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Richard Widmark's lengthy first marriage was a rarity in Hollywood. PHOTO: EPA

Producers have pulled a drama from the Hong Kong International Film Festival because it hasn't been cleared by Chinese censors, an incident highlighting China's growing influence over Hong Kong cinema.

The China-Hong Kong co-production Lost, Indulgence (迷果) was scheduled to make its world premiere at the festival but was pulled because Chinese censors have yet to sign off on the film, Jeffrey Chick, a spokesman for Hong Kong's Sundream Motion Pictures, said yesterday.

Chinese policy requires movies to receive government approval before they can be shown at international film festivals, and violators can face stiff penalties.

Chinese director Lou Ye (婁燁) and producer Nai An (耐安) were banned from making movies in China for five years after showing their romance Summer Palace (圓明園) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 without clearing it with Chinese censors.

Lost, Indulgence is also scheduled to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York next month, and Chick said producers are still hopeful the movie will be approved in time.

He said Chinese censors so far haven't given the filmmakers any feedback on Lost, Indulgence. The movie is about a passenger who moves in with the family of a taxi driver after he dies in a car accident.

The film's withdrawal from the festival is a sign of China's growing influence over Hong Kong film.

Eyeing the booming Chinese movie market, Hong Kong directors and actors now often make movies with Chinese partners, which means they're subject to stricter Chinese movie regulations and censorship.

Hong Kong filmmakers enjoy greater creative freedom in their hometown, a former British colony that has retained Western-style civil liberties since returning to Chinese rule. Oscar-winning director Ang Lee's (李安) sexually explicit spy thriller Lust, Caution (色,戒) for example, was shown uncut in Hong Kong but was heavily censored in China.

The Hong Kong International Film Festival started March 17 and is scheduled to end April 6.

News Corp cable channel FX Network says it has inked a deal to buy the basic cable television rights to more than a dozen movies released by Universal Pictures this year.

The deal is estimated to cost about US$100 million and cover about 15 movies, but those figures may change depending upon how the films fare at the box office.

The package includes already-released films Jarhead and Definitely, Maybe and upcoming movies like the third installment in The Mummy series due this summer and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Universal, a unit of General Electric Co's NBC Universal, says the deal is the first time the studio sold such a large slate of films to a basic cable channel.

Richard Widmark, the poker-faced actor who made his name portraying sadistic villains and gunslingers, died at age 93, his family said Wednesday.

Widmark died Monday in his home in the US state of Connecticut, according to media reports.

Widmark made his screen debut in 1947 in the thriller Kiss of Death, portraying a psychopathic killer who giggles as he ties up an old woman in a wheelchair and pushes her down the stairs.

Even his upbeat roles, like the doctor in Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950) who fights bubonic plague, or the daredevil pilot in Slattery's Hurricane (1949) were laced with nerve-wracking tension, the New York Times wrote online.

Widmark once noted the tendency of movie fans to "fasten on to one aspect of the actor, and then they decide what they want you to be."

"The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby," the Times quoted him as saying.

Before his acting career, Widmark worked as a teacher and was married 55 years to his college sweetheart, actress Jean Hazelwood, until her death in the 1990s - a rarity in the film industry's divorce factory.

"I happen to like my wife a lot," he was quoted as saying.

In 1999, he married the actress Susan Blanchard, the ex-wife of the late Hollywood legend Henry Fonda.

Other roles made famous by Widmark included the dauphin to Jean Seberg's Joan of Arc in Saint Joan (1957); Jim Bowie, the famous frontiersman who made the last stand in The Alamo (1960); a US army colonel prosecuting German war criminals in Judgement at Nuremberg (1961); and the evil hospital director in Coma (1978).

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