A Kiss Before Dying (1956), dir. Gerd Oswald. Streaming at home, Tuesday, November 22.

Honestly, I’m a bit surprised that no one programmed Gerd Oswald’s very strange, and at times laughably bad, A Kiss Before Dying when Robert Wagner was reconsidered to be a person of interest in Natalie Wood’s death in 1981. I mean, you have this total creep who has murdered one girlfriend and has his sights set on another. It seems like a… well, if not perfect fit, an interesting one, anyway.

A Kiss Before Dying is written up as evidence that director Gerd Oswald was a force to be reckoned with, and that this is a lost masterpiece that should be revisited. I would say it’s worth watching, if only for the slow boil that the director has with Wagner, whose Bud Corliss is a poor but insanely ambitious kid.

Thing is, the plot of this film is utterly ludicrous, but it really takes a Douglas Sirk to make this hysteria work. In fact, the same year (1956), Sirk released Written on the Wind, which is bat-shit crazy, and that lunacy, and Sirk’s commitment to it (not to mention the actors devouring every scene and figuratively one another), makes that movie a joy to watch. Oswald seems touchy, lingering too long on some moments, and never really eliciting anything other than decent performances from his players.

That’s a mistake. In this movie, our anti-hero, Bud, throws his fiancee off of a 20-story building at high noon, manages to escape unseen, and then proceeds to slowly worm his way into her sister’s life, in the hopes of marrying her and taking control of the girls’ father’s granite company (we see that he’s been planning this for years, somehow, by the piles of company literature he possesses.) At one point, a man who is a witness to Bud’s duplicity (and a perfect fall-guy for the first sister’s death) is murdered by having Bud stand next to the man at his own typewriter with a gun slowly coming to the side of his head, and shooting him as if it were a suicide. The man’s passivity makes the scene dull. Yes, it is a nice touch that Bud sees a photo of the victim playing tennis and then moves to the other side of his head when it’s revealed the poor dude’s left-handed. However, this cunning is undermined by the fact that Bud didn’t bother to check to see if this guy was even in town to commit the murder that’s about to be pinned on him.

Stuff like that is shot through this entire picture, but worse, anyone who is not one of the main characters acts as though they were just roused out of a deep sleep and told to get acting. So many scenes in this film are tedious, Bud’s inner life is never explored, other than he’s just greedy, Joanne Woodward is absolutely wasted, and the finale is just as dopey as anything, though it’s cool to see Robert Wagner smashed into by a dump truck.