MOVIE OF THE DAY: "A KISS BEFORE DYING" (1956)

It seems to me that actors with a limited range make totally convincing psychopaths. Robert Montgomery in Night Must Fall, Frank Sinatra in Suddenly, Donald Trump as President of the United States. Add to this honor roll Robert Wagner in A Kiss Before Dying.

Big Man on Campus Bud Corliss is focused on the future: getting his degree in grad school, marrying his heiress girlfriend Dorothy Kingship, and working for her father in the mining business. Dorothy's unplanned pregnancy forces Bud to slightly remake his plans: kill Dorothy, and make a play for her sister Ellen. Now there's a man who thinks on his feet! 

There's something both sophisticated and tawdry about A Kiss Before Dying. Beautiful young people... but murder. Big money... but a cold father to go with it.  Cinemascope... but color by DeLuxe.  Oh, and the song on the jukebox with the line "Just a kiss before dying..." That's romance, brother. 

He wouldn't have been forced to do this if she had
just taken the poison he slipped her the day before.

All these contradictions make for a shockingly entertaining picture. I have no idea if Wagner's soft, sing-song delivery was a directorial suggestion or just the way he normally talked, but it certainly makes his character that much creepier. His reaction to his girlfriend's pregnancy announcement -- a half-hearted agreement to get married -- sounds more like a stall until he can figure out a way to get rid of her. 

Joanne Woodward, as the ill-fated Dorothy, gives a performance that appears better in retrospect. Yes, she's whiny and weak -- far from the A-lister she would become -- but her characterization fits the role perfectly. It's easy to see why a pretty but vacuous sorority sister could to be tricked into writing her own suicide note by her Prince Charming  boyfriend.

Bud wonders if it's too soon to kill the sister, too.

Her sister, Ellen, is a little more on the ball. Oh sure, she falls for Bud when he enters her life from out of nowhere, not knowing of his previous relationship with Ellen. But she's cynical, too, thanks to her unfeeling dad, who's more concerned about his late daughter's pregnancy being made public rather than her death. Hey, falling off the top of an office building is one thing. But being knocked-up at the time? That's not good for the family name!

Wagner can't help but be amused that he and Jeffrey
Hunter are better looking than any woman in the movie.

A rat like Bud Corliss needs a rival, or at least a nosey-parker, and he has both in Gordon Grant, the police detective who moonlights as a tutor for the college kids -- including the late  Dorothy Kingship. While Grant accepted her death as a suicide, a chance meeting with Bud sparks a memory that leads to further investigation.

Jeffrey Hunter (a few years away from his title role in King of Kings) looks like he's playing a pipe-smoking Clark Kent rather than a flat-floot, particularly when he's wearing glasses. (Pipe + glasses = intellectual trope in 1950s Hollywood.) He has the hots for Ellen, too, so his interest putting Bud in the slammer goes beyond professional bounds, which is certainly grounds for dismissal. 

Astor and Macready look like they could be
a couple.

Mary Astor and George Macready round out the cast as Bo's mother and
Ellen's father. Astor, as with the other actresses in A Kiss Before Dying, is cursed with a hideous short haircut that was all the rage for women in mid-50s America. You'd never guess this was the woman whose career nearly derailed due to her hot, diary-detailed affair with George S. Kaufman 15 years earlier.

The always dependable Macready, whose acting C.V. doesn't include "Hero", is the tycoon who appears to have born with a Frigidaire instead of a heart. I never recognize him when I see him (which, admittedly, isn't very often), but as soon as he opens his mouth, I recognize him from Lenny Bruce's superb impression in his "Airplane Glue" routine. By the way, did anybody else do George Macready in their act?

And did I tell you he murders another person?

Robert Wagner must have enjoyed the change of pace that A Kiss Before Dying gifted him. (It was only two years earlier he starred in the comic strip-come-to-life Prince Valiant). Still, a quick perusal of his credits doesn't ring any bells as far as villains are concerned, other than his comedic turn in the Austin Powers sequel.  

It's likely the studios (or his agent) decided that A Kiss Before Dying was all the stretch Wagner needed before returning to the leading man roles that would define him for several more decades. Too bad. Maybe he and his wife Natalie Wood could have starred in a remake. Oh wait...

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