A Kiss before Dying is the movie Robert Wagner made to solve the Prince Valiant problem – he was too pretty and too old-school in a Hollywood that had suddenly gone sweaty and Method, in a nutshell.
Prince Valiant was the film he’d made two years earlier, camp nonsense about a Viking prince in the court of King Arthur. Wagner is about as far as he can get from that here, as a handsome college psychopath who decides that the best way to deal with his suddenly pregnant girlfriend Dory (Joanne Woodward) is to get her to have an abortion (the word is never used though “pills” are mentioned). And when that doesn’t work Bud decides to poison her. That doesn’t work either and so he goes to plan c, which (no spoilers, it’s the film’s best scene) finally does.
In plotting that doesn’t quite make sense – unless you’re a psychopath who secretly wants to get caught – Bud then decides to take up with the girl’s sister, Ellen. The relationship with Dory was entirely on the downlow, so no one will think this is odd at all because no one will know, will they? This, it turns out, is the axle on which the whole story turns.
Director Gerd Oswald and DP Lucien Ballard shoot it all bright and colourful, as if this were a late 1950s Hitchcock movie, and there is also something of a foretaste of the Psycho plot here – the story moving from female one to female two, then female two hooking up with an investigator to crack the case. Plus Bud’s excessive feelings for his mother.
It would be tempting to see it as a slight rip-off of Psycho, except at this point Robert Bloch hadn’t written the novel on which Hitchcock based his film. The film is in fact based on Ira Levin’s first novel, written when he was 23. It was a big hit, as was his second novel, Rosemary’s Baby, another story of an innocent young woman being drawn into dark terrain.
There are moments of genius plotting, such as Bud getting the unwitting Dory to write her own suicide note but things bog down a bit in the gap between Dory dying and Ellen being established as the new main target – see also Psycho.
Wagner is a convincing psychopath with a smooth veneer, and puts his good looks to good use. It is really an excellent performance. Decades later he’d be Austin Powers’s Number Two – it starts here. Mary Astor plays the mother, while Joanne Woodward, in a performance she hated, plays the dreadfully drippy Dory. You will possibly cheer when she heads off into infinity. Virginia Leith is a touch inert as the slightly more feisty Ellen and Jeffrey Hunter plays the investigator, Gordon Grant, his preposterously handsome looks not toned down at all by the wardrobe department’s efforts – the tortoiseshell glasses, knitted tie and pipe.
The opening credits are initially a puzzle – all pink and blue lettering, swanky saxophones and razzmatazz, as if this were going to be a caper movie starring one or other of the Rat Pack, or a perky vehicle for Doris Day. The end credits are the same. But they add a nicely jarring counterpoint to the very disturbed story that’s on offer beneath the bright visuals and 1950s perkiness.
This is Gerd Oswald’s debut feature after having directed on episode of a TV show, and he’d return to TV once this was done. His directing is snag-free and unobtrusive, throwing the emphasis on the performances, which in Wagner’s case is a good call. That said, Wagner is not quite a convincing stand-in for Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brando, and the scene in which Bud dons denim to go riding with Ellen only emphasises that. Still, he’s not bad, not bad at all, and nor is this appealingly off-whack movie.
A Kiss before Dying – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
