A KISS IS STILL A KISS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ACCORDING TO DIRECTOR BARBET Schroeder, by the time he started shooting his remake of Kiss of Death, "only the title and one plot point remained" from the 1947 original. Sure.

According to some impressionable reviewers, David Caruso, late of NYPD Blue, made the right decision when he quit the hit abc show to play leads in the movies. He is, they say, an authentic star. Yeah, right.

Don't you get tired of being treated as if you were born yesterday? The fashionable novelist Richard Price has done a reasonably good job of slipcovering the source of this remake's screenplay, and Schroeder has energetically tarted up his version of a film Henry Hathaway originally shot in a rather austere semi-documentary style. But the fact is that the basic situation, most of the main narrative beats and all the major characters are essentially as they were 48 years ago (as a trip to any well-stocked video store will prove).

As for Caruso, he's a fairly crude update too--of Victor Mature, whose role he has taken on. Mature also came off as a self-absorbed egocentric, but that was more an accident of looks than a matter of intent, and he fought against it, sometimes with self-parody. We will not live to see the day Caruso sends himself up. For he seems to believe inwardness is a guarantee of integrity, a signal that a whole lot of serious acting--too fine for him to share fully with us--is going on inside his head. Me? I'll have the ham sandwich, thanks.

Once past the truth-in-advertising issues, though, you have to admit that there's something sturdy, maybe even indestructible, about Kiss of Death. It's the story of a not-too-bright crook and family man named Jimmy Kilmartin (Caruso) caught in a well-carpentered claustrophobic invention. Busted for his reluctant role in a big-time car theft, he gets the book thrown at him when he refuses to inform on his confederates. Then his wife dies, and his fatherly obligations to his little girl start calling. So does the D.A. (Stanley Tucci), who makes a proposal: help him catch the rest of the mob, and Jimmy can go back to daddying. The trouble is that while Jimmy is away, that old gang of his is taken over by Little Junior, played by the peerlessly creepy Nicolas Cage. Even though he doesn't get to push a wheelchair-bound woman down a flight of stairs, as giggly Richard Widmark did memorably in the original, hypnotic psychopathy is never in short supply when Cage is aslither.

A half-century ago, this figure was a revelation; people hadn't seen criminal lunacy of this kind on the screen before. What's most effective about the new Kiss of Death is Tucci's marvelously slimy prosecutor. This character was once a symbol of society's rectitude. Now he's as hard and amoral as the gangsters, someone we snicker at knowingly. He, and our reaction to him, may be the scariest thing about this movie-scarier than Cage's performance. Or the good reviews for Caruso's nonperformance.