"Kiss of Death" starred Victor Mature as a small-time crook and family man who reluctantly informs on his ex-partners to gain parole from prison. But Widmark stole the show as the revengeful Udo, who gleefully ties up an older woman in her wheelchair with a lamp cord and then pushes her down a flight of stairs.
The chilling performance prompted film critic James Agee to write of Widmark's character: "It is clear that murder is one of the kindest things he is capable of."
Widmark received his only Oscar nomination -- as best supporting actor -- and he won a Golden Globe as "most promising [male] newcomer" for the role.
If his giggling killer in "Kiss of Death" made a big impression on movie audiences, his performance also had an effect on the actor.
"I'd never seen myself on the screen, and when I did, I wanted to shoot myself," he told the New Yorker in 1961. "That damn laugh of mine! For two years after that picture, you couldn't get me to smile. I played the part the way I did because the script struck me as funny and the part I played made me laugh, the guy was such a ridiculous beast. I was doing 'Inner Sanctum' on radio at the same time, and I remember reading the 'Kiss of Death' script to some of the guys and saying, 'Hey, get a load of this!' and I'd laugh, it was so funny."
And that, he said, is the way he played the part in the movie.
"I don't think we'd seen quite that level of anti-social behavior in movies, and he never repeated villainy at that level in the movies," film critic Richard Schickel told The Times in 2002.
But, he said, even when Widmark played a leading man, "there was a kind of hard-core urban cynicism about him that was really different than previous urban bad guys in the [James] Cagney or John Garfield vein, where there was a kind of sweetness lurking there."
"He's, to me, one of those people I was always glad to see on the screen because it promised some edge that wasn't entirely conventional. There was something slightly mysterious about his behavior, and you felt a slight unpredictability about him."
Widmark, Schickel said, later became a much more conventional leading man, but even then his portrayals conveyed "sort of an awareness that the world didn't always work out for the best, that you had to be somewhat wary of people."
