Kiss the Blood Off My Hands

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is a 1948 American noir-thriller film directed by Norman Foster. Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Gerald Butler, it stars Joan Fontaine, Burt Lancaster and Robert Newton. The film faced minor opposition from fundamentalist groups in the United States and the Commonwealth, with regards to its gory title. In some markets, the film was released under the alternate title The Unafraid (in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and smaller towns in the United States) or Blood on My Hands (in the United Kingdom). The film was the first production by Lancaster and his agent Harold Hecht's new film production company, Norma Productions (co-produced through Harold Hecht Productions). Kiss the Blood Off My Hands was financed and distributed through a one-picture deal with Universal-International Pictures, in exchange for Lancaster appearing in the studio's production of All My Sons. The film was set in London, England but was shot almost entirely at Universal-International Pictures' Sound Stage 21 from March to May 1948. Some exterior scenes were shot on location at Los Angeles' Griffith Park Zoo and Hollywood Park Racetrack. The movie premiered on Friday, October 29, 1948, at Loew's Criterion Theater in New York City, and opened to over three hundred theaters in the United States starting on October 30 and throughout November 1948. In promotion for the film, Lancaster embarked on a tour performing a trapeze and acrobatic vaudeville act with his partner Nick Cravat. Some of the pair's stunts would be recreated and filmed in Norma Productions' next picture, the swashbuckler The Flame and the Arrow. Plot Bill Saunders (Burt Lancaster) is a Canadian former prisoner of war now living in England, whose experiences have left him unstable and violent. He gets into a pub fight in which he kills the publican and then flees. He hides out with the assistance of a nurse, Jane Wharton (Joan Fontaine), who believes his story that the killing was an accident.