Widmark redux

I can't add very much to what Wesley has already written below, but I do have to say that if you really want to appreciate what Widmark was capable of, you need to get a look at "Pickup on South Street," Sam Fuller's absolutely essential 1953 film noir. Widmark, the go-to weasel of 50s B movies, plays a pickpocket (a "cannon" in the movie's surreal argot) who boosts some top-secret Commie microfilm from an unsuspecting courier (Jean Peters, soon to become Mrs. Howard Hughes in real life) on the subway.

Widmark's character, Skip McCoy, is so alienated from mainstream society that he lives in a shack tenuously connect to Manhattan by a plank -- you can't live farther out in New York City and still actually be in New York City. He's a nasty piece of work, but the movie and Peters slowly reel him back to the land of the living; when these two kiss, it's like pieces of meat mashing together.

Wesley's already mentioned the actor's weirdly taut face, as though all the contradictions of the Eisenhower era were stretching his skin too tight, but what I always took away with me was Widmark's smile -- wide, insincere, and mesmerizing. If a cobra had teeth, that's what he'd look like.

"Pickup" is available on a dandy Criterion DVD, as is "Night and the City" (1950), in which Widmark tries to play both ends of gangland London against each other and, as expected, loses badly. Don't ask how the professional wrestling supblot fits into this. The actor spent the 1960s and beyond playing mostly good guys, but he didn't fool anyone -- in truth, he embodied the acrid smell in back of the 1950s better than almost anyone else.