Burt Lancaster has committed murder within four minutes in Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, and in fleeing through London backstreets to dodge pursuers takes refuge by climbing through Joan Fontaine’s apartment window. As movie openings go it’s one of the most memorable examples in film noir. Lancaster leaves after a tense night in the apartment, the cops thrown off his trail, but he’s taken an interest in Fontaine and comes to see her again. She wants nothing to do with him at first, but his persistence prevails.
Lancaster is a broken man, a former prisoner of war, angry, bitter, lost. He has romantic aims but he’s a ticking timebomb. That’s made clear when he commits two assaults, is thrown in jail, and gets eighteen lashes from a cat o’ nine tails in the bargain. He’s seemingly trapped in a cycle of crime and violence, but Fontaine, in an act of kindness, gets him a job as a truck driver. She’s a redemptive archetype doing as expected in a film noir. At the same time, a man who witnessed the earlier killing blackmails Lancaster into more crime, a corruptive archetype likewise doing as expected. Which side of Lancaster will prevail?
There are some interesting angles to Kiss the Blood Off My Hands. First of all, there’s a commentary made about a woman’s compulsion to reform or at least modify a man she sees as having potential. There’s also a suggestion that a moral balance hangs over us all. Roger Ebert once said that film noir is the most American film genre—no other society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear, and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive. Maybe, but the naive idea that crime doesn’t pay derives, we think, largely from censorship. It was against the Hays Code to show criminals succeeding in the end. How challenging could crime movies be under those circumstances?
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands resolves in a way that rings false, but American cinema would break away from such endings during the push against censorship in 1960s, and finally embrace the ambiguity that truly defines life. As a technical vehicle, however, the movie is one of the best in film noir, with deeply black shadows, canted angles, rear projection, dolly shots, foggy exteriors, panic sweats, heavy melodrama, an orchestral soundtrack, and more. It’s a prime example from a celebrated cinematic cycle, and as such is certainly worth seeing. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1948.
