Who’s Your Favorite Noir Actor?
Suzanne Lummis:
I can’t choose between Richard Widmark [left] and Dan Duryea, both consummate artists, absolute originals who enlivened every scene of every movie they appeared in with their idiosyncratic expressions of evil, villainy or rascally mischief—lowlifes but so alive.
Dan Duryea’s the only actor I can think of who could inhabit characters who were not only bad, not only murderous, but downright smarmy, and still seem weirdly attractive. Often his characters slap women around, in Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window, Too Late for Tears… One of the women noir scholars contributing to the commentary on a DVD said, “I find Dan Duryea sexy, which is really disturbing.” That made me laugh. – Problem is, confidence and energy combined with focus is sexy, and nothing can be done about that. In life, though, I’d loath that type of abusive person, but in the movies… In the movies, what you’re looking at is talent.
Widmark played strong, good guys, too, especially in Westerns, but in Noir, oh anything from the hapless grifter in Night and the City, a loser forever a step away from the Big Break, to the maniac in Kiss of Death. It’s said he’s the only actor ever to become famous for his first scene in his first movie. And it haunted him; he got so freaking sick of people asking him to giggle like Tommy Udo. It went on for years. I adored Richard Widmark, who was commanding in all his roles, and I sympathize with his disappointment that the public tended to reduce him to one role, one scene. Stupid public.
I especially love that Duryea [right] and Widmark lived lives that dramatically contrasted their screen images. It’s not simply that they were nice—nothing surprising about that. These guys were absolute sweethearts, known as a couple of the kindest, most honorable men in Hollywood, both with happy lifelong marriages to high school or college girlfriends, not a trace of scandal. When asked why he didn’t flirt around Widmark said, “I happen to like my wife—a lot.” When she got Alzheimer’s, he gave up acting to nurse her for seven years till her death.
They were smart as hell, both of them. Before Widmark came to Hollywood he taught acting at the college level. At Cornell, Duryea was elected to the most prestigious honor society. They read, these guys. The sleazeball hustler in Scarlet Street majored in English. The Psycho in Kiss of Death lived in a home packed with books. I love that both were able to capture that raw, streetwise (or street-dumb) darkness and wildness but knew not to live it. It’s called acting.
David Lehman:
Edward G. Robinson gets my vote because of his amazing versatility. He can be the indomitable investigator (Double Indemnity),the relentless G-man and Nazi hunter (The Stranger), the nasty villain (Key Largo), the poor sucker who loses everything and ends up on a park bench (Scarlet Street), or the genial clubman who kills a man in his sleep (The Woman in the Window). In each case he knocks it out of the park.
May I also cast a ballot in favor of Ida Lupino the director. I love her movies, “The Hitchhiker” and “The Bigamist.” Very daring. She is a wonderful actress, too — for example in 'The Bigamist," about which I wrote this poem:
The Bigamist
I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.
Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).
Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time
and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas are Joan
Fontaine and Ida Lupino.
This is the fourteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.