Kiss the Blood Off My Hands

With perhaps the most lurid title of the noir cycle, Norman Foster’s Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is a visual stunner that turns studio-bound streetscapes and high-contrast lighting into a dazzling nighttime London atmosphere that engulfs most of the film. After American drifter and former prisoner of war Bill Saunders (Burt Lancaster) accidentally kills a man in a pub brawl, he flees from police through the streets of London (a thrilling symphony of inventive camera angles), ultimately hiding through the open bedroom window of single nurse Jane Wharton (Joan Fontaine), who not only agrees to shelter him from law enforcement but begins to fall in love. Robert Netwton plays sleazy pianist Harry Carter, who witnessed Saunders’ crime and uses that fact to blackmail him, not to mention to sexually attack Jane. Both in their peak years of youth and beauty, Lancaster and Fontaine display natural romantic chemistry (despite rumored conflict off-screen) which adds a layer of doom given Jane’s prim innocence against Saunders’ shady background (“What have I done to you?!” he asks, enraged at himself, when she collapses in fear). Cinematographer Metty uses high angles, low angles, and Dutch angles to shoot streets, stairwells, and rooftops in a way that conveys constant motion.