Killer's Kiss

 

Killer’s Kiss

Director ~ Stanley Kubrick

Writers ~ Stanley Kubrick, Howard Sackler

1955, b&w, USA

Stars ~ Frank Silvera, Irene Kane, Jamie Smith

 

Stanley Kubrick’s short film ‘Day of the Fight’ from 1951 flows into his second feature ‘Killer’s Kiss’ from 1955. The boxing scenario of ‘Day of the Fight’ leapfrogs Kubrick’s 1952 debut ‘Fear and Desire’, which he disowned, and informs the starting point for ‘Killer’s Kiss’. What the feature imports from the short is a slice-of-life sensibility and a great angle from under the stool in the boxing ring. (See how he prods his face in the mirror to see how he might look with a broken nose?) ‘Killer’s Kiss’ is not the slick and precise Kubrick that he is more renowned for, but more the smash-and-grab guerilla street style typical of first-time indie directors. 

 

If not quite as raw as Cassavetes, certainly as frayed as Edgar G. Ulmer’s ‘Detour’ and not far from Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’. Surely there’s even a touch of the French New Wave in its digressive, airy feel. You can tell that he’s just using whatever he can. For example, the diversion into the tale of the ballerina is surely because the ballerina is Kubrick’s second wife, Ruth Sabotka. Kubrick was on welfare when making this, and the glitter and grub is product of desperate, mercenary film-making. It also captures a time and place with an authenticity that more resources couldn’t manage. From his next film, 1956 ‘The Killing’, it is clear we have the far more deliberate Kubrick that his legend is based upon.

 

There is a sense that the characters are all under the malaise of their lives: a seemingly bored boxer, a wannabe femme fatale, even a gangster that didn’t mean for things to get so out of hand. Although the ending tries to neatly tie things up, this is a real shrug to the film, even despite the escalating action.

This was the only original story Kubrick wrote himself, all his other films being adaptations of novels. Film critic Geoffrey O’Brien says that the images of ‘Killer’s Kiss’ are the foreground and the story just the backdrop for them. As a tone poem, it has a lot to offer in the visuals, the framing and the capturing of a threadbare everyday existence. Highlights are the excellent mirror shots, rooftop action and the showdown in a mannequin factory. There is even the shock of a brief dream sequence that foreshadows ‘2001: a space odyssey’ trippiness. If it lacks in story and acting, it has an urban dreaminess and enough film noir to make it memorable and fascinating.