SUMMER FILMS/RETROSPECTIVE; A Cult Figure Now, With His Gallery of Reprobates
By STUART KLAWANS
Published: May 13, 2001
Published: May 13, 2001
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)
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/arts/summer-films-retrospective-a-cult-figure-now-with-his-gallery-of-reprobates.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1
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