Oh, how to resolve the age-old problem of accidentally getting your girlfriend preggers? Well, if you're a good-looking, psychopathic college boy, as portrayed by Robert Wagner in the 1956 thriller "A Kiss Before Dying," the answer is fairly simple: Just knock her off and hope for the best...and pray that her snoopy sister won't start nosing around! Anyway, that's the setup for what turns out to be in essence a poor man's "A Place in the Sun" (1951), but nevertheless a film that remains quite entertaining in its own right. Based on an Ira Levin novel, directed by cult favorite Gerd Oswald, and featuring beautiful, wide-screen color filming (shown to good advantage on the DVD that I just watched), the film certainly does impress. Joanne Woodward comes off very sympathetically here in her third film, and supporting players Mary Astor (a 50-year-old redhead in this picture), George Macready (less hissable than usual) and Jeffrey Hunter (who will ALWAYS be Capt. Pike to me!) are all very fine. But Wagner certainly does steal the show as the pretty-boy whacko. Storywise, I'd say that the plot is a wee bit on the far-fetched side, but never absurdly so, and that most viewers will easily foresee how Wagner will slip up in the end. Still, the film remains suspenseful throughout and concludes most satisfactorily. Strange that the "abortion" word is never brought up, though. Could Wagner's character be a pro-lifer who's into murder? He wouldn't be the first!
Review of A Kiss Before Dying
