Richard Widmark: A Princeton legend

Young Richard Widmark had three definite influences in his early life. His maternal grandmother, Mary Barr, took him to the movies starting at age 3. His mother, Ethel Mae Widmark, and his father, Carl Henry Widmark, were of course very influential also. These three adults were who he interacted with in the first formative years of his life.

His father was gone a lot, being a traveling salesmen, and so most of the child rearing was obviously left to Ethel and her mother. Grandma Barr instilled in him a wonderment for the moving pictures of the silent films. Maybe it was watching all those silent movies, where everything was expressed with the characters actions and facial expressions, that left a subconscious imprint on a young Richard Widmark’s mind. He was really taken with the silent movies and the characters in them. He would act out his own scenes in the backyard when at play as young boy. He collected silent movie magazines. These things had to have been an influence on who he would eventually become — Richard Widmark, the actor who could mesmerize you with his spot on characterizations on the screen that would take you from one side of the fence to the other in a second.

What may have been the most influential of all though was the constant battle over how Richard was to be raised as to his religious upbringing.

“Religion was no comfort to me in my childhood and youth; it was an irritant, responsible for constant bickering in our home. My father was a Lutheran, my mother a Christian Scientist and her mother a Catholic. I was tossed up for grabs. There was a period in which I used to creep within earshot as they all argued about me, hotly, furiously. And then I stayed strictly away. I don’t have to tell you how a child instinctively reacts who is pulled this way and that without his even knowing, or even having the ability to understand what all the furor is about. He resents it. I knew that in many places the church is the center of social life, and I knew this could be a good thing properly recognized. In the small towns in which I had lived, including Sunrise, Minn., where I was born; Princeton, Ill., where I graduated from high school; and Lake Forest, Ill., where I both attended college and later taught English and drama, a great many activities were fostered by church groups. And we would have suffered a serious social and recreational lack without them.

“Yet even so, these were the side inducements to seek God, and I couldn’t get away from the feeling that one should not require bonuses to worship. That was my predicament. I asked myself, ‘What do you do?’ And I had no answer. Little by little I stopped thinking about it and grew into maturity as the kind of man you would call a doer more than a thinker. I didn’t want to think. Of course that doesn’t work; at least it isn’t a final way of life. When things got rugged with me, whenever it was a matter of touch and go, I would find myself looking up and asking, ‘Please help me.’

“During World War II my brother, a pilot in the Army Air Force, had a bad time of it. He was shot down three times in Europe, one time landing with a burning parachute. He was a prisoner of war in Germany for two years. He had to undergo critical brain operations as a result of his injuries. There is no kidding about my reaction to all this; I needed faith to overcome the worry and anguish which beset me through this period. Very simply I turned to God. I knew there were other people who were like myself; they did not go to church and wear it as a sign of religiousness; just the same they had religion and lived mostly within the concepts of a religious life.

“I am certain that every man has a belief; that there is no such thing as not having one. A man who held otherwise once cited what he said was a regular Sunday spectacle in rural Ireland to prove his point.

“As religious a country as Ireland is,” he said, “you can go to any small village on a Sunday morning and find that while many men accompany their wives to church, they don’t go in themselves. They sit outside smoking their pipes and gabbing until their women come out. You can go to Mexico and see the same thing.

“He held that this showed the men were tolerant of their wives’ beliefs but without belief themselves. My analysis was different. I was and am certain that each of these men had a relationship with God, but one that he felt was entirely private with him, and which he did not like defined in any specific way. It might even be that many of them could not explain their faiths to themselves, not understand it when explained in church, yet that did not signify that they were faithless. When I pictured them sitting outside the church on a quiet Sunday morning, I saw them as within the fold, not without.”

Maybe this is just the way it was with Richard Widmark and his acting. Maybe he could not explain this thing he had and did not even know what it was he had. Maybe it was this early inner turmoil with religion, and the being pulled in many directions, that manifested itself in his actions on the screen where he also has a turmoil that could tear him in more than one direction just like that.

John Dee, writer of another article on Richard Widmark, "Widmark is Baffled," in the British, Picturegoer Magazine (Feb. 21, 1959), brings up this very same subject. He stated, in his article, that Richard Widmark could not explain his enormously successful acting technique. Widmark's career had "grown from a maniacal laugh that has lately borne some astonishingly varied fruit. In the past few months, Richard Widmark, who founded his fortune on zestfully pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of steps ('Kiss of Death,' 1947) has played an honest earnest sheriff in 'Warlock,' a comedy husband in 'Tunnel of Love,' and a squeamish young lawyer in "The Trap" – generally released early next month. And, be it noted, these diverse roles were for three competing studios all glad to get him at his zooming price. In the preceding year Widmark has been a cynical mocking killer in 'The Law & Jake Wade' for MGM (his last to be released), a dedicated army jurist in Time limit for himself, and the effeminate Dauphin in Preminger's 'St. Joan.'"

Dee said that while Widmark is one of Hollywood’s most successful actors, he had the fewest theories about how he does it. When asked, Widmark had this to say. “I’m always suspicious of people who can very glibly explain their own art. Possibly some people know how they do it. I don’t.” The fascination for Dee was that up there on the screen, Widmark acts like a man constantly torn between two intentions. He quoted a simple example to Widmark from “My Pal Gus” – a nothing scene in which all Widmark had to do was come into a girl’s office and say she was right. So he opened the door and said it as if he really meant she had been wrong, then instead of leaving, tossed his hat on a distant table and took a long pregnant pause. Puzzling? It was spell binding. Widmark wrinkled his brow, “You mean I do that sort of thing all the time?” I nodded. His gloom deepened. He said, “I never knew I had that sort of double thing going on. Must be subconscious.”

There it was. In Richard Widmark's own words. He was completely unaware and yes, even baffled. I'll keep exploring this "sort of double thing going on" when I return with the next part of The Widmark Look.