Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Robert Wagner has built a solid resume as a male ingénue and action hero is such films as "Halls of Montezuma" (1951), "Titanic" (1954), and "Prince Valiant" (1954) before taking an extreme U-turn as the murdering sociopathic college student Bud Corliss in "A Kiss Before Dying." Corliss has decided to worm his way into the rich Kingship family by marrying the youngest daughter, Dorothy (Joanne Woodward). His plans are threatened when she gets pregnant and wants to elope out of the influence of her controlling father. Well, that's not going to make Bud rich, is it? He begins to plot ways of either ending the pregnancy or ending his girlfriend. Virginia Leith plays Ellen, Dorothy's older sister. Leith is a talented actress who, unfortunately, is usually remembered only as the mad-scientist's girlfriend whose live severed head ends up in a lab pan ("Jan in the pan") in the horror howler "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" (1962). Joanne Woodward is particularly bad in this, showing none of the potential she had. Her voice is high-pitched and grating. She does a lot of whining. I have to presume she was directed this way and had no say about it at this point in her career. Jeffrey Hunter is a police detective with a Thing for Ellen. Overall, a terrific thriller with a couple of real shocks that, had it not been shot in full (sometimes garish) color, might have been considered a top noir. The first "neo-noir," maybe? But let's not go there. The cinematographer was Lucian Ballard (The Killer Is Loose, Kubrick's The Killing, City of Fear, True Grit ('69) and The Wild Bunch).
Review of A Kiss Before Dying
