The Curse of the Great Title
It’s an old Hollywood truism that if you have a good title, the quality of a film doesn’t necessarily matter—people will still buy tickets based on that title alone. This was especially true of B films, whose brief theatrical runs didn’t leave a lot of time for even a great film to generate much word of mouth. Roger Corman took the idea a step further, finding that he could sell a film to theaters based on a title alone, before a single frame had been shot and in some cases even before a script had been written.
The rule holds just as true for serious dramas as it does for science fiction and horror films. Adult audiences may be harder to please than teenagers heading for the drive-in, but they’re just as gullible. You generate interest and curiosity, you make some promises and raise expectations with a title, even if audiences ultimately leave disappointed you still have their money.
In 1948, actor-turned-B unit director Norman Foster (Journey Into Fear, the Mr. Moto films) took a mediocre novel, hired Burt Lancaster and Joan Fontaine to play the leads, and made a mediocre film—but one with an irresistable title: Kiss the Blood Off My Hands. Who wouldn’t want to see that? While the film isn’t nearly as bad as most viewers seem to think, a title like that creates some unrealistic expectations. It raises the bar a shade too high. You enter the theater and there in the back of your mind is the hope that at some point during this film you will see a woman licking blood off a man’s battered knuckles. Of course you know you won’t—you wouldn’t even see anything like that in a vampire film (not until the late ‘60s anyway). But still. The funny thing is, for as much as people complain about the disparity between the film and the title, in the end—if you pay careful attention—deceptive as it is, the title makes absolutely perfect sense.
After a philosophical opening crawl about the physical and psychological ruins left behind across postwar Europe, we meet Bill Saunders (Lancaster), a sailor who’s jumped ship and is hiding out in London. When a barkeep informs him it’s closing time, Saunders takes a wild swing and accidentally kills him. With the police and the other patrons in pursuit, he runs away into the night, ducking into the nearby apartment of a nurse, Jane Warton (Fontaine). Things immediately seem a little odd, as the nurse remains much too calm considering a large man has just broken into her apartment in the middle of the night. Then Saunders goes to sleep. Instead of stepping outside to inform the police about this strange turn of events, Warton sits and watches him. By the next morning they’re behaving like an old married couple. Warton heads off to work and later that afternoon, apparently having forgotten that he’s wanted for murder, Saunders takes a stroll and runs into her on her way home from work. While she’s cool at first, she soon warms up and the pair visit the zoo.
We start to glean that he might be a little unbalanced when he freaks out while watching the lions and monkeys. (He explains he was a German P.O.W., and so can’t stand to see anything in a cage).
Well, what’s going on here is clear. While the title sounds like a searing crime drama that might border on the sleazy, what we’re in fact watching is a romance about the redemptive powers of love and what have you. Saunders was deeply damaged by the war, but now maybe there’s hope, right? If this nurse loves him, maybe things will be okay after all. That murder at the beginning was merely an excuse to allow the two to meet cute, 1948-style.
The expected and traditional conflict arises in the form of Harry Carter, a Dickensian underworld character (Robert Newton , playing an updated version of the same role he’d recently played in David Copperfield), who approaches Saunders at a racetrack. Carter saw Saunders kill the bartender, and wants to hire him for a job. Saunders sends him away.
What follows is a sequence that seems to have been lifted from another film and edited in here by mistake. On the train ride home from the track, Saunders (as we’ve all been tempted to do once or twice) beats the crap out of an old man performing card tricks. He then beats up a cop. Before he’s dragged off to jail, Warton tells him she doesn’t want to see him again. He’s sentenced to six months hard labor, and a whipping with a cat o’ nine tails. The standard “whipping sequence,” so common to certain varieties of films but rarely seen in mainstream romances, goes on for quite some time. Then when Saunders is released, both Warton and Carter are waiting for him. Having forgotten all about that scene on the train, she offers him a job at the clinic, driving truckloads of medical supplies around England. Carter, meanwhile, wants to steal those medical supplies so he can sell them on the black market. To insure Saunders’ cooperation he blackmails him by threatening to go to the police about that long-forgotten murder.
Well, things trickle on expectedly toward an ending that seems to upset viewers more than anything else about the film. But they seem to be upset because even by that point they insist to themselves that they’re watching a blistering noir film instead of a postwar romance with a minor crime sidebar.
No, it’s not a great film. It’s a predictable melodrama with performances that range from the flat to the cartoonish, static and uninspired cinematography, and a script that at times seems sloppy at best. But for all that it remains an oddly fascinating film, a real head-scratcher, in part for its flaws, in part for what it does and doesn’t want to be, and in part for the weird dynamic between what’s on the screen and that clever, misdirecting, and astounding title. In fact if it wasn’t for that title, people probably wouldn’t hate this film nearly as much as they do.
by Jim Knipfel