Before Dying. (41)5.71h 33min1991R. Before I Go To Sleep. Kiss the Girls. A Kiss Before Dying is a movie that I enjoy watching when I'm bored. A remake of the 1956 film of the same name, A Kiss Before Dying is directed by James Dearden and Dearden adapts the screenplay from Ira Levin's novel. It stars Sean Young, Matt Dillon, Max von Sydow, Dianne Ladd and James Russo. Music is by Howard Shore and cinematography by Mike Southon.
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A Kiss Before Dying is a 1956 American color film noir,[1] directed by Gerd Oswald in his directorial debut. The screenplay was written by Lawrence Roman, based on Ira Levin's 1953 novel of the same name, which won the 1954 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.[2] The drama stars Robert Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter, Virginia Leith, Joanne Woodward, and Mary Astor. It was remade in 1991 under the same title.
Wagner plays a charming, intelligent man who will stop at nothing to get his life where he wants it to go. His problem is a pregnant woman — played by Joanne Woodward in one of her first film roles — who loves him. The solution involves desperate measures.
Plot[edit]
In 1956, Bud Corliss (Robert Wagner) is an ambitious university student who is wooing fellow student Dorothy Kingship (Joanne Woodward) purely for her father's mining fortune. When he discovers that Dorothy is pregnant with his child, he realizes she is quite likely to be disinherited by her father, Leo Kingship (George Macready). She does not care about that, saying she feels 'like me' for the first time in her life, free of her father's control. Bud assures Dorothy that he will take care of her, hesitates when Dorothy insists on marrying, but then seemingly agrees to it.
After an initial attempt to harm her, which Dorothy registers as an accident, Bud spends the days leading up to their arrangement establishing an elaborate staged plan for what would appear to be her suicide. He is stunned into near panic when this fails. On the day they are to be married, Bud purposely has Dorothy meet him at the municipal building within the lunch hour when the pertinent office is closed. He suggests they go to the roof for some air. There, he manipulates her into position and murders her; her death is considered a suicide because of a letter he had forged and mailed in anticipation of his original plan working.
After a couple of months, Dorothy's sister, Ellen (Virginia Leith), is dating Bud; he is giving himself a second shot at ingratiating himself with Leo Kingship. Ellen has no idea of Bud's previous relationship with Dorothy; she has, however, always had doubts about the death. She has an idea that if she can find out who her sister's boyfriend had been, it will be proven that he killed her. For help, Ellen contacts Gordon Grant, who tutored Dorothy. Shortly, Ellen believes she has identified the boyfriend, Dwight Powell (Robert Quarry). Bud learns of the investigation and manages to eliminate Powell from the equation. This, too, is taken to be a suicide.
Ellen is satisfied that Powell was the man who killed Dorothy. Bud and she become engaged. Gordon shows up during the engagement party to tell her that he has discovered that Powell could not have committed the crime. On his way out, he is introduced to Bud; while driving home, he stops at a phone booth to call his uncle, the chief of police, to reveal that he believes he had seen Bud with Dorothy at the university. Gordon returns to Ellen's and informs Leo Kingship that he is certain Bud was dating Dorothy and is likely a murderer. They give Ellen this news, which she rejects outright.
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The next morning, the couple drive to the Kingship mine so Bud can see the family fortune being made. Meanwhile, Gordon's uncle confirms that Bud was Dorothy's boyfriend.
During casual conversation, Bud lets it slip both that he knows more about the smelter than he should, considering he supposedly has been talking only with Ellen about her family, and that - concurrent with Dorothy - he had gone frequently to concerts in the university town. He admits to Ellen that he knew her sister, that he 'even had a few dates with her'. He tries to tell Ellen that he was being considerate of her emotions by keeping it a secret; they argue and Bud stalks to the edge of the open mine pit. Ellen goes after him, still hoping he is not a murderer. They continue to talk and it becomes obvious that he, indeed, is guilty. Her father and Gordon arrive and witness Bud struggling to throw Ellen into the pit; in a desperate attempt to kill her, he shoves her in front of an oncoming truck, which swerves and instead hits him, knocking him over the cliff.
Cast[edit]
Cast notes:
Production[edit]
Darryl F. Zanuck bought the rights to the book in August 1953, following the bidding of many studios. His public announcement revealed that Wagner would star in the lead.[4] The role of Dwight Powell, played in the film by Robert Quarry, was initially to be played by Martin Milner, but Milner had to drop out because of schedule changes.[5]
In 1955, it was announced the film would be made by Crown Productions and distributed by United Artists. It was the second film from Crown following The Killer Is Loose; an executive for the company was Robert Jacks, Daryl Zanuck's son in law.[6]
Three members of the cast – Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Jeffrey Hunter – were loaned to United Artists by Twentieth Century-Fox.[5] The film was the directorial debut of Gerd Oswald, and was filmed in Tucson, Arizona.[5]
The film's use of the word 'pregnant' caused controversy: it was cut during its preview in Chicago, and United Artists was not allowed by the Hollywood censors to use the word in any advertising.[3]
Critical reception[edit]Contemporaneous response[edit]
When the film opened, the review in Variety commented: 'This multiple-murder story is an offbeat sort of film, with Robert Wagner portraying a calculating youth who intends to allow nothing to stand in his way to money ... Gerd Oswald's restrained direction suits the mood ... Wagner registers in killer role. Woodward is particularly good as the pregnant girl, and Virginia Leith acceptable as her sister. Jeffrey Hunter is lost as a part-time university professor responsible for the final solution of the crimes. Mary Astor and George Macready are okay as Wagner's mother and the girls' father.'[7]
Modern assessment[edit]![]()
Time Out Film Guide liked the script and the direction of the film, and wrote, 'An early Ira Levin thriller, predating Rosemary's Baby...superbly adapted as an icily acute nightmare...by the great Oswald, giving a criminally myopic Hollywood its first glimpse of a unique visual talent, idiosyncratically developed from that of his father, German silent director Richard Oswald.'[8]
Film critic James Crawford praised the film for direction and inventiveness. He makes the case that the film's long second shot functions as a foreshadowing, an organizing principle, a statement of purpose in the film. Crawford wrote, 'It’s not remarkable for what it reveals — it’s essentially exposition of narrative and character traits — but for its movement, length, and the way it approaches space, viewer identification, and power dynamics.' As for the creativity of the film, he compares the three minutes, 26 seconds length of the shot and likened it to the 'granddaddy of all tracking shots,' the one that kicks off Touch of Evil — the most apropos comparison, given that it was released in 1958, two years later.[9]
Noir analysis[edit]
According to film critic Alain Silver, a theme used in film noir is the disruptive force of the 'maniac' in society. The threat to the family and social values is apparent in these types of films. Gaining dominance and disrupting the family is a central theme of A Kiss Before Dying. Robert Wagner's character pursues one path to his true target in Dorothy, then kills her and pursues her sister, all with the objective of reaching their father and his fortune.[10]
The film is in fact an excellent representation of mid-1950s culture and social standards of the upper middle class of America in terms of talk, dress, hairstyles, and looks. It shows the interface between the older 1920s-1940s attitudes of the parents against the modern, easier, not wanting-to-be-controlled attitude of the children (and was made exactly at the time rock-n-roll was effecting the same change in the U.S.).
Remake[edit]
An adaptation directed by James Dearden was made in 1991 using the same title. Called 'insanely inept' and 'bereft of suspense' by Entertainment Weekly,[11] the film earned two Razzie awards. The Hindi film Baazigar(1993) starring Shah Rukh Khan also had a similar plot.This movie also remade in Malayalam as Moonilonnu (1991)
See also[edit]References[edit]
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Kiss_Before_Dying_(1956_film)&oldid=936846962'
Dorothy's twin is Ellen, also played by Sean Young, and soon she and Jonathan are in love. They both work in the same homeless rescue agency, picking up street kids and giving them counseling and a place to spend the night. But Jonathan doesn't see social work as a permanent career, and he ingratiates himself with the uncompromising old man, goes fishing with him, agrees with everything he says, and is eventually given a job in the family firm.
Ellen is in love, but she is obsessed with the notion that her twin did not commit suicide. There are all sorts of clues, if you know where to look: For example, Dorothy was wearing new shoes, purchased just before she died. Is that the action of a suicidal person? And then there are the mysterious deaths of Dorothy's former friends and co-students. Did they know something? Are their deaths a coincidence? Veteran filmgoers, familiar with the Rule of Economy of Characters, will have guessed that Jonathan is not in the film simply to stand by while Ellen finds the real killer. 'A Kiss Before Dying' generates most of its suspense, in fact, by allowing us to know things about Jonathan that Ellen doesn't know. Dearden, the director, wrote 'Fatal Attraction' and got substantial mileage out of the same idea - that a man is in mortal danger from the woman he is having an affair with. In 'Fatal Attraction' there was an additional twist, in that the audience was not quite so sure of the facts, but the strength of 'A Kiss Before Dying' is that the Matt Dillon character is so private, so controlled by inner needs no one else in the film is allowed to see, that he is almost two persons, all by himself.
This is Matt Dillon's first film since 'Drugstore Cowboy,' and demonstrates again that he is one of the best actors working in movies. He possesses the secret of not giving too much, of not trying so hard that we're distracted by his performance. Dillon was never trained as an actor, was a junior high school kid when he was cast in an unsung but powerful movie named 'Over the Edge,' and has turned out to have a natural affinity with the camera. There was a brief period when his career was endangered by quasi-Teen Idol status, but he just kept working, choosing interesting roles and good directors, and today he and the slightly older Sean Penn are the best actors in their age group.
About Sean Young I am not quite so sure. In her best work, like 'The Boost' (1988), she is convincing - angry, obsessed, fearful. But here her character seems to know too much of the story; she has a detachment that's not appropriate, a way of seeming to know, like we do, what the real outcome is going to be. It undermines the concern we feel for her.
And yet 'A Kiss Before Dying' works, in most of its scenes, because it is fueled by the need of the Dillon character. Dearden helps it work because he doesn't press his point. The film opens and closes with closeups of Dillon as a boy, looking at those trains going by, and Dillon is too good an actor to feel any need to improve on the emotions we associate with those wide little eyes.
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