Hollywood actor Richard Widmark dies at age 93, represented Hollywood’s heyday.
Richard Widmark, best known for his Academy Award-nominated performance as a giggling, grinning gangster in the 1947 film noir classic Kiss of Death and as an NYPD policeman in the 1970s TV program Madigan, represents a Hollywood long gone and greatly missed, where on-camera performers and others involved in making films saw themselves as professionals, not artists—and succeeded in creating real art much more often than today’s more overtly ambitious and politically active generation.
Madigan was based on a very good film directed by Donald Siegel, which is well worth seeing.
For more on Widmark and his career, see the AP story.
Widmark leaves a legacy of great, often underrated work. It’s been years since I’ve seen Madigan, so I’ll have to check it out. In the meantime I recommend Pick-up On South Street, a great little Sam Fuller film in which Widmark plays a second-rate pickpocket who by chance lifts a top secret government document being couriered by a girl whose boyfriend is working for the Russians. The sub-genre has grown familiar–petty criminal ends up with something valuable sought by the the cops and the really bad guys and works his own agenda while managing to stay alive–but Fuller brings a grittiness and honesty that was rare in crime films of the 50s.