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Kiss of Death
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Barbet
Schroeder’s films, whatever part of the wide world they are set in, often train
a keen, quasi-ethnographic gaze on diverse, sometimes subterranean sectors of
society: from sadomasochists (Maîtresse, 1976) and alcoholics (Barfly, 1987) to professional gamblers (Cheaters, 1984) and the disgustingly
rich (Reversal of Fortune, 1990). His
remake of Henry Hathaway’s noir classic Kiss of Death (1947) takes us
into an underworld milieu based on a commerce in cars: stolen, transported,
swapped, disguised, taken apart in seconds.
For
a moment in 1995, going to the movies resembled attending a motor expo. But the
cars in Kiss of Death, unlike those
of Geoffrey Wright’s Metal Skin (1995), are not symbolic of
emotional drives – or even of social conditions, as in David Caesar’s stylish
(and cautionary) documentary Carcrash (1995). They are simply the stock-in-trade
of this expert criminal sphere.
It
has been a while since we have seen a film which really studies the
professional rituals of such an alien or exotic scene. This is part of the
hardboiled tradition in American fiction and film: the type of story that follows
a hitman (for example), letting you observe the way he cleans his gun and puts
it together, the way he occupies his time during boring stakeouts, the way he
banters at the diner or fits in a family life before suddenly swinging into
action and killing some anonymous target. Films including Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) lean into this kind of fascination.
The
free adaptation by novelist-screenwriter Richard Price (Mad Dog and Glory, 1993) of Ben
Hecht & Charles Lederer’s script works small but satisfying variations on
very familiar generic elements. An elegant construction, it borrows only a few
scenes and plot premises from the original. Jimmy (David Caruso) is an ex-con
lured back to the criminal life for one last gig. Everything goes wrong, and
Jimmy’s life becomes one long, uphill battle against enemies on both sides of
the law. Into this cauldron go a sensitive, asthmatic villain
(Nicolas Cage), a cop on a revenge mission (Samuel L. Jackson), and a family
dealing with the terrors of so-called witness protection.
Just
as Hathaway’s film signalled, in its time, a step forward in screen realism,
Schroeder embeds his rendition in the nitty-gritty, everyday detail of this
strange, parallel space of crime, with its gaudy clubs (“Baby Cakes”), and
out-of-the-way rendezvous points. The general mythic thrust of the tale,
however, is classic noir: according
to Schroeder, “A man trapped and fighting to get on top”.
The
central theme of the original work is cleverly expanded: the paradoxes and
problems of being (and staying) honourable – “Are you a man of honour?”, Jimmy repeatedly asks the shifty Zioli (Stanley
Tucci). Honour among thieves, as it transpires, no longer exists; and the
clandestine arrangements between lawmen and criminals willing or eager to
squeal guarantee just as little protection.
In
this story of perpetual, ubiquitous vulnerability to harm and violation, Price
and Schroeder hone in on the small but decisive shifts in the balance of power
between the players in this game. Matters of trust, bluff and betrayal are
played out from moment to moment. It’s not a loud, violent melodrama, but a
low-key, snaky kind of film.
Schroeder’s
storytelling style, somewhat surprisingly and paradoxically (given his artistic
background), owes more to the classical American B film than to the Nouvelle Vague.
A keen student of films from the 1940s and ‘50s, he reinvents, in his own way,
the prime lesson of that era: every scene should simultaneously advance plot,
theme and character. His brisk vignettes (complete with clever transitions in
and out) concentrate on physical action; encounters and gestures encapsulate
the clash of moral positions.
At
the same time, Price and Schroeder tweak the given elements of the genre by
consistently employing ellipsis, indirection and unusual points-of-view – as
when, for instance, we do not see Jimmy receive the news of a death, but only
hear his cries as the camera stays outside in the corridor.
The
performances are terrific. Like James B. Harris (Cop, 1987), Schroeder clearly enjoys casting certain actors against
type (and thus, in the process, altering the type itself), bringing out some
side or shade in performers we haven’t seen before on screen. He restrains the
normally overwrought Caruso, bringing out something gentle and sympathetic in
him. Or take Helen Hunt, so popular in the whimsical TV sitcom Mad About You (1992-1999, revived 2019).
She’s marvellous here as Jimmy’s hardbitten wife, desperately trying to resist
the bottle when her man lands in the slammer.
Each
character here has his or her own enjoyable (and often frankly infantile) tic –
like Hart (Jackson) forever dabbing his wounded, weeping right eye with a
handkerchief, or the superstitious fear in Omar (Ving Rhames) of the colour red.
But Schroeder and Price obviously had the most fun devising the role of Little
Junior (his father’s name is Big Junior) for Cage. This is a villainous
performance a little in the vein of Dennis Hopper’s part in Blue Velvet (1986). Cage wheezes with
asthma, has psychotic episodes, uses his girlfriend as an exercise barbell and,
at one point, does a frantic pogo in order to assuage his grief after his dear
old Dad dies.
Yet
Little Junior is also a Sensitive New Age Guy with enlightened ideas. One of
his best notions is that people should have personal, positive acronyms. His is
BAD: Balls, Attitude and Direction. Like the villains of many modern
crime-gangster films, both Little & Big Junior are violent warlords of the
urban jungle, but they display many fascinating vulnerabilities. The plot’s
unfolding depends greatly on these vulnerabilities.
This
is a movie for cinephiles who appreciate the work of artists working wholly
within given conventions, subtly bending and modifying the rules along the way.
It offers the sorts of pleasures associated with the B pictures of the
Hollywood studio era, not the more modish, iconoclastic, modern thrills
associated with the reigning Lord Tarantino. Kiss of Death is a minor gem, and a striking, authentic
contemporary example of what Manny Farber once baptised as termite art: films
that use familiar generic structures in order to work, ingeniously, on the fine
details.
MORE Schroeder: Before and After, Desperate Measures, Single White Female © Adrian Martin May 1995 / December 2007 |
