Coleen Gray

Kiss of Death

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Victor Mature cradles Coleen Gray's head

Fans of Richard Widmark who can’t get enough of his giggling psychopath routine, Kiss of Death is for you. This is where it all started, in 1947, a crime drama notable not only for being Widmark’s screen debut but also for delivering a really good performance by Victor Mature. Having grown up in a household where Mature’s presence on the small screen was usually greeted by titters, I personally wasn’t quite ready for this. But good he really is. He plays Nick Bianco, a smalltime crook who gets caught doing a jewellery heist but refuses to name his accomplices when taken in by the police. All this changes some way down the road … Read more

Kansas City Confidential

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Joe holds a gun to the head of Tony (Lee Van Cleef)

Here’s a film about a perfectly planned heist, so perfect that it hasn’t made it into the city records, Kansas City Confidential announces as it opens, in one of those scrolling on-screen scene-setters that really should be read in an authoritative voice (but isn’t). And then, in the first of many flat illogicalities, the movie turns out to be about a heist that isn’t perfect at all. It goes wrong. Not at first, or not at first by very much. But go wrong it does. The film can take it. On its release in 1952 it was so successful that it spawned a string of other “Confidential” movies. New York. Chicago. Hong Kong. … Read more

Nightmare Alley

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Zeena and Stanton in a carnival truck

1947’s Nightmare Alley is lavish, melodramatic, contains a hint of the supernatural and is a touch too long – you can see why Guillermo Del Toro wanted to remake it. It’s also a great role for a matinee idol trying to shrug off a pretty-boy tag (Tyrone Power even more so than Bradley Cooper in the remake). In a tale about a carnival worker tasting the heights and then plunging into the depths, Jules Furthman’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s best-seller plays the hubris card early on, in a little speech in which carnie Stanton Carlisle (Power) explains himself. “You see those yokels out there,” he says to mindreader Zeena (Joan Blondell), laying … Read more