A Kiss Before Dying

Classic 1950's murder mystery/thriller starring Robert Wagner and Virginia Leith (who famously played a talking severed head in "The Brain that wouldn't Die"). A couple of nice twists and a great performance from Wagner (though some of the supporting roles were pretty wooden), this flick also has a handful of truly shocking/surprising moments. Quality entertainment.

Robert Wagner is excellent as a man with a passion to succeed in life, even if it takes murder to do it. The film is very stylish, with great use of wide-screen and color.

An uneasy genre-straddler. Wants to be noir (and certainly its source was!) but also a JD flick and color Picnic-type movie. Case in point: the ludicrously out of place opening titles (and music)...did this movie really need a theme song? Wagner is good, but some of the other acting (especially toward the beginning) is a bit unsteady. Unfortunately, they did away with the book's extensive background on Corliss' social-climbing obsession, so he becomes merely another run of the mill psycho.

The writing is quite good, a melodrama murder mystery with restrictive social mores underlying the narrative. It's very well paced too, with moments of rising and declining tension, but the performances, particularly in the first half, leave quite a bit to be desired. They're not bad, but they're theatrical and hollow in a way that doesn't mesh with the rawness of the material. It's still worth watching, but held back by the inconsistent execution.

Pretty cool color noir. It's kind of like what David Lynch did for 50s suburbia in Blue Velvet, except it was actually made in the 50s. Robert Wagner is great.

A pulpy "noir" with many of the same cliched tendencies of the best and worst of the genre but in technicolor!

Em honra de Virginia Leith (1925 - 2019) filme #3. Quando a Joanne Woodward disse que esse não era apenas pior filme em que tinha trabalho, mas o pior filme de toda a Hollywood obviamente ela estava exagerando e nem havia visto aquela versão com o Matt Dylon e a Sean Young dos anos. É um filme razoável, mas acho que a galera conspiratória que acha que o Robert Wagner matou a Natalie Wood o assistiu demais. BlurayRip RARBG.

White telephone 1950’s stylish with a bit of a noirish feel make this an entertaining thriller.