Earlier this week I watched The Bedford Incident for the first time. It’s a fantastic cold war suspense movie starring Richard Widmark. And I got to thinking, has Widmark died? So I Googled him and it turns out he has indeed died. Just over a week ago [actually: it was late March, not May as I first misread it -- thanks to Jeremy for the correction]. And as far as I can tell, virtually nobody seemed to notice. Even searching Google News only turned up a handful of stories for the last month [sadly, changing the date filter on Google News to include all of 2008 did not make much difference; Richard Widmark still didn't pick up many hits and most of them were reviews of his movies being rerun on TV rather than obituaries]. And all I can say is it’s a crying shame.

Richard Widmark was never one of the marquee stars of Hollywood. Other actors who started their movie careers around the same time included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, James Cagney, Ingrid Bergman, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, and Gary Cooper. In this company, Widmark doesn’t stack up as a box office drawcard. But Widmark was as important as any of his contemporaries. For one thing, he was instrumental in the emerging film noir of Hollywood, a genre that I have heard called the only great artistic movement to come out of the United States. He starred, variously as villains or as good guys, in seminal films noirs such as Kiss of Death, Night and the City, Panic in the Streets, and the inventive The Street With No Name, shot in semi-documentary style.

Even more importantly, Widmark changed the way movies were made. Widmark was an exceptionally intelligent actor who found himself frustrated by the idiocies of the Hollywood film system. So he created his own production company. Every actor and his dog does it now, but not then. And he was willing to finance risky films that he believed in — such as The Bedford Incident — that addressed social issues without preachiness.

In No Way Out he played a man trying to stir up a lynch mob against Sidney Poitier. At the end of takes in which Widmark ranted at Poitier using abusive, racist language, Widmark would apologise to Poitier profusely. Years later he cast Poitier in The Bedford Incident in one of the very few lead roles in Hollywood history in which a black actor plays a part whose race is not important to the role and is not commented on by any of the other characters. Widmark was more than just a good actor. I wish he was remembered for it.