Kiss of Death

Opening with a Christmas Eve jewelry heist and a bare-knuckle getaway in a packed elevator slowly descending the Chrysler Building, Henry Hathaway’s taut noir deals frankly with the dilemma facing petty crook Nick Bianco (Victor Mature). Should he snitch and return to his family or keep his trap shut and end up behind bars in Sing Sing. Learning of his wife’s suicide while in the pen, Bianco decides to flip and chance his fate with a persuasive D.A. (Brian Donleavy). He begins a new life with girlfriend Nettie (Coleen Gray, later of Kubrick’s The Killing) and his two little girls in Astoria Park—only to end up in the crosshairs of the sadistic, maniacally cackling gangster Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark, in one of the most memorable debuts in cinema). An unpretentious thriller that melds hard-boiled punch with neorealist soulfulness, Kiss of Death was cited by Claude Chabrol as, “a supreme example of all the features of the detective story genre combined . . . swansong of a formula, end of a recipe and the bottom of a gold mine.”

Bing Theater | Included with admission to The Naked City | $5 for this film only | Tickets: 323 857-6010 or purchase online