Rent Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)

Burt on the run - Kiss the Blood Off My Hands review by NO

Over melodramatic with London portrayed rather gloomily.Dissapointing for a Lancaster film.Newton relishing overacting as a villian & Fontaine rather meek.Unrealistic ending.

Despite the noir trappings, a stinker - Kiss the Blood Off My Hands review by MB

You might think this seems interesting, given its lurid title, cast and setting, but I'm here to assure you that it's not. Like other famous big budget stinkers - Goldcrest's 'Revolution' or Hitchcock's 'Under Capricorn' - the problem was precisely that the script didn't come through a major studio. The latter had a long process of developing stories and scripts and it's rare to find something as bad as this from e.g. MGM or Columbia (though maybe a bit more likely from the Poverty Row producers).

Burt Lancaster produced it - it was his first film as a producer - and wanted a role to show his physicality - which it does - and then didn't apply his mind to the rest. Basically, there's no motivation for anything here; and no plot to speak of. Characters just do what they want at the moment. It's all happenstance, from the opening fight/encounter onwards. Awfully thin unsatisfying stuff, which even a decent director and DP's noir touches can't hide.

London Noir. - Kiss the Blood Off My Hands review by Steve

Actually no, it doesn't live up to the pulp sadism of its title (from Gerald Butler's 1940 bestseller). Though Burt Lancaster does get whipped by prison guards. He plays a suffering brute back from WWII with PTSD who accidentally kills a pub landlord, witnessed by a black marketer (Robert Newton) not above a little blackmail. It's a pessimistic London noir.

The East End was recreated on an extensive sound stage at Universal, so some money was spent on this, but it's from an era when studios were shooting more on locations, so it probably felt dated even on release. Its evocation of a dazed country struggling to emerge from the shock of war may have felt more contemporary. In the UK at least.

This is a land of bobbies on the beat, unlocked doors and ration books. Of austerity and crime, loneliness and loss. And threatening strangers who loom in the shadows of the human jungle. There is an overwhelming sense of despair. But as a thriller, it lacks the necessary suspense to obscure the familiarity of the narrative.

Burt is always good as the fatalistic loser of his early noirs. Joan Fontaine is superb as a traumatised war widow suffocating in her isolation; who fastens onto a wounded creature out of desperation and pity. Newton delivers his usual ham. There are points of interest but a quality film fails to emerge; it needed a more gifted director than Norman Foster.