A Kiss Before Dying is a 1956 American color film noir[1] directed by Gerd Oswald in his directorial debut.

Bud spends the days before the wedding formulating an elaborate plan to poison Dorothy with arsenic and create the appearance that she has committed suicide.

He is agitated when this plan fails but has another idea: on the day of the wedding, Bud lures Dorothy to the top of a building and pushes her to her death.

It is considered a suicide because of a letter, supposedly from Dorothy, that he had mailed to her sister in anticipation of his original plan working.

While driving home, Grant stops at a phone booth to call his uncle, the chief of police, and tells him that he had seen Bud with Dorothy at the university.

Darryl F. Zanuck bought the rights to the book in August 1953, following the bidding of many studios, and announced Robert Wagner as the male lead.

Critic Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote a blistering indictment of the film's depiction of "mental cruelty":I felt offended, even outraged; and ever since, I have been trying to figure out why.

I only know that those two sequences in "A Kiss Before Dying" struck me personally as being beyond the pale and, in my capacity of reviewer, as being potentially harmful and pernicious for indiscriminate general viewing, particularly by teen-agers.

I think that I—and others—can take most of the other kinds of "suspense" in our stride, provided that they are conceived in: (1) the objective newsreel or documentary technique or (2) as frankly "horror" stories.

[7]In a contemporary review for The Boston Globe, critic Cyrus Durgin wrote: "It seems to me that director Oswald, though he has his own notions of camera angles and scene detail, never got as much out of his competent actors as he ought to have done.

"[8] Reviewer Mildred Martin of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: "Endless gabble coupled with slow-motion directing dissipate whatever suspense might ordinarily be suspected ... By the time arsenic fails and the girl gets pushed off the roof of a 12-story building, all one can do is settle down to an endurance test.

Called "insanely inept" and "bereft of suspense" by Entertainment Weekly,[11] the film earned two Razzie awards.

The film was unofficially remade in Malayalam as Moonilonnu (1996), and in Hindi as Baazigar (1993), starring Shah Rukh Khan.