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Killer’s Kiss (1955)
Starring Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith, Irene Kane, Jerry Jarret. Cinematography by Stanley Kubrick. Edited by Stanley Kubrick. Produced by Stanley Kubrick and Morris Bousel. Written and Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Davy Gordon is a boxer plagued with a glass chin. His one time promising career has been spiraling towards obscurity and he sees the world a little bit darker every day. One evening Davy comes across a woman being attacked and rescues her from her potential beating. The woman, who is actually Davy’s neighbor, is named Gloria Price. She works as a private dancer and her attacker was her boss, Vincent Raphello. Gloria and Davy quickly fall in love, which leaves Vincent furious. He sets out his thugs on the lovers, who now plan a move to Seattle where their lives would be simpler. But escape proves to be difficult and soon murder is in the works.
Killer’s Kiss is an example of the hard boiled, film noir style that found popularity in cinemas in the 1950’s and would be the last time that Stanley Kubrick would work with an original story. Though he had a considerably larger budget to work with than he had for his previous picture, Kubrick was still under strict budgetary constraints and had to shoot the picture with a “guerilla filmmaking” approach. With that in mind, it’s absolutely amazing to see what he could do with such limited resources. This rugged method of the production lends the film a bleak emotion that adds to its noir chill. The most impressive and memorable sequence in the film is the final battle between our opposing characters. After leaping across the tops of building in a highly charged chase, the two men drop into a mannequin storeroom to play out a brilliantly assembled game of cat and mouse. Fabricated body parts hang languidly from the ceiling as the two enemies hunt for each other with pikes and axes. The surreal scene plays out like a dark nightmare punctuated by a gruesome death. This could very easily be seen as Kubrick’s first successful experiment in style.
But for all of its strengths, Killer’s Kiss unfortunately displays more than its fair share of weaknesses. First and foremost is the blatantly apparent struggle with sound. Kubrick was forced to fire his sound man Nat Boxer when he discovered that Boxer’s boom mike was showing up in the form of a shadow in many of his shots. The dialog had to be dubbed over in post-production, which sadly detracts from the feel of picture. But whether it was recorded on location or in a studio after principle photography, the dialog seemed hardly worth the effort. By Kubrick’s own admission this was the weak point of the script and he would henceforth seek conversational assistance while writing. There are other, less significant faults in the film that hardly warrant mentioning, but ultimately Killer’s Kiss is fascinating as an evolutionary link between Kubrick’s allegoric Fear and Desire and intricately structured and timed The Killing. As with Fear and Desire, the film is probably not worth the effort of searching it out if you are not a fan of Kubrick’s work.
Budget: $75,000
Total US Gross: $???
Genre: Film Noir
Runtime: 67 Minutes
US Release Date: 11/5/55
Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
Awards: none
Tagline: Her Soft Mouth Was The Road To Sin-Smeared Violence!
Quote: “I didn’t know it then but I was already in over my head and I couldn’t have cared less.”
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