booze and cigarettes?
Now that I'm 50, I think that Mr. Widmark's performances really did tap into the particular anxieties of the World War II generation. But that wasn't the limit of his appeal. Consider the facial expressions, the voice and gestures of James Dean in ''Rebel Without a Cause.'' They're reminiscent of Richard Widmark -- as if Dean and his director, Nicholas Ray, had discovered the adolescent in those middle-aged characters.
I mention these impressions, and Mr. Widmark replies, ''That's interesting -- because I modeled my part in 'When the Legends Die' on my father.''
It's an astonishing response. A character-driven, modern-day western that's been too little seen, ''When the Legends Die'' allowed Mr. Widmark to give one of those big, deeply confident performances that a few actors are blessed to pull off in the autumn of their careers. The Lincoln Center retrospective is treating the film as a rediscovery, as it should. But can this be Mr. Widmark's image of his father? The character is an aging, drunken hustler on the rodeo circuit.
''My father had a lot of troubles,'' Mr. Widmark says simply. ''He was a traveling salesman. He wasn't around much.''
Born in Sunrise, Minn., in 1914, Mr. Widmark moved around the Midwest with his family until they came to rest in Princeton, Ill., where they acquired a bakery and the apartment overhead. An obsession with movies had already taken hold, thanks to the grandmother who had begun taking him to the pictures at age 3. The love of acting developed at Lake Forest College, where he quickly transferred out of the pre-law program.
After two years of postgraduate teaching at Lake Forest, Mr. Widmark risked moving to New York in 1938 and immediately found steady work in radio. In 1943, still a civilian because of a perforated eardrum, he made his Broadway debut in a play directed by George Abbott; two years later he worked for the first time with Elia Kazan, starring in a show at the Theater Guild. By then, he had married his college sweetheart, Jean Hazlewood, with whom he would remain until her death in 1997. (His second wife, Susan, whom he married in 1999, is a friend of many years.)
He may have looked baby-faced when he signed his contract with Fox at 32, but Mr. Widmark brought to Hollywood an unusually stable marriage and nine years' professional experience. He was one of his generation's best-trained stars - though that does little to explain how he made his first scene before a camera into a classic film noir moment by gleefully shoving a woman and her wheelchair down a flight of stairs. What was it like to begin a movie career with that scene, and to pitch it four octaves higher than anyone else would have attempted?
''It was comparatively easy,'' he says. Pressed for details, he can say only: ''You get up and do it. That was the direction George Abbott used to give me: 'Just get up and do it, Dick.' There was no thought-theme-and-mood with George. Just do it, again and again.''
In his early pictures, he says, ''I did too much.''
'' I look at them and want to say to myself, 'Don't!' ''
His fans, of course, disagree. Part of the glory of ''Night and the City'' comes from the way the director, Jules Dassin, set free Mr. Widmark's athletic grace and jivey rhythms. At one point, Mr. Widmark even showed off a skill learned in high school, playing an impromptu drum solo. Samuel Fuller took the opposite approach to directing him in ''Pickup on South Street,'' holding Mr. Widmark immobile so that his emotions, with nowhere to go, kept roiling subcutaneously. His face in that picture seemed perpetually flooded with adrenaline, cupidity, anger, cunning, mockery, wariness and a wonderfully filthy tide of lust.
But then this busiest of actors could also become profoundly quiet, as in ''Don't Bother to Knock'' (1952), in which he played a womanizing heel on a visit to Manhattan. Having talked his way into Marilyn Monroe's hotel room for a ''date,'' the character discovers she's psychotic and there's no way out. Only Richard Widmark could get into such a jam; and having got there, only he could be so alert to Monroe's needs as an actress. However active he was when he had the focus, he made himself all but disappear when the attention shifted to her.
''That's the main thing in acting, is to listen,'' Mr. Widmark explains. ''I think stillness is very important in acting. Silence is important.''
I ask whether any of today's younger stars impress him, and he singles out Johnny Depp. Of course - the Spencer Tracy type, who makes everything seem effortless. But if I were to choose a contemporary actor who's reminiscent of Richard Widmark, I would pick another slim, edgy Midwesterner with a high forehead: John Malkovich.
You might think Mr. Malkovich was a Swiss Army knife, so suddenly does his emotional repertory unfold from a still, inner source. In some of the later films in the Lincoln Center program, a similar quickness is evident in Mr. Widmark's acting - a sense not of effortlessness but of hidden reserves. Those qualities show in the mercurial Navy commander he plays in ''The Bedford Incident'' (1965) - ''a real right-wing nutball,'' according to Mr. Widmark. ''I modeled him on Barry Goldwater.'' Or look at how his weary, cynical New York detective in ''Madigan'' (1968) abruptly turns boyish and abashed, out of nowhere.
Most astonishing of all, perhaps, is his performance in ''When the Legends Die.'' You might say it's one more portrait in the gallery of reprobates; and yet, maybe because the actor was thinking of his father, there's something more as well. Richard Widmark, who played bad guys so brilliantly, admits to feeling ''pretty good'' about this one movie, in which he portrayed a not-quite-bad man and gave him warmth and sympathy.
Photos: Richard Widmark, above, as Harry Fabian, a low-life hustler in the 1950 film noir ''Night and the City''; right, Mr. Widmark last month at his apartment in lower Manhattan. (Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive); (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)
Richard Widmark was in London and was interviewed by the BBC, covering the usual ground - background, movie career (with much reference to THAT film) but also covering the later stuff including the Swarm ("the worst film ever made") and Orient Express, which he found huge fun. Interesting, and just lovely to hear his story in his own voice - though of course he was quite old by now (88) - but still full of great stories about the great actors and directors he worked with, including Henry Hathaway, John Ford and the Duke, John Wayne. God bless the BBC for still making this old material available.
Unusually seedy and small-scale for a Fox picture of 1952, this black-and-white thriller is set over one evening exclusively inside a middle-class urban hotel and the adjoining bar. The bar’s singer (Anne Bancroft in her screen debut) breaks up with her sour pilot boyfriend (Richard Widmark), a hotel guest. He responds by flirting with a woman (Marilyn Monroe) in another room who’s babysitting a little girl (Donna Corcoran), but the babysitter turns out to be psychotic and potentially dangerous. Daniel Taradash’s script is contrived in spots, and the main virtue of Roy Ward Baker’s direction is its low-key plainness, yet Monroe — appearing here just before she became typecast as a gold-plated sex object — is frighteningly real as the confused babysitter, and the deglamorized setting is no less persuasive. With Jim Backus as the girl’s father and Elisha Cook Jr. as Monroe’s uncle, the hotel elevator operator. 76 min. (JR)
