Richard Widmark 1914-2008

Richard Widmark has died. In a complete reversal of Hollywood physics, he reached stardom by playing heavies, starting with "Kiss of Death," in which he notoriously tied up poor Mildred Dunnock and pushed her down the stairs in a wheelchair.

I saw that movie at about 9pm on a Saturday night in 1986. I was 10, and the evil that came off the TV set was so vivid (that laugh, that bone structure) I was afraid to go to sleep. Part of what made Widmark so dangerous, at least to me, was that he made evil seem evil without making it seem repellent. He was sexy, and later on part of me didn't know how to reconcile that. His characters killed and connived and tortured, and while my brain understood ("This man is bananas!"), the rest of me couldn't resist him.

Like the rest of America at the height of Widmark's fame, I was caught in his sexual undertow. He wasn't gorgeous. His skin was tight over his face in way that sometimes made it seem skeletal. And he could be schvitzy. To my mind the only working actor who comes close is Viggo Mortensen, another guy with Scandinavian roots. But even he is still a neighborhood over from what made Widmark so appealing. Widmark thrived in a strange moment when nihilism and misanthropy in Hollywood were easier to come by and straight happy endings were scarcer.

By the 1960s, that nasty laugh and those disgusted expressions had plenty of camp to occupy them. My favorite Widmark movie from this period is "The Long Ship" (1964), a sword-and-sandal-esque situation with him as a man trying to get gold before King Sidney Poitier -- James Brown's hair and in full West Indian accent (if memory serves the king is Islamic) -- does first. Or something like that. The movie's a hoot. But it was one of the markers of his persona's transition from societal menace to the inevitable authority figure. Don Siegel's "Madigan" (1968) pretty much capped the transformation. In "The Long Ship," occasionally, Widmark lets a smirk slip through all the outlandish gravity. Maybe he noticed the movie's ludicrousness --or Poitier's wig. But by that point, he'd blazed a trail nobody could really follow. He didn't need to throw Dunnock down the stair in "Kiss of Death." He could have killed her with a look.

Here is Aljean Harmetz's obituary.