Monday | August 19, 2013 7:00 pm

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands

Screening on Film

Directed by Norman Foster.
With Joan Fontaine, Burt Lancaster, Robert Newton.
US, 1948, 35mm, black & white, 79 min.
Print source: Universal

Underappreciated and rarely screened Kiss the Blood Off My Hands lives up to the dark evocative hyperbole of its title, delivering a sad and often touching portrait of a life fatally derailed and a love never consummated. Possessed by a murderous rage against the world, Lancaster is frighteningly convincing as a luckless criminal who is first tamed and then inspired by the quiet charms of the winsome nurse played with characteristic timidity by Joan Fontaine. The evocative score by Miklos Rozsa and the dramatic cinematography by Russell Metty (Touch of Evil, All that Heaven Allows) brand Kiss the Blood Off My Hands with the heady Romantic fatalism so essential to 1940s film noir.